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!

Some time ago, I ran across this lengthy humor article on how to write unmaintainable code.

Look at this gem:

Capitalisation
 
 Randomly capitalize the first letter of a syllable in the middle of a word. For example ComputeRasterHistoGram().
 

How many times did you see this CamelCase notation in code on Words? Too many times!

Conrad Black, the Canadian born media mogul, has asked for his Canadian citizenship to be reinstated.

Black renounced his Canadian citizenship in 2001 after a spat with Prime Minister Jean Chretien, resulting in a legal fight which Black lost. The source of the dispute is that Black was to be a peer at the British House of Lords, having the title Baron Black of Crossharbour.

Newspaper articles at the time were not sympathetic to Black at all, saying that Canada is not the one to lose in this, and basically it was "good riddence".

It seems that there are places in Canada where there is no harsh winter weather. Nanaimo, B.C. claims to be the city with the mildest climate in Canada.It seems that Environment Canada record data for Nanaimo does back this up. You can also see a more detailed chart with record temperatures, snowfall, rainfall, ... etc.

Last week on Friday on November 18, we had our first snow fall, blanketing everything in white. It did not last long, and all melted the next day.Yesterday, we have a winter snow storm in earnest, with snow squalls, slippery roads, and snow plows on the road. The amount of snow is not that much compared to other storms in Southern Ontario, but the winds are very strong and the snow is blowing all around.According to The Weather Channel forecast on Thursday, South Western Ontario got off easy compared to the area east of Toronto, where the bulk of the storm was supposed to hit.  However, when I check it today, it says 1 cm of snow in Toronto, and 5 cm here.