Older blog entries for roozbeh (starting at number 131)

Loss: Still no news of the passport, the laptop, or anything for the matter. I am still struggling to restore my Fedora Extras commit access, to de-orphan things that I missed rebuilding for FE6 (Thorsten had offered to help). Of these, spicctrl will remain orphaned, as I don’t have a VAIO laptop anymore. Also, the passport office has told me that they will not issue me a new passport until six months later, which will be March/April 2007, presumably to make sure I am not lying about losing the passport (one important alternative in their mind is confiscation by a random foreign government).

Unicode: Am still waiting for my Unicode 5.0 book, in the meanwhile I prepared a few Unicode proposals for consideration by the Unicode Technical Committee and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2. The ones publicly available are:

• Proposal to encode the Avestan script (co-authored with Michael Everson)
• Proposal to encode eight Arabic characters for Persian and Azerbaijani (with Michael and Elnaz Sarbar)
• Proposal to encode four Qur’anic Arabic characters (with Michael)

The other two were about changing the bidirectional type of four Unicode Arabic characters (mostly to simplify the way Pango can imeplement these) co-authored with Behdad, and renaming some mis-named Arabic characters. A few more concerning ZWNJ and ZWJ need to wait until I get the book so I can suggest a diff...

Testing Old Persian cuneiform in Firefox:

𐎲𐎥𐏐𐎺𐏀𐎼𐎣𐏐𐎠𐎢𐎼𐎶𐏀𐎭𐎠𐏐𐏃𐎹𐏐𐎡𐎶𐎠𐎶𐏐𐎲𐎢𐎷𐎡𐎶𐏐𐎠𐎭𐎠𐏐𐏃𐎹𐏐𐎠𐎺𐎶𐏐𐎠𐎿𐎶𐎠𐎴𐎶𐏐𐎠𐎭𐎠𐏐𐏃𐎹𐏐𐎶𐎼𐎫𐎡𐎹𐎶𐏐𐎠𐎭𐎠𐏐𐏃𐎹𐏐𐏁𐎡𐎹𐎠𐎫𐎡𐎶𐏐𐎠𐎭𐎠𐏐𐎶𐎼𐎫𐎡𐎹𐏃𐎹𐎠𐏐

In order to view the text, you need the font Xerxes (TTF, 9KB). This is probably the first publicly available standard font for Old Persian. (The license is GPL with the extra embedding allowed in documents exception.)

Intersting note: Apparently Pango knows how to break the text as can be seen from pasting the text into gedit. The backslash-like characters are Old Persian spaces and thus line breaks are allowed after them, which Pango knows about. But Firefox doesn’t and treats the text as one long word.

Someone just stole my laptop and passport. More to come.

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: