It seems that Ariel Sharon's stroke is being attributed to the Pulsa DiNura ("lashes of fire") that was placed on him by extremist Jews for pulling out of the Gaza strip. Pat Robertson seems to agree on this, saying that this is God's punishment, and noting that Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated.

Bloggerparty.com launched yesterday. They use Drupal, the Adsense module I wrote, and the new revenue sharing features that were recently sponsored by Bloggerparty.Brenda, the owner of BloggerParty, is elated with the success so far, in just two days. Read about it on her post on the first day.

On a recent post on Drupal.org, a few people were asking for the devel module for 4.6. I don't understand why it is not branched with every release, and let for those who need it. Anyway, since I happen to have a copy of the 4.6 module, I am attaching it here. Enjoy ... Update: The module is already branched for 4.6, and you can get it from drupal.org.

The user points module has been updated for Drupal 4.7.Get it from the Drupal.org project page. 

The Drupal  Adsense module has been updated to allow revenue sharing.

Some technical details for the curious:

• The site admin can assign a certain percentage of ad views to be assigned to  the node author's Google AdSense client ID.
• The node  types are also configurable, so the admin can only enable it for specific node types (e.g. blogs).
• The revenue sharing only  applies to the full node view, not the teasers. These go to "the house" (i.e. the site assigned Adsense client  ID).
• The path /blog/uid also has revenue sharing enabled.
• A specifically named profile field has to be filled in by the user to get credited with the ads.
• When revenue sharing is enabled, adsense caching is disabled.
• The percentage is determined based on a random number generator. So it is basically tossing dice from 1 to 100, and seeing if this page view should be awarded to the author or the site. I did this so that I dont have to keep a running total in the database, which would slow things down.

Benefits

This is a great community building tool.

Introduction

Swahili is a language that fuses African Bantu with Arabic. Arab sailors and traders have established links and ties with East Africa for centuries, their language  strongly merged with the local language to produce a creole derivative.

The word Swahili itself is derived from Arabic Sawahili سواحلي which is plural for ساحل meaning [Language] of the Coast. 

This article gives  some examples of Arabic words still in today's Swahili.

Here are some words. 

In the Drupal Predictions for 2006 thread, I predicted that both Slashdot.org and Digg.com will move to Drupal, mostly tongue in cheek. For those who do not know, both are really high volume technology news and discussion oriented sites. If/when they adopt Drupal as a platform, it would seriously demonstrate Drupal's performance under heavy loads. Alex Racine said that Digg already runs Drupal.

The Narwhal (Monodon monoceros) is an arctic whale, very similar to the Beluga whale. Both have the same body shape, the "melon" at the front of the head, a finless back. The differences are mainly in the coloring, whereas adult belugas are white, the narwhals are mottled.

The most striking feature lacking from the beluga though is the tusk that male narwhals sport. It originates from the upper part of the left jaw into a spiral helix that can be up to 3 meters long.

In medieval times, narwhal tusks were sold as unicorn horns, fetching their weight in gold. It seems that the spiral tusk were the origin of the unicorn myth, not unlike how dinosaur fossils gave rise to dragon myths around the world.

In an earlier article, I wrote about Search Engine Optimization, and how some people abuse it. I listed some instances of Ad Spamming by eBay there.

Here are some more interesting or surprising tidbits on Google advertising, specially on the newly introduced Gmail webclips.

Google Ads In Arabic

Google does not support Arabic as a language for Adsense. This did not stop a few adventurous souls to do their ads in Arabic regardless. The first time I saw a Google Adsense Ad with Arabic in it was a few months ago, on CreativeBits.org. It was for an internet hosting company in Bahrain. Since Ivan Raszl, Creative Bits owner, lives in Bahrain it was no wonder that this ad showed up on his site.

A few months ago, Boris Mann posted a call to arms of sorts on Drupal.org for search engine ranking for several keywords and phrases, my favorite being: Drupal, the Best Open Source PHP MySQL CMS there is.Today, it occured to me to search Google for "the best CMS", and found that the fourth result was the Drupal.org news about Sir Tim Berners Lee uses Drupal as a blog. When searching for "the best php mysql cms", the above link comes out as the fifth.