I will write about the adventurous Turkey trip as soon as I can. It’s quite a entertaining story, considering all the disasters that happened to us. Also more on OOXML later.
I will write about the adventurous Turkey trip as soon as I can. It’s quite a entertaining story, considering all the disasters that happened to us. Also more on OOXML later.
Student: I was wondering if you would please give us a copy of the FreeFoo software you just installed on the computer?And then Behnam explains again for half an hour how yum works.Behnam: But I don’t have anything apart from the OS installation CDs, of which you have copies. The application yum does all the rest.
Student: But you just installed it! You should have a CD somewhere.
Behnam: It’s installed off the Internet, as I told you.
Student: [not believing him] Ah, still, would you give us a copy if you have one on you?
Among the most interesting parts of the trip, was going to the Babak Fort during a very mysty day when we couldn’t see more than five meters around. Michael remained in the car, and tried to decode the joining and shaping behavior of the Psalter Pahlavi script, a script that is only found in a fourth century CE twelve-page document (and also recently on a damaged cross found around Herat). We, the others, tried to find the path to the castle in the mist and was lost after twenty minutes, trying to find the coordinates of the castle by phoning friends and asking them to dig Google Earth and other friends with GPS devices but seeing no success, and then finally finding our way by Christian (our other Irish guest) hearing a loud radio playing in Azerbaijani which we followed and resulted in us getting found.
I’m looking forward to mapping the route to the castle on OSM.
My mom was at his death bed, and held him when he died. He was very well aware of what happened around him until the final moments, but had a hard time talking and moving in his last week. For all I know, he wished to die sooner, as he perhaps could not stand himself being weak. His mental image of himself was always a strong and clear-minded man, which was breaking after his illness after a few heart attacks he survived.
He is the nearest person I have lost to death. I tried my best to not look at his corpse, hoping that the avoiding will help me keep a better last image of him in my memory.
I had written here about him previously, on a note about Rumsfeld.
OSM’s infrastructure is great, but more mappers and developers are definitely needed and are quite welcome. Getting involved in the project is highly recommended if you love maps, own a GPS device, or like trying your hand on hacking map-related software like map renderers and route finders.
For us, it’s a unique opportunity to beat the proprietary providers’ inaccurate and out-of-date maps for the quickly changing Tehran which is full of oneway streets and dead end alleys, and release the first free maps of the huge city where we’ve been born and brought up.
I don't know how it passed the officials, why they didn't think he's a total hoax, etc., but anyway, here it is:
Help!
And that is just the bare statistics. The larger and harder packages (kernel, glibc, ...) are mostly in that 84%.
We seriously need more package reviewers. There have only been a few reviewers and I think some of them (like myself) are already burned out. We also need more collaboration from package owners (famously known as “The Red Hat Engineers”).
(Personally, I guess I will finish some of the reviews that I started and then maybe a few easy ones, but that’s all unless I suddenly find a lot of energy.)
The only worrisome thing that came up a few times, was a possible war on Iran, and one of our guests (Matin) had heard it may even happen in two weeks time. I, having not followed the very recent turn of events but only the developments about the Democrats getting control of the US Congress and Senate, found that ridiculous and impossible.
But after another guest (Arash) explained the way he thinks some things will happen, I agreed that they may. We saw that the only way of getting Iran and the US into a war would be an attack by Israel. The Israeli government may be under pressure for the various things enough to do something like that. After all, they seem to be very angry at what happened in Lebanon, and they may like to do something about it.
Let me tell you what will happen from this side. The bombs or the rockets or whatever they will be that will only be targetted to nuclear facilities will also kill several civilians, because of people living with their families near the facilities, misfires, and various other reasons, let alone future Chernobyl-like effects.
From that moment, Iran will enter a war state. Having grown up in a war (how many of the readers of this blog can claim the same?), which was interestingly another war with Iran which also had the US on the other side of the table, I can easily tell you how that will feel like.
Random scenes that come to my mind: the very brilliant people (who usually are very sensitive) will get hot and go to war voluntarily and get killed. Several others who are scared of war and the draft/conscription will hide (or get hidden by worrisome moms) at home and will not see the light of day for months. The borders will be closed. There will be refugess to countries like Afghanistan and Turkmenistan who used to send refugess the other way around, to Iran... The effects would be irreversible. Think about the Iranians scattered in the world today in the West, you will have Iranians everywhere: in Arab countries, in Central Asia, in Caucasia, in South Asia, in Eastern Europe, in North Africa, ...
The government will have much tighter control because of a war state, which they will keep the same way the US goverment has kept the post-9/11 state by introducing the Homeland Security Advisory System (Did you know that the current threat level is Orange/High Risk of Terrorist Attacks for all US domestic and international flights? What does “High” really mean?). The Iranians will have a much harder time than presently, although I guess it will take quite a while for us to get to the level Iraq is now experiencing. I guess instead of the sect-related Sunni/Shia conflict Iraq is having now, we will have a ethnicity-related Persian/Azerbaijani/Kurdish/Baloch/Turkmen conflict.
And of course, more innocent Americans will get killed!
It may be so sad for observers, but it will be hell for us random free software developers who will not be able to leave the country once the Iranian government declares a state of war (even if it's only one simple rocket from Israel, with no US involvement).
I hope I can sleep tonight.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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