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.

I ran into The Daily WTF web site by chance. Programmers send the web site maintainer coding mistakes they have seen by colleagues. Some submissions indeed have a high WTF factor, for example, this overly verbose way of negating a number.

I did some Drupal consulting work for www.telecentre.org, a grassroots community technology initiative co-funded by Canada's IDRC. That included some more consulting for wsis.telecentre.org which is about the World Summit on Information Society.