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.

After completely forgetting about it, the Google Summer of Code T-Shirt has finally arrived. I participated as a code review  mentor for Drupal on three student project.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee has a blog at MIT, and it runs on Drupal. For those who do not know him, he was the inventor of the World Wide Web back in the early 1990s.The site's theme is a modified form of the SpreadFireFox theme, by Chris Messina, which I ported from 4.4 to 4.5 and 4.6. Too bad Chris has no time to keep working on this theme. So much potential, and  lots of attention to detail...

The Drupal Click Thru Tracking module has been updated to work with the upcoming 4.7 version of Drupal.Thanks for Patrick Nelson for the patch.

Arturo from Mexico writes to me:

I am visiting Egypt in January and plan to visit Alexandria and specially the Library and I want to know the procedure to donate two books of Mexican Industrial and Graphic Design edited by the Mexican Industrial and Graphic Design Association which I preside. 

This is of course a very nice gesture.It is also the fourth mixup I got confusing my site with the Library of Alexandria. Others are the university student, the secretary, and the offshore drilling company.

I get a lot of strange feedback from visitors to this site, most of it fall in the mistaken identity category.However, it strikes me how some people are just plain lazy. They want their homework done for them, and complain when they don't get their "entitlment". An example is someone with the email address: kkpepsipuppy, who did not like what I wrote on food Recipes From Ancient Egypt.