Ahmadinejad: I will be in New York next week, with thousands of other Iranians and non-Iranians, to show my opposition to Ahmadinejad’s being internationally recognized as Iran’s president. He stole the election, and he helped several of my people getting killed, raped, and tortured. He is not Iran’s president, he is just another liar, thief, and murderer.

If you wish to join us, information on events are at http://voices4iran.org/.

Calendrical calculations: For whoever who may be computing Singapore holidays any time in the future: Singapore’s Vesak Day (Buddha’s birthday) holiday does not follow the Buddhist calendar or the recommendation by the first Conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists held in Sri Lanka in 1950 (that recommended the first full moon in May). It is calculated using the Chinese calendar, but not the 8th day of the 4th moon like the Chinese and the Koreans celebrate it, but seven days later, on the 15th day (calendrical full moon) of the 4th moon.

I lost at least three hours today finding about this, and I found about it by accident, because I had Calendrical Tabulations at hand and happened to look at the Chinese calendar column. There are several conflicting pieces of information on the internet here and there, which really confused me to the point that I thought the actual algorithm is not publicly available.

Losing weight: I just saw arc’s post on losing weight.

Just wanted to share a bit of my own experience with being overweight, losing a lot of it, and then gaining some of it back:

• One may have misconceptions about how weight is lost and gained. Specifically, one may think that “by eating only what my body needs and some exercise, I can lose weight”. That’s rarely true.
• You need to understand how diets work. Generally, one doesn’t really need nutritionists. But it’s important to understand the simple science behind dieting, in order to make the whole thing effective and avoid putting it just back.
• The personal psychology of dieting is important. You need to know why you are doing it, and care about it.
• You don’t need to spend time thinking about the diet, following it, or even exercising. There are good ways to lose weight without the usual obsessions associated with diets, like that of the Atkins diet.

I highly recommend The Hacker’s Diet, available online for free. It is written by John Walker, of AutoCAD fame.

The very short book helped me lose about 15 kilos easily (and with no exercising) a few years ago. I have started to diet again these days, with a goal of losing about 30 pounds (almost the same amount, but I know live in the US).

Even if you hate diets and diet books, still read it. I would recommend reading it even if you are not overweight!

Footnote: The author of the book has made all the code he used in the book (with several updates) available as public domain code online. He also runs a server with the tools installed for public use, if you are the lazy type, like me. It's all here.

Unicode: I am thinking again about the brilliant Joe Becker. I met the gentleman last October in San Jose, when everyone was celebrating twenty years of Unicode. His short 1988 article, titled Unicode 88, is amazing. It is interesting that a lot of Unicode principles remain the same, after twenty years.

Fonts and Languages: I was repackaging my fonts for Fedora 11, when something caught me. The font packaging policy involved the list of languages my font package supported. But it was a font with a wide range of Latin and Cyrillic glyphs, and it probably supported dozens of languages. Happening at the same time, I found that Fedora 11 is considering supporting automatic font installation. Among various things, this means that we need to know which fonts support which languages.

Font files don’t have that information directly. How would a font designer know that his font supports Arbuan Papiamento just fine, which uses a different orthography than Papiamento as written in Netherlands Antilles, for example? What about African or native American languages? Or Mongolian? Or Kurdish? He just designs and tests glyphs for characters and languages he is interested in. If the resulting font happens to support Filipino too, good for him and his users, if it doesn’t, he may not care. At best, a list of the languages the font designer believes the font is supporting may be found somewhere in the documentation.

In the present freedesktop stack, the language support detection task is done by fontconfig. When an application, like Firefox, wants to display text in some language, a text layout engine, like Pango, will ask fontconfig for a font that supports displaying text in the language (possibly with some other properties, like the font being bold and sans serif). fontconfig then uses its various font suggestion rules and orthography files to give the best font it can find back to the engine. If FontConfig doesn't know anything about the language, or has wrong information, it may give you something totally off, like a Latin or Devanagari font for a language written in the Arabic script.

What font designers may not know (or care about), fontconfig needs to know. The usual way of knowing, especially for not-very-famous fonts or languages, is through orthography files. These files contain a list of Unicode characters that play a letter-like role in the language. For example, for French, it is a list of basic Latin letters plus all the ligatures (like œ) and accented letters (like ï). fontconfig runs the list through each font installed on your machine and sees if it has glyphs for all the characters listed. If it does, the font is assumed to support the language.

Getting back to my own story, I thought of checking orthography files to see which languages my packaged fonts support. But when I looked into a few, I found several bugs and unsupported languages. Behdad encouraged me to fix them early, for a chance for them to get them into fontconfig 2.7.

During the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to hunt things down and fix them during my free time. I achieved my first target of matching glibc locales (those without ‘@’). I’m now on my second target of matching languages with two-letter codes; remaining are: Akan, Avestan, Cree, Ewe, Herero, Sichuan Yi, Javanese, Kanuri, Kongo, Kuanyama, Luba-Katanga, Nauru, Navajo, North Ndebele, Ndonga, Ojibwa, Pali, Quechua, Rundi, Sango, Shona, Sundanese, Tahitian, and Zhuang. After that, there are thousands of languages with three letter codes, which would need an army the size of SIL International.

Everything I did is in my git tree here. If you want to help, file bugs with your findings at http://bugs.freedesktop.org/. You can also check out the existing orthography bugs to avoid duplication.