Older blog entries for roozbeh (starting at number 55)

Democracy: The election results are out and the moderate pragmatist conservative Rafsanjani and the populist hardline conservative candidate Ahmadinezhad went to the second round.

According to my brother, who attended the university where he taught, Ahmadinezhad can't differentiate shit from Goosht Koobideh.

I am totally depressed about the situation.

Behdad: The main reason I didn't write to Google about it, was that I thought it would be a waste of time, since I couldn't find any Iranian student living abroad interested in the Summer of Code thing, and after reading the United States Treasury documents I believe that the regulations apply to students in Iran. Specially, the most capable person I was thinking about when I wrote that was you yourself, but since you told me that you will not apply for the program anyway, I saw no reason to contact Google about a lost cause. I'm happy that you are now applying and have solved the problem yourself.

About the Fedora EULA, I contacted Red Hat long before having an English weblog, and also tried to get the help of Novell lawyers through Luis. But the problem cannot be solved by seeing Google and Red Hat removing the wrong clauses: they will appear in other EULAs and FAQs (even possibly legally) if there is no general awareness on what the problem is. That's the reason I'm educating myself on all the background, and will ask FSF lawyers to help me in the cause.

I am going to polling offices now, to vote for Moeen. (BTW, none of your two Persian weblogs have anything recent on them yet about not voting, unless it's a third one I don't know about.)

Good luck with your application!

Elnaz has posted a few of our photos from GUADEC 6 here. I specifically like this, depicting Keith Packard.

Yaser: I seriously believe you have forgotten a very important option, that is voting blank or for anybody one believes is the best person to become the Iranian president, although he may not have run or may have been rejected by the Guardian Council. I seriously believe the this should be recommended to people who don’t want to vote for any of the candidates anyway and believe they will be endorsing the current regime and its practices if they do.

The theory behind it, is that by voting "blank or invalid", you are saying that you wish to vote and it really makes a difference for you in who is in power, but none of the people you want for the office were allowed to run. This means that you are pro-democracy, but against the current practices of the government in not allowing everybody to run.

The way it makes a difference in practice, is that the number of blank and invalid votes is counted in the final count, and it makes sure that no candidate gets enough votes to win the election in the first round, winning the 50% requirement in the presidential election or the 25% requirement in the parliamentary one. The government won't be able to claim that people who vote are supporting the current regime, since they have clearly mentioned that they don't like any of the options.

I seriously believe that bycotting elections has only one political meaning, that one doesn't believe in democracy, or prefers other things to democracy. And I have a good proof for it: most of the proponents of bycotting the elections are for an alternate totalitarian regime, either those like the Soviet Union, or those with someone like Reza Pahlavi II on the throne.

I am personally voting for Moeen, of course.

Fedora Core 4 is out, which means much many more users for GNOME 2.10. Hurray!

This came on #gnome-hackers:

<luis> roozbeh: fudding against the americans should be fair game

I seriously believe one can make a really good hackergotchi from this photo of Glynn. Update: uws (who calls himself "a postmodern geek living in the Netherlands") already did it! It rocks!

On the other news, I was locked out of our compile farm because I installed an updated pam on it.

On the other other news, Elnaz, the CEO of FarsiWeb and my wife, was not allowed into a building of the governmental Management and Planning Organization, who is one of our company's customers, because of "inappropriate hijab" (the headscarf was very much like the first photo on the Wikipedia article, and almost the same blue color, which practically doesn't have any kind of problem, legal or not, or they would have arrested her in the street). The guard was a woman herself, of course, and she refused to show us anything on paper about the weird requirement. She allowed her in after she went and bought a different kind of headscarf, which was black... Will post photos here later.

Caleb: You should check this about The Da Vinci Code.

My first real security bug: Today, I probably found my first real security bug, which I obediently reported to Red Hat's "secalert" alias. I'm sorry I can't disclose more, but I enjoyed finding it.

Too bad I can't read the OSNews article anymore, it will apparently help feed the masochism. She has apparently removed the article from OSNews.