McEs, A Hacker Life
Amsterdam on Thursday
On my looong way to Gran Canaria Desktop Summit later this week I'll have a six-hour afternoon stop in Amsterdam, perfect for grabbing lunch and a walk around town. Anyone interested drop me a line.
Cheers,
behdad
Labels: amsterdam, guadec
Iran is
ON STRIKE
Labels: iranelection, neda
"The Wall"
To the friend or friend-of-friend in Toronto who borrowed my "Pink Floyd The Wall" DVD please return it ASAP. It was gift, and I want to watch it again this weekend. Thanks.
Green!
What a better time to be Green!
People of Iran are asking Google to change their logo to Green for one day, like Reddit and PirateBay did. PirateBay is actually called
The Persian Bay since yesterday. Was also reassuring to see the State Department ask Twitter to postpone scheduled maintenance downtime by 24 hours.
Thanks,
behdad
Labels: gr88, iranelection
How to Help Iran, #2
There are three different ways right now that people can help Iranians stay connected to the outside world a little longer:
- Setup a Squid proxy: HOWTO (read even if you know how to setup Squid, it has Iran-specific info)
- Setup a Tor bridge: HOWTO
- Setup a Twitter relay: HOWTO
After you set something up, it's important NOT to make the info public. Email to gr88proxies@googlegroups.com. Helps if you clear-sign with their PGP key and/or attach other evidence that they are not insiders. Anything, for example hosting it on a server that is clearly not run by AN supporters, etc.
Thanks bunches!
behdad
Labels: gr88, iranelection
The Times They Are A-Changin'
"The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast,
The slow one now will later be fast,
As the present now will later be past,
The order is rapidly fading
And the first one now will later be last,
for The Times They Are A-Changin' "
--Bob Dylan, 1963
How to Help Iran
Simply change your Twitter timezone to that of Iran (UTC+4:30) such that filtering Iranian twitters becomes harder for the authorities.
Just a reminder, you can follow up-to-minute happenings by following @lotfan. For photos and videos checkout the instructions at
http://lotfan.org/.
Thanks,
behdad
Labels: Iran
Chronology of June 13, 2009
http://lotfan.org/Labels: elections, Iran
Update on Iran
I've been living on Red Bull. Will update everyone in detail soon. All GNOME and other duties are suspended until further notice.
Things not going well at all. But Mousavi and the people are trying to stand their rights peacefully. The other side though is more violent than ever.
Fortunately media coverage is fantastic. BBC and CNN are on it around the clock. More surprising is how awesome Twitters from Iran are doing. CNN was literally just reading twits on TV. Follow
lotfan for news from outside and
iran09 from inside. Also a
YouTube channel. Some disturbing stuff there though, be warned.
Me on election day.
Will I be that happy ever again?
Labels: elections, Iran
UNREST IN IRAN: Please HELP
Yesterday was the
Iranian presidential election. I drove to Ottawa to vote. More than 85% of eligible voters voted, of which about 80% of those voted for
Mousavi, that is, against current president
Ahmadinejad. I actually campaigned to encourage voting, by launching
Lotfan.org last weekend.
Overnight however, a silent coup happens. The votes are never counted! Imaginary numbers are pushed out in the state-run TV as actuals:
The first counts, from rural places, start with Ahmadinejad getting 69% of the votes. Which sounds not right, but not unrealistic for rural places.
What we notice as being very very weird in our 5 hour drive back to Toronto is, as the total of votes counted goes up from 5 millions to 10, 15, 21, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30 millions, the balance doesn't change much. In fact, as facebookers and bloggers soon discovered,
the ratio of votes for Mousavi over that of Ahmadinejad's at any given announcement was following a straight line with VERY HIGH CERTAINTY.
Same pattern applies for other candidates, which consistently get 1% and 2% of the vote, with Mousavi and Ahmadinejad converging to a 1:2 ratio.
The first three hours, they "counted" 20 million votes, a very unusually high rate. The next three hours, only 10. Then there's silence for six hours. No one's responding. Mousavi and Karroubi are pretty much non-existent on the net and news. Karbaschi, the former Tehran mayor and Karroubi's VP stopped tweeting at 4am, saying that they have to wait to hear from Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, and he wouldn't tweet for ten hours. It's this time that bloggers find about the all made up numbers. The following "photo" of the Iran map on fire storms Facebook profile photos:
There's a freaking silence in the air. Makhmalbaf, the world-famous Iranian director who is associated with Mousavi's campaign talks to foreign media and warns about the coup. People in Iran wake up to an election lost, and life looks normal. Except that it's not. A coup is going on. Mousavi, Karroubi, Rafsanjani, and all other prominent figures are waiting for Supreme Leader's word. Election results are postponed from 8am, to 10, to noon, to 2, and to 4pm.
The results are finally out and the Supreme Leader approves the election results.
Storm of people in the street. Being shot:
The police alleging protesters of violence, but who's breaking the windshield on these cars? Well, judge yourself:
This is the start of a new era in Iran.
The videos are being uploaded and circulated widely on Facebook AS WE SPEEK. Like this, or this, or this.
Iran is a different place today.
And Facebook is the Xnet
Please HELP.
Updated 12:15EST: Added two photos.
Labels: help, Iran, panic
If you see Keith Packard, say hello
Tell him to give me commit access to fontconfig. He stopped responding to my multiple pings and other messages a while ago.
The last fontconfig release happened over a year ago. I've been hacking on fontconfig and reviewing and committing patches submitted by others since August, and
my tree has accumulated 190 commits so far, and touches about 7000 lines of code.
My tree fixes more than half of the bugs open in upstream bugzilla. It also includes many many performance improvements. Consumes less memory. Has a FcFontSort() call four times faster. And adds many new features as well as support for many new languages.
It also adds features needed for
automatic font installation using PackageKit. This feature is
included in Fedora 11, which means my tree is shipped in F11. Other distros however are waiting for a tarball without "behdad" in the version tag before updating.
Thanks,
behdad
Labels: fontconfig
Love GNOME? Show Your Support!
The new
Friends of GNOME program that was launched in January have been a great success. I for one have certainly been
feeling the love.
Stormy will be posting stats this week.
In the mean time, if you use and enjoy
GNOME, here's a few different ways you can support it:
If you have not already, opt in the Adopt a Hacker monthly subscription. It's the easiest way to contribute to GNOME in a sustained and affordable way. Like they say, what are you waiting for? :)
- If you prefer one-time donations, you can do that too. Remember, GNOME is a registered non-profit and donations are tax-deductible in the US.
- You can also support GNOME by letting your friends know about it. Just go to this page and post one of the badges to your blog or website. Thanks in advance!
- Finally, as a special offer, the first person to donate to GNOME in the Philanthropist level ($1200 or more) will receive the following framed art work with an engraved plaque recognizing your contribution:
(Click to enlarge)
The frame is 13"x18" and comes with over 4GB of ram! Perfect for a GNOME-Friendly office. If you attend GUADEC this year, it will be handed to you by the GNOME Foundation board of directors there. If not, we'll make other arrangements. Contact me at behdad-gnome-org to claim. First come first serve!
Labels: gnome, GNOME foot logo
"Your Point of View"
If you travel frequently, chances are you've seen many of the HSBC "Your Point of View" airport ads already. Everytime I'm boarding an aircraft or getting out of mine I enjoy them and want to blog about them, but by the time I have internet access I've already forgotten.
So I was delighted to finally look them up and find them
here. They are truly brilliant. Here's a couple favorites of mine:
Labels: ad, hsbc
