Close to where I live, stands a lighthouse on a group of rocks known as Race Rocks. This lighthouse steers mariners clear of the 8-10 knot (9-12 mph) tide that flows between it and the south coast of Vancouver Island. There are a number of sad tales of ships and lives lost in this treacherous passage of water.

In 1865, lighthouse keeper George Davies and family had for some time been looking forward to a visit from Rosina Davies? brother, sister-in-law, and three friends. On the day of their intended visit, the Davies scanned the nearby shore in anticipation of sighting the boat that would bring family and friends to break the solitude of the lighthouse keeper's family. Sure enough, the visitors did appear as planned, rowing towards their destination, Race Rocks.

Read more: Race Rocks Christmas

I use the Joomla! component sh404SEF on the Cybersalt site. It's great for giving my pages SEF (Search Engine Friendly) URLs. Unfortunately, sh404SEF does not include something very helpful to make the urls even more SEF friendly - canonical url specification.  But it will with a little tweaking!

Read more: Canonical Urls in sh404sef

November 11, is the day when a number of countries around the world remember their war dead and past and present military service men and women. The video below is a wonderful and stirring piece of art focussing on the significance of this day.

Here is one person's description of the story behind the video:

On November 11, 1999, Terry Kelly was in a Shoppers Drug Mart store, in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. At 10:55 AM an announcement came over the store's PA asking customers who would still be of the premises at 11:00 am to give two minutes of silence in respect to the veterans who have sacrificed so much for us. 

Read more: Remembrance - Veterans Day

I just helped a friend today who has two customers still running sites on Joomla 1.0.  He is upgrading his servers to run mysql5.x and the Joomla 1.0 installs were not displaying any content.  This meant it was time to migrate (it was well past that time actually).

I had him send me an sql dump of the databases and then I imported (one at a time) each dump into a database called "client10".  I then did two very quick, and basic installs of Joomla 1.5 and Joomla 1.7.0, each using databases named "client15" and "client17" respectively.

Read more: Migrating from Joomla 1.0 to 1.5 to 1.7