Older blog entries for roozbeh (starting at number 21)

This was in mail:

The FSF is releasing a new version of the GPL!  Unfortunately, it's
not version 3 yet.  Instead, it's the third revision of version 2.  Like
the previous revision, it will differ only in that it will contain
FSF's new address.  This version will be available and effective on
Friday, April 29, 2005.

When you next get the chance, please go through your source code and
replace the old copy of the GPL with the new version.  Also, old
notices should be replaced with new ones.  The following shell command
will do this for you in a sloppy way; its results should be carefully
checked:

find . -type f -exec sed -ie 's/59 Temple Place, Suite 330/51 Franklin
Street, Fifth Floor/;s/02111-1307/02110-1301/;' {} ';'

We will also be releasing new revisions of the LGPL and the FDL.

Time to update all your sources...

Quoting Mark Davis of the Unicode Consortium fame for anybody interested in helping in i18n standardization:

We can now generate text file that shows the language -> territory / script
mappings in CLDR in a more readable form than the XML; see

   http://unicode.org/cldr/data/dropbox/language_info.txt

For cross-checking, the end of the file contains the languages / scripts
that are not represented. This information is currently in draft state; we'd
appreciate it if knowledgeable people looked over the missing items to see
what information can be added. For example, here is the first part of the
'unrepresented' scripts list and languages list:

=======================================
  Scripts Not Represented
=======================================
  [Bali] Balinese
  [Batk] Batak
  [Blis] Blissymbols
  [Brah] Brahmi
  [Brai] Braille
  [Bugi] Buginese
  [Buhd] Buhid
  [Cham] Cham
  [Cirt] Cirth
  [Copt] Coptic
  [Cprt] Cypriot
...

=======================================
  Languages Not Represented
=======================================
  [aa] Afar
  [ace] Achinese
  [ach] Acoli
  [ada] Adangme
  [ady] Adyghe
  [ae] Avestan
  [afa] Afro-Asiatic (Other)
  [afh] Afrihili
  [ak] Akan
  [akk] Akkadian
  [ale] Aleut
  [alg] Algonquian Languages
...

If some of these are in modern use for some languages / territories, please
file a new reply on http://www.jtcsv.com/cgibin/locale-bugs?findid=471.
Please include both the name and the code of the new relation and whether
the language should be starred or not (see the text file). Example format:

Please add:
[cop*] Coptic; written in [Copt] Coptic, used in [EG] Egypt and Antarctica
[AQ]
..

The data looks to be in a very good shape now. If you have a use for it, you should preferably try the XML version.

You can also send the feedback to me (roozbeh at farsiweb dot info) if you wish someone to review it for you before it gets to the Unicode CLDR committee.

Awake for almost 24 hours. Thoroughly reviewed the list of correspondence between languages and countries where they are official or commercially important in this (incomplete text version) for the third time in the cycle that started more than three months ago. It seems that me and Mark are finally converging to something good.

Had a company board meeting and the trans-company "free software council" meeting, trying to get the business plan for our customized Linux distribution approved and financed by the VC, but I am not very hopeful, really. Seems that they (the shareholders of the VC, that owns 30% of our company) are more interested in talking about and encouraging entrepreneurship than spending the real money they are making in North America here. Free advice, we're getting, but not the money to implement the same advice.

Put lots of information about Stuttgart on the Wiki page for GUADEC. So tired now, should get some sleep to be in shape for tomorrow's translation party (we'll be doing Fedora this time).

Daniel: It was like that for me for years. For quite a long time, possibly since the first time I knew anybody interested in my free software (which were all Persian-related), I was finding that almost all of the interested people were naggers. (My company somehow hires all the others!)

This made me very mad, resulting in the first GPL-ed software in Iran (FarsiTeX) unmaintained for quite a few years, to the users’ discomfort. I was waiting for years for someone to send a patch for a very trivial bug, or for someone to branch. None happened. Not that I hadn't mentioned my expectations.

This has basically resulted in me being very uninterested when I receive bugs with no patches. When I get a bug report with no patch, I basically think "how will fixing this help me?" If it is useful for myself, or would be returning a favor to someone who has helped me or I have learned from or in any other way I have respect for, it's probably going to get fixed. Otherwise, it will even sit there forever, until someone gives me a fine patch.

Your post made me think that this may not be regional culture at all. This may be a lose-lose situation. Those kind of people, if you beat them, they go away nagging about you forever and won’t ever become a helper. If you talk nicely, they will come with every expectation from you next time, and nag the first time you won’t give it to them.

It's sad that this is happening to you now. In other words, I have no clue why it hasn't happened earlier. But brother, it will pass.

It's official. They didn't give me the Egyptian visa on time. The Interests Office in Tehran provides no reason!

This is the third time ever I have not got a visa on time. The first time was Egyptians again, but the meeting got cancelled anyway, because it was supposed to happen on September 12, 2001. The second time it was the Irish, who finally gave us a visa, but about a week late for GU4DEC, which me and Elnaz (who's my wife now) used for a holiday, visiting Michael Everson, a very dear friend.

Miguel: Nice reading, thanks a lot.

Nat: That somehow sets a deadline (June, 2005) if you wish to hire me!

But finally, for those who may be able to read French, possibly the best non-fiction originally in Persian that I've read is now translated to French. It's Ebrahim Nabavi's Couloir n° 6, which is simply a prison diary for the time when Nabavi, a satirist, was arrested for writing political satire but was jailed with financial prisoners instead of political ones (for the fear of helping their mood), or being put in a solitary cell (as is normal in Iran these days). So, the book somehow becomes an elite view into the lives of the very normal people, like an old man remaining in prison for a few years for of a debt of about EUR 50, unable to pay it back because he has neither family and friend who could pay it for him, nor he can earn any money inside the prison.

The Egyptian embassy doesn't like the invitation letter as scanned, emailed, and printed. They prefer a lower quality fax, which they call "the orignial invitation letter". OK, they'll gonna get it!

<crying how="OUT LOUD">
Jeff, please post my hackergotchi on Planet GNOME!
<crying>

The national Iranian Motorcycle and Automobile Federation finally announced the results of our first Speed -Time-Distance road rally. Out of about 180 teams, we ranked 27th, with 135 negative points. It wasn’t an amateur rally, many national champions also participated. It was something like free for all.

I was not involved in the driving (I don’t know how to drive) or much in navigating (I look at the map too much, ignoring the road or the features): I was sitting at the back calculating the times and speeds and all using a solar calculator and large pieces of paper (between two and four people were allowed in each car). When I checked the numbers later, I hadn’t made a single error, all that with a solar calculator which didn’t work properly in the early morning. (I somehow reprogrammed it about 10 times, the program was reset every time we went under a bridge or something.)

But why did we only rank 27th? Well, one of the instructions on a map was “During this map, don’t add 15 minutes to your due time”, which meant that you should ignore the instruction completely (it was a trap). We had automatically read this as “add 15 minutes”, because, a) the high stress would only let you read everything as they would most possiblity mean, and b) the Persian terms for add and don’t add, were only different in one single duplicated letter in this case: “اضافه نمائید” vs “اضافه ننمائید”. This was early in the game, so we were about 15 minutes late for each of the seven or eight time controls after that, which explains about 100 of those negative points. We didn't find about the trap until we passed the finish line.

I don’t have the score sheet yet, but I really believe that without those 100 points, we would have been in top three. Too great for first-timers!