In a recent speech, US President George W. Bush stated that his policy in Iraq is to "stay the course" and not "allow the terrorist to break our will" and "not permit Al Qaeda to turn to Iraq to what Afghanistan was under the Taliban, a safe haven for terrorists and a launching pad for attacks on America". One should remember that none of these "terrorists" were in Iraq before the USA invaded in 2003. Al Qaeda had no presence before that time. These "terrorists" flocked to Iraq as a direct result of the invasion: mainly fuelled by the mere presence of invading forces inflaming emotions by the invasion, but also by the instability and power vacuum in the country that insued after the Saddam regime fell.

The Washington Post has a good article by David Luban, professor at Georgetown University Law Center, and visiting professor at Stanford University Law School. The article is titled Torture, American Style. NPR also has Luban as a guest on "The Debate Over Torture", with the other side represented by neo-conservative ideologue Charles Krauthammer, who is a member of the Project for the New American Century, and a columnist for the Weekly Standard.

The Pentagon has finally stated that the old rules on prisoners no longer apply. They continue to use the term "detainees" for those in Guantanamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib as opposed to the term "prisoners". From the start, those prisoners had the label "enemy combatants", so as to deprive them from the Geneva Conventions.This continuous rewriting of the rules as the game progresses will only cause more resentment towards the USA, and damage to its image worldwide. 

The latest version of Drupal's Google Adsense module implements the relatively new feature of section targeting.

This allows ads to be targeted more towards the content of nodes in Drupal, and not others areas of the page's HTML, such as blocks. This provides more relevant ads to the page being displayed.

I have previously written how Gwyn Dyer has characterized the Egyptian Presidential Elections as a Cynical Farce. Now, the third phase of the Egyptian Parliamentary Elections for 2005 has closed, and similarly it is a cynical farce too.

Lars J wrote me asking how to display points with every user's info on all pages.

This article is the answer to this question.

Prerequisites

Before you can use this method, you have to be using the latest user points module.

You must have a version that supports the new call.

//$Id: userpoints.module,v 1.21 2005/10/30 02:23:02 kbahey Exp $ 

The version should be 1.21 or later. 

Method

Basically, Drupal has a central function for displaying user info. This function is called format_name() in the file includes/common.inc . So the solution relies on changing that function to include the number of points with the user name.

In the mid 1990, I came to know of a fungicide being sold under the UNIX name.

At the time, I was working in Saudi Arabia for AT&T after its acquisition of NCR, and the general manager called me in to ask about this matter.

I told him that from what I know, trademark law does not cross domains. This means the use of UNIX in domains other than computers is permitted.

I send that info to the late Dennis Ritchie, the father of UNIX, and he put it on his site under Other UNIXes.

Here are some examples of online collaboration experiments that are interesting. Some are fun to watch, and all are interesting to study, not from a technology point of view, but rather from how few people use/abuse the privilege behind the anonymity the internet provides. First, visit the The Scratchpad, which is a Flash application. People draw on the same whiteboard simultaneously. The whiteboard clears itself every 2 minutes, and the whole thing starts over.

Recently a client wanted to move their site from 4.5 to 4.6.3. They happen to use the image module. Although they initially said that the images are just "icing on the cake", and that they could repost them, I discovered that they had 500+ images already in many galleries.

I decided to spend some time and try to migrate the images over.

With the 4.6 version, the image module has an update-image.php script that should migrate your old data from the image table to the standard files table of Drupal. Problem is: it did not work. After some debugging, it seemed that it was confused on file locations.

It is a known fact that US missiles made their way to Al Jazeera offices in Kabul, Afghanistan in 2001, and Baghdad in 2003.

What is making the news these days is an alleged leaked memo that Bush wanted to bomb Al Jazeera offices, but Blair disagreed. The source is The Daily Mirror, which is mostly a tabloid.

The White House denies that there was ever such a plan, and the ever so eloquant Blair said it is a conspiracy theory. 

Al Jazeera officals have requested a meeting with Blair to discuss the issue. Staffers at Al  Jazeera have started a "Don't Bomb Us" blog!