Older blog entries for roozbeh (starting at number 148)

Che: Here’s a great way to celebrate Che’s death anniversary: Where are the Rosa Luxemburg t-shirts?

In other news, apparently access to my Persian weblog (not updated for quite a while) is blocked by some (but not all) Iranian ISPs. My mother-in-law found about it, when she was searching my name in Google, and then called Elnaz, my wife: “There were so many hits for Roozbeh, but his website was filtered!”

OOXML: I’m still tired from a one-week Turkey trip, in the middle of which I was supposed to finalize the drafting of comments to accompany Iran’s No vote to OOXML. Hard work for which some shameless people are trying to claim credit for...

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.

Teaching: My brother Behnam teaches GNU/Linux and various software that usually come with it, specially server-related applications. A week ago, after he had talked about an hour about how yum works, how to use it, and how to install a certain piece of software (let's call it FreeFoo) that the students were being taught about (on Fedora and with yum), a student asked a question:

Student: I was wondering if you would please give us a copy of the FreeFoo software you just installed on the computer?

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.

And then Behnam explains again for half an hour how yum works.

Student: [not believing him] Ah, still, would you give us a copy if you have one on you?

Holidays: Working at your own (and a bunch of friends’) company means that arranging holidays with friends will be easier and harder at the same time. But we did it anyway. I am just back from a road trip across Iran, going from Tehran to Qazvin to Zanjan to Tabriz to Kandovan to Jolfa to Kaleybar to Ardebil to Astara to Chalus and then back to Tehran. There were seven of us, five Iranians and two Irishmen, one of them Michael Everson (blog, wikipedia article), whom I have worked with on quite a few character encoding proposals for the Unicode Standard.

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.

Family: Today, my grandfather died at the age of eighty-three, fifteen minutes before when me and Elnaz were supposed to arrive at his home to visit him and wish him well-being. It was so sad, to miss him like this.

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.

Maps: A Persian map of the area surrounding Sharif University of Technology in Tehran (which Farzaneh and me have mapped) is now image of the week on OpenStreetMap and appears on the project’s front page. Nice!

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.

Rally: We will be participating in a TSD Rally tomorrow. So if you live in Tehran, watch for the numbered cars, which may pass your street, it’s quite fun!

Hackergotchis: We found a very funny thing about Reza, a new colleague of FarsiWeb, last night: he used his hackergotchi for an official photo for his registration for the National Examinations for Post-graduate Studies, which is considered a very serious/official/... thing!

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:

Addictions of life: After Rodrigo first wrote about it, OpenStreetMap has become a new addiction. I used to look down on a book or magazin or watch the usual traffic (and get scared becuase of the bad drivers) when we were in a car (note: I don't drive). But now I look for street signs and oneway streets and the topography of squares.

Help!

Fedora: I just checked the latest statistics for Fedora Core merge review. Of the 1087 packages which must be reviewed, only 60 have already passed review (5.5%), 113 are under review to some degree (10.4%), of which 69 (6.3% of the total) await some action from the package owner and 44 (4.0% of the total) await some action from the reviewer. A total of 914 have not really started going under review (84.1%).

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.)