In the News

I've been extremely busy the last few days. So I first go by a long news post.

Books arrived. Busy with "Inmates". Pretty good stuff so far. The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia is awsome too. I'm having a lot of good time reading the Encyclopedia and Lyrics books side by side. I will post a few notes on Bob Dylan later.

Web development. Last few days I've been busy doing web development. Focused mainly on RiRa Persian Digital Library, but editing other stuff too. Behnam sent me this Web Development Bookmarklets which totally changed my web development practices. I made a list of pages and services I maintain, and cleaned their codes and styles up until satisfaction (XHTML1.1) and perfect FireFox viewing. I probably ruined Windows support in the process, but I don't care _much_. Since Opera 8.0 is released now, I'll try to download and test under that too. I will compile the list of these pages I do and put on my homepage and post here later. Moreover, I finally decided to put all my web development stuff under the name RiRa Developers Resources. Will come soon.

AdSense. I finally decided to put Google AdSense on this blog. Not that I get any clicks, but that should be enough to pay for the domains like iraniancalendar.info that I will not renew if I don't get enough dollars for that. Click a couple once in a while if you don't want to see them discontinued. Thanks.

Bloglines. For a few days now, I found bloglines.com very helpful in organizing feeds I read. I'm very satisfied with that. I've got to make the switch to del.icio.us too soon. I'm torn apart between my laptop at home and terminal at office. On each, there's FireFox for web development and Epiphany for Persian and long session browsing. So both Bloglines and del.icio.us are much needed. Epiphany rules with it's crash recovery. When I've got to leave office/home, I just kill it and continue browsing when back and recover. It's got a little better Persian support too, in tooltips and titles specially, thanks to Gtk+-2.0.

Linux World Expo. With my good friend Farhang we headed to the Linux World Expo yesterday, to get some merchandise. Like last year, Novell was making huge buzz, with very uninformed speakers that probably have been counting minutes down. One of them focusing on migration from Windows, saying that there are lots of solutions, like VMWare, Wine, etc...
We made a couple questions and got back stuff. I got a Novell cap like last year, Farhang got a huge red umbrella that can wait to be used in Vancouver next fall. We jumped in an IBM talk on Linux Internationalization. The speaker was a teacher at IBM Toronto. Lets not be picky about him calling "UTF-8" simply "UTF", but he even said that Unicode 3.2 is the latest version of the UCS standard! Got a good Tux from HP. The top earning was the Programming Languages and Unix History posters from O'Reilly. Not surprising, Red Hat's booth was a boring place with absolutely nothing to give away. Ah, got a VMWare 5.0 workstation too! Will try that sometime. Maybe run Ubunto under that, or Gentoo.

Gnome. Read Davyd's presentation on his experience in Gnome. I'm a bit surprised on how he can enumerate the bugs he started with, in 2003. As a result, I feel more strongly that I am a Gnome developer :D.
I wanted to comment on Luis's comments on Gnome 3.0 too, but let that be for another occasion.

Enough for now! I would be happy to answer any questions the audience may have.

¶ 6:01 AM