Older blog entries for roozbeh (starting at number 134)

Narcissism: Shayan, an old colleague from Sharif who is now working for Microsoft, has blogged on Sharif Linux, FarsiWeb, and me.
Red Hat, Novell, and Microsoft: Was thinking about Havoc’s post and suddenly found how ironic it is. Quoting him:
This is not a religious argument about open source, it's a matter of respect for a community that works together, and the wishes of creators. If I write something and put it under the GPL, then I want it under the GPL where all of us working on it can use it. I don't want it to be made proprietary, for someone else's benefit, due to some shady deal and legal technicality. Commercial yes (and encouraged), proprietary no.

Let me say the from my point of view, and the problem I have with the EULA of Fedora.

This is not a political argument about the US policies or the Iran-US relations. It’s a matter of respect for a community that works together, and the wishes of creators. If an Iranian writes some code or a patch and puts it under the GPL, then he wants it under the GPL where all of us working on it can use it. He doesn't want it to be made illegal for Iranians to use it, due to some legal technicality.

Hmm, works! The legal technicality here is probably that restrictions about certain encrypytion software is expanded to all packages in a distribution, including those to which Red Hat does not hold all copyright.

What really sucks, is that I don’t see much help from Red Hat guys in this. Rahul and Jesse helped a lot for a short while but the communications stopped after Red Hat lawyers basically told them “it’s fine, believe us.”

US elections: I just wish to congratulate the American friends for making Rumsfeld resign. Just last night, I was talking to my parents about my eighty-three year old grandfather, and how sharp he is, that he had used Rumsfeld as an example of a “f***ing bastard” when we were talking international politics!

For the record, my grandpa has been a truck-driver and later a grocer for most of his life, and had survived three heart attacks and a kidney surgery when we were discussing Rumsfeld perhaps a year ago.

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:

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...

1 Nov 2006 (updated 2 Nov 2006 at 12:45 UTC) »

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.

18 Sep 2006 (updated 18 Sep 2006 at 17:59 UTC) »

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

25 Jun 2006 (updated 25 Jun 2006 at 10:25 UTC) »
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.

13 Jun 2006 (updated 13 Jun 2006 at 11:30 UTC) »
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.

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