Winter in Southern Ontario started out with three consecutive snow storms early in November. This is unusual, since real snow storms do not hit until December.After that initial "wave" of bad weather, things were also unusual, because from 21 December (official day of winter start) till end of January, the weather has been warm. All snow has melted twice this winter, and we never saw the days with -25C that we had over the last few years. The temperature locally did not drop to lower than -15C on just one day. Moreover, it was +8C a few days ago, and even Toronto had +10C.

Due to some change of plans, things turned out for the better, and I will be travelling to Vancouver, British Columbia to attend the Open Source Content Management System Summit (OSCMS-Summit), which is mainly a Drupal event, but with other CMS sessions peppered in. This will be my first time in Vancouver. I wish it was in some better season though, and I could take the whole family there. Anyone up for fishing? I know it is not a geek thing, but ...

Sami Khan's DrupalShowCase.com has been operating for a while, but only today did I notice that he has something to say about Baheyeldin.com.He says:

Khalid is a Drupal module developer and works in general on the Drupal content management system. He's brought Drupal many great modules including the AdSense module and the nodevote module.

My first name is Khalid. In Arabic, this is خالد. It was originally spelled Khaled with an "e", to  be more in line with the Egyptian pronounciation, but at some point I decided that Khalid with an "i" is closer to the classical version. The problem is that in English, this is taken to be a long "i", as in "-leed". It is more  like "lid".

Searching Google for the proper name Khalid returns this web site in the top 10. Of course, having a non Anglo-Saxon name helps a bit.Also, see this post, and comments, on Om Malik's web site about other geeks on Google. Or you can read more about what the name Khalid means.

Many systems in human societies are started for good reasons, for sound principles and for the benefit of society. As time passes by, that same system is often abused to become completely opposed to the principles it was designed to uphold.One such case is the U.S. Patent system. Initially designed to protect the small inventor from large corporations, it has grown into something that disregards the individual inventor, and favors the corporations. For example, individual inventors working for companies are made to sign agreements ceding all rights to the corporation, in exchange for a "bonus" of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. The system is prohibitive for the individual because it takes a lot of money, time and effort to get the filing right, and takes a lot more time, money and effort to defend the patent in court because legal fees are expensive, and only a corporation has the resources for a protracted fight.

A few minutes from where I live, there is an interesting phenomenon, believed to the be the first of its kind in North America: a single building is used for both Reform Jews and United Church of Canada.

Of course, both are on the moderate/liberal side within Judaism and Christianity, and it would not have been considered if they were more conservative. 

Historically, this is not the first time in that two different religions shared a building, as I will detail in another article on the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, Syria. 

Resources

• Cedars Temple Shalom.
• Westminster United Church.
• Background and history of the Cedars Worship Centre.
• Wikipedia article on Interfaith worship spaces mentioning the Cedars.
  

In an earlier article, I noted the diverse backgrounds of the local candidates for the federal elections.

Today, I will describe the process of the election here in Canada, as a personal experience, mainly for my non-Canadian readers.

The process started by filing the taxes for tax year 2004 in March 2005. One of the questions is whether one would want to be on the elector list. Canada Revenue Agency sends the name and address to Election Canada.

Here is a list of web application frameworks that are written in PHP.  Some of those were inspired by Ruby On Rails, or seek to imitate it. Others are frameworks with varying goals. All are PHP based.

• CakePHP has been covered before on this web site.
• And so is PHPOnTrax.

Here is another web application framework written in PHP.

WASP is a "powerful web application framework built on PHP5". It is object oriented, and strives to be suitable for enterprise class applications with less code.

What is interesting is that  WASP uses Drupal to power its site. 

Resources

•  ONLamp article on WASP.