Older blog entries for roozbeh (starting at number 128)

Re-spinning dreams: I sometimes have interesting work-related dreams/nightmares. The one I remember from last night was me re-spinning some customized version of Sharif Linux that was supposed to fit in one CD, but had one package more than a CD, and I couldn't find which package was pulling that package in as a dependency.

A related bug I filed yesterday is rh196311.

Distrowatch: Distrowatch has a very interesting definition of what a distribution is. It thinks that if a distribution is not downloadable by an anonymous person over the Internet it cannot be called a distribution! Quoting their Ladislav Bodnar:

[…] a distribution that is not distributed publicly (can you still call it a "distribution"?) […]

Thanks a lot Distrowatch. I thought you are also interested in stable distributions, not only those that make new releases instead of security updates. I thought you may also be interested in distributions that may be sold (god forbid) instead of being available for gratis.

Fedora: It’s really nice to see that my wrap-up work on the update applet is being used in Fedora.

The story is something like this: I saw a blog post by Seth mentioning random thoughts of his about an update applet, catched him on IRC and he pointed me to an email thread about it, I read the thread and reread his posts and thought a little, and finally put two hours on drafting my thoughts on a page on the Fedora wiki.

I was supposed to get more involved with it and possibly help in coding, but couldn’t, mostly because of my Sharif Linux work (which uses Fedora as the main upstream).

And now, I see on Fedora Weekly News that some people are working on icons for it. Nice! I’m thinking about the impact that a few hours of my time is going to have on people’s lives…

Update: I’m now also aggregated on Fedora People. Another thanks to Seth.

Hooman Mesgary is the fourth FarsiWeb hacker to start a blog in English. I hope he continues to write in English.

The other three are me, Behdad, and Behnam.

Advogato: I broke Advogato’s RSS feed of my diary by removing a duplicate post completely, which resulted in mod_virgule crashing on the HTTP requests.

For those who read this through Planet GNOME, these are the posts you may have missed:

• Fedora planning to replace teTeX with TeX Live
• Sharif Linux in the news with a photo of me in front of an anaconda screenshot
• Sharif Linux statistics
• Changing the UI language at runtime may be very hard
• My ignorance of Internet censorship in Iran

PS: Apparently when I read some of my posts, I feel the influence of Hoder’s style of writing…

TeX: after teTeX’s getting orphaned by Thomas Esser, Fedora is considering to move to TeX Live. The only problem for this is that TeX Live is more a distro than a package, and a huge distro for that: the size of the SVN trunk checkout is 4GB!

Sharif Linux: Mehr News has covered our Sharif Linux event fine enough (Persian, Urdu, with more photos). The report could have been much better, of course…

The Persian title is somehow funny, and somehow resembles my rants here in this diary: “Despite United States economic sanctions, Sharif Linux was produced according to the requirements of the Persian language”. Of course I only mentioned economic sanctions as the reason for why several western software companies were not interested in the Iranian market. I’m really glad I didn’t talk about US government regulations and how they affect Iranians, or the article/title might have become a propaganda piece.

This is a photo showing me show an anaconda screenshot using gthumb. Unfortunately the laptop sticker that says “EFF, Proud Member” cannot be seen:

Following is some Sharif Linux 2 Desktop Edition statistics, as promised.

• Number of binary CDs: 2
• Number of RPMs shipped: 612
• Number of SRPMs: 518
• Number of changed SRPMs: 101 (19.5%)
• Number of SRPMs used intact: 417 (80.5%)
• Number of patches over upstream: 137
• Number of subversion commits for non-translation updates: 865
• Number of subversion commits for translation updates: 401
• Most patched packages: anaconda (19) and evolution (19), followed by openoffice.org (8) and gtk2 (7).
• Number of bugzilla bugs fixed over upstream: 349

Random notes:

• Upstream for us was actually an updated Fedora Core 4+Extras+Livna, instead of original upstream packages. So 19 patches for evolution really means 29, since the latest update to FC4’s evolution already had 10 patches.
• By patches or patched I mean files ending in “.patch”. The changes to the “.spec” files and new “Source”s are only counted in the CVS commits. Translations fixes were not done as patches, but SRPM “Source”s.
• Bugs means things we had bugzilla’d in our internal bugzilla. Some fixed bugs were only reported upstream (to gnome, fedora, OO.o, ...) or were fixed by a developer or translator without filing. The real number should be about 500.

giulia: Microsoft’s Michael Kaplan writes about changing the user interface language at runtime and how hard it would be, even if you had the tools for it:

The distance between the possible and the practical here is substantial; the distance between the possible and the maintainable is orders of magnitude greater still.

How often would it really and truly be worth it?

Danilo thought we needed a UI-switch support system for giulia when we were discussing giulia. But from the Sharif Linux 2 experience, I found that it is already hard for application maintainers to keep the code properly internationalized. I really think making the applications UI-switchable would not be worth the time really.

Our Tower of Ivory: We lived in a tower of Ivory, and we had no clue about it. We have been experiencing technical problems with our primary (academic) internet service provider, so we were using the fallback internet service for the last few days. This has the level of website blocking a man in the street gets from his internet service.

And we found interesting things. It’s not only marginallly controversial web sites like Orkut, BBC Persian, and the Kurdish Wikipedia. Many other things are blocked: the whole livejournal.com is blocked. Flickr is blocked. Not only searches for pornographic words are blocked, but also any search that contains “woman” is blocked. LaTeX is blocked because latex has sexual uses.

And the blocking software is so simple-minded that it even stops you from doing ‘positive’ things. Today, I was searching the Encyclopaedia Iranica for calendars used historically in Persian/Iran, and the most important article for me was blocked because it had the term “Islamic period” in the URL. That is blocked because it has the word “period”, a synonym for menstruation which may supposedly be used to find pornographic pictures on the internet...

The thing amazes me the most, is that my own name is blocked! My family name, “پورنادر” (Pournader), starts with the transliteration of the word “porn” into Persian, “پورن”...