A while back I read about a new symbol that could be appearing on my consumer products:

Marks on products to indicate the Kosher Certification of one authority or another are quite familiar to most Americans (I think) and "Halal" marks are common throughout the Muslim world, but this mark seems to be the first effort to mark products as acceptable to Muslims in the US. The growth of this sort of thing, especially in the US environment, is clearly going to be a slow thing, but this morning I noticed the mark on a product that was already in my medicine cabinet, Deodorant - Apricot Long Last Stick (2.25oz 18P).

IFANCA: About Us:

IFANCA's halal certification symbol, the Crescent M, can be found on thousands of products around the globe. In addition, IFANCA maintains close working relationships with many Islamic centers and Islamic organizations throughout the country and the world.

The seem to know their stuff, but who knows what process they go about when certifying products. Still I'll trust this mark over nothing, and it's better than my trying to review a product for Kosher marks, since there is a ton of difference between those marks as well, and I also then have to search for anything with alcohol in it.

Amazon.com - Wish List:

Universal Wish List allows you to add products from any website to your Amazon Wish List with one simple click, making it easier than ever to keep track of all the gifts you wish for, all in one place.

And since I'm apparently some sort of Amazonaphile I've promptly moved my list off of Kaboodle and back onto Amazon.com.

Perhaps I've explained it before, but we aggregate lists published by governments of "bad people" that other companies can then search via website, web services, or various batch reports to ensure that they are not doing any kind of business with said "bad people". But how often does this sort of thing make the news?

U.S. Links Iranian Bank To Fifth Avenue Building - washingtonpost.com:

Citing a series of alleged sham transactions and e-mails, Treasury and Justice write in court documents that Assa Corp., which holds the 40 percent interest, is a shell company that funnels the rental proceeds through a parent company in the Channel Islands, off the coast of France, to the Iranian bank, which is wholly owned by the Iranian government. Under various laws and presidential orders, the government of Iran and related entities are prohibited from doing business in the United States without a license from Treasury.

And yes, Assa Corp. is now designated "bad people".

Yes, I am redoing my work site. ColdFusion 5 to ASP.NET 3.5, so there is lots of potential for improvement. One such improvement is localization. The last time I tried localization I was on ASP.NET 1.1 I think, and it seems some improvement was made in ASP.NET 2.0/VisualStudio 2005 (and it all still works with 3.5/2008).

CodeProject: Globalization and localization demystified in ASP.NET 2.0. Free source code and programming help:

Globalization and localization are two important processes which every developer should be aware of while creating global products or applications. Though there are many articles which explain the subject well, I did not find a single resource which explains all important concepts regarding globalization/localization, practically and comprehensively. This article aims to provide practical step-by-step approach to globalizing a web application in ASP.NET 2.0.

Relatively painless so far, though I am taking shortcuts by only using language and not culture, so I'm not going to be changing symbols or currency markings, etc. Plus I'm not tackling support for RTL languages, I'll worry about that later...

So I'm converting an Excel Spreadsheet to a SQL script and I forgot to escape the single quotes before surrounding all of the data with single quotes, which won't run in SQL of course. Usually I just start over, today I took it upon myself to determine how I can find these offending single quotes with a vim RegEx. Voila:


The only ones this misses is single quotes at the beginning or end of a field, like: ''Bobby Smith'', which should be escaped '''Bobby Smith''', but these are much easier to hunt down with all other cases taken care of with a simple :g//s//''/g knowwhatimean?

Prison cops in five-hour Muslim riot | The Sun |News:

A FIVE-hour rampage by young Muslim prisoners armed with hammers and chisels was broken up by a riot squad yesterday.

Dozens of inmates barricaded themselves into a workshop and grabbed tools including saws.

Riot police and 100 specially-trained prison officers — kitted out with body armour, shields and helmets — were called in.

When negotiations failed, the officers moved in and overpowered the prisoners — many of whom were teenagers.

No injuries to staff were reported but there was said to be “considerable damage” to the workshop.

Some of the rioters suffered minor bruises.

It is believed the rampage at Aylesbury Young Offenders’ Institution started after inmates celebrated the Muslim festival of Eid which marks the end of Ramadan.

Commenter "Bettymac":

When are they going to stop calling this the "Religion of peace"?

Because, of course, criminals are known to be the exemplar of following rules...

Mac is just *nix under the covers, so this was a bit odd that these two popped up next to each other on Twitter:
And I haven't changed anything, I'm Even Steven!

Authorities Shut Down Major Spam Ring - NYTimes.com:

“This will send some real shock waves through the spamming industry, but even if these guys were running a substantial botnet of compromised computers, there are always spammers looking to take their place,” said Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Sophos, a spam-fighting security firm. “It wouldn’t be a surprise if people don’t notice any difference in their in-box tomorrow morning.”

My GMail spam folder now holds about 1/4 the spam I had become accustomed to. The only reason I even read this story is when I remarked on that fact, and was tipped off by mexijew and sspenguin on Twitter.

Now that Za is on the TV/Game room TV much of the day, I've been DS and iPod Touch gaming a lot more. iPod Touch mostly for Cross Word Puzzles, and my DS has been destroying Castlevania, but I'm just about done with that so what's next? Looks like some DS PoP action, please.

Official Google Reader Blog: Is Your Web Truly World-Wide?:

Believe it or not, the web truly is world-wide. That means there is a lot of interesting content out there in languages other than your own. You might have missed out on this content in the past, but now, with automatic translation in Reader, you don't have to miss a thing!

Next time you find an interesting feed in another language, just subscribe to it as normal in Reader. When you view the feed in Reader, check off "Translate into my language" in the feed settings, and (voila!) the feed will be immediately translated for you. Also, this setting will be saved so you can always view this feed in your own language.

Now I can get the gist of my wife's blogs, mostly written in Bahasa Indonesia which I'm still a neophyte in. I probably already know what they say, since we do live together and all, however regardless of that, thank you Google, bawk bawk!