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.

I was recently approached by a client who wanted a custom Drupal module.The module was supposed to be a clone of Drupal's "Who's New" and "Who's Online" modules, but with user defined input. The specifications were that would be an admin defined list of users, and the module will select some of them at random. There would also be a user defined list of how many users to show online at a certain time (how many registered users, and how many guests). In other words, it would give a fake sense of the site being a very busy one.I politely told the person who requested this module that this amounts to deception. Their answer was it was like the opening day of a restaurant when it is packed with guests, but all of them are really relatives and friends of the owner who invited them for the opening night.

Last month, there were clashes between Copts and Muslims in Alexandria, Egypt. It started when someone leaked a CD of a theatrical play performed inside a church said to be disdainful of Islam. Three were killed in the clashes. The government was quick to blame a conspiracy by "external entities", or the religious parties (Muslim Brotherhood), for the soon to be held parliamentary elections. The problem is that someone to blame is always sought, whether internal or external.

The World Summit on Information Society has started in Tunisia.Watching Tunisia's Satellite TV on Telstar5, coverage is almost exclusive on this event. No wonder since it is good publicity for the country and tourism. I did some consulting work for telecentre.org, who also have a dedicated web site for WSIS. The official beta launch for Telecentre will be at the summit on Thursday.

I have been use a Dell Optiplex GX270 at work for almost 2 years now. This has been a very stable machine, powered on 24x7.

Last week, the machine just shut itself off by itself. After powering it on, the colors on the monitor were off (no greens nor yellows). I notice that if you wiggle the monitor cable the colors will change, although the green/yellow will never reappear. The machine has an nVidia video card with DVI output, and a connector for DVI to VGA.

After calling Dell, they said they are going to send the video card and "cable". Overnight, the machine powered itself again. And then again every night afterwards. Then it would only stay powered to the login screen only, then power off.