(BTW, Run Lola Run appears to be one of the favorite movies of DEK. It was only being a DEK fan that made me find and watch the movie. I loved it, of course.)
Then, just now, someone (who seemed to be an Iranian intelligence officer) called my office. He mentioned my previous blog entry and that I had asked for advice there. He asked me to meet him in the governmental Office of Alien Affairs (where foreigners usually go to extend their visas in Tehran). He mentioned that this is definitely a trap and wanted to advice me about possible other traps that I may encounter in my "foreign visits". He mentioned that he and his colleagues appreciate the advice of us "computer guys" and we should also appreciate theirs. I am thinking whether or not I should try to meet him. It may practically take half a day out of my time, which is very bad for the very busy days I have now. I guess I will think about it for a few days, to see if it will be worth the time.
In other developments, I contacted the company that the "headhunter" mentioned as a possible employer and asked them to confirm that they have such a "human resources" company working for them. They have not answered yet. I guess they, being so large, won't even care about such scams and the possible victims!
But generally, I find it very interesting that random Iranian people have read this English blog, although I have not advertised it much anywhere. It may only be linked from Planet GNOME and Advogato itself. I wouldn't even have been on Planet GNOME if Jeff hadn't discovered my Advogato diary.
This is becoming a total time-waster. I should try to not even think about it anymore.
I guess I won't be answering his email. Does anyone advise to the contrary?
This guy, told me that he has seen my CV and is considering to offer me a job. He said he has three or four cases in mind, but did not provide any more explanation of what the job responsiblities are or what the companies are (or any other information about them, for the matter). He said he is calling from Luxembourg, and wants me to go there (or to Istanbul if it's hard for me to get to Luxembourg, which predictably is) in an all-expenses-paid visit for two or three days to give interviews.
It seemed like a scam to me. Not that I had been ever been a victim of such scams, but it somehow looked somehow like the Nigerian scams, which even some Iranian movie directors have fallen for.
That was specially because the guy failed to provide any kind of details about what kind of job he wants to offer me, or any information about the companies he is considering me for. He only mentioned that they are interested in skilled "mathematicians and computer scientists", and that the jobs are in Europe. When I insisted, he mentioned that I may need to sign NDAs (he asked me if I knew what it is), that he won't be able to provide details otherwise. When I mentioned that it's fine, I can do that, and the time for a courier from Western Europe to reach Iran and get back is usually less than ten days, he said that ten days is too much: they usually connect the employees and the employers in three or four days!
Basically, I mentioned that it's not very easy for me to get out of the country for such an ambiguous matter, unless I have more details. I gave him my personal email address and asked him to email me with all the details he can provide. I told him that I will consider the offers then, based on reserch I would do based on the information he provided. He has not contacted me by email yet, and I consider it already late if this is usually a quick thing for him.
He probably found me over the Internet, and used a previous entry on this blog to get my office's new phone number. There is a change he may read this. There is a chance that this has been a legitimate call. If that is the case, no time is lost: he can still contact me. But I am very sceptical...
The only worry I have in posting this, is educating scammers. But I don't think they would need much more education than they currently have. There will always be easy targets, until the level of awareness of the people of the world reaches the level of awareness that the practice of law enforcement assumes of them to have.
I am not interested in random copyrighted text someone mentions in a blog. I am concerned about copyright and license violations in copyleft software, which you have not been careful with. Please be careful with those, instead of joking about my concerns.
When I release (or contribute to) free software, following the license is the minimum I ask for. I understand that you don't care about copyleft for your software and have mentioned a few times that we can consider your free software contributions public domain, but that is no reason for you not following the copyleft license of other people's works.
The WSIS regional civil society meeting for West Asia and Middle East, supposed to take place in Kish, for which I was invited to talk about access to information in one's native language, was banned for not enough reasons. We were only about fifty people, forty Iranians and ten foreigners (from Tajikistan and Ukraine to Sweden and South Africa), mostly without any involvement in politics. There were two former politicians and a formerly jailed journalist involved, but only as participants representing their civil organizations: they were not even speakers.
The story was like this: the night before the conference, at around midnight when all participants were already in Kish, the organizers were told that the local provincial security council has met urgently and decided that the meeting may not take place, unless some restrictions in the agenda are guaranteed (as signed) by the organizers:
I can't find much about this online yet, but there is a report in Persian in Rooz and some statement in English by some of the foreign participants.
I have not signed anything about the meeting yet, not wanting to get involved in the unknown politics of the matter. I was only planning to talk about Unicode and the Wikipedia.
BTW, it also mentions Jeff’s suggestion of a resignation from being GNOME’s release manager…
So, no, the fonts are not broken. They are intentionally meeting the "Microsoft Typography criteria for hinting and quality in TrueType and OpenType fonts." Cutting the tails would be against the recommendations.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!