McEs, A Hacker Life

Europe, here I come!

2009-12-17T05:59:00.003-05:00

I wrote my last exam on Tue night and We afternoon headed to the airport to get to Spain for the WebKitGtk hackfest at the Igalia offices. At this time, stuck in Frankfurt airport after missing my connection.

After the hackfest I'm doing a mini tour of Western Europe, thanks to RailEurope. Mostly visiting friends and family. Currently looking like: Frankfurt -> Kassel -> Paris -> Brussels -> Amsterdam -> Hanover -> Berlin -> (Maybe) Zurich.

Looking forward to meet GNOME guys. And will blog about hackfest progression. Before you ask, my mandate for the event is to port WebKit to use the new HarfBuzz API.

Lazyweb: Conference organizing/scheduling software

2009-12-11T06:24:00.002-05:00

Dear Lazyweb:

What are the best Free Software conference orginizing / scheduling pieces of software?

We are looking for things more sophisticated than Drupal's conference module. Two years ago we used expectnation, a kickass hosted service that Edd Dumbill kindly offered to GUADEC free of charge. But we are looking to host our own within the GUADEC infrastructure now that we finally have started looking into building real infrastructure for running GUADEC website on an ongoing basis as opposed to rebuilding it from scratch every year.

So, please leave comments and share your experience. Thanks in advance.

Funny spam

2009-11-25T18:03:00.004-05:00

Quite slick actually compared to the average spam I get...

Subject: This is hard for me to say

This is quite hard for me and I haven't been able to let you know up till now (you'd know why if you knew who I was)...but I have a crush on you.
You'll have to find out who I am though (I'm quite shy and this is without a doubt the bravest thing I've ever done). To help you out I made some videos and pictures with your nickname over my body. The photos and videos are kind of risque so I had to make a name at Black Book and put them there. My username in the members area is " behdad.esfahbodandme2009" (it's a free website).
But anyway, get on Black Book and once you are in, take a look for me. I want you to guess who I am and then approach me yourself. Good luck.

Hugs and kisses, Your secret admirer

PS. You'll get no extra help by e-mailing me back, so don't try :P

Pango vs HarfBuzz

2009-11-18T20:01:00.002-05:00

Since the rewritten HarfBuzz is shaping up fast and getting lots of Buzz these days, I get asked the same question again and again: "Will HarfBuzz replace Pango?" This post tries to answer that.

Short answer: No, not at all! Pango is here to stay. It will change, but only get better.

Long answer:

Pango provides two levels of API: A low-level and a high-level.

Low level API: What I can the "three pillars of pango":

pango_itemize(): Breaks text into runs that each have the same font, Unicode script, language, direction, and other characteristics.
pango_shape(): Shapes a single run of text, given the font, script, language, direction, and other properties. Shaping means converting Unicode text to positioned glyphs.
pango_break(): Does line breaking and other text segmentation (cursor positions, cluster boundaries, word boundaries, and sentence boundaries).

High-level API: Pango's high-level API consists of the PangoLayout object, aka "here's a piece of text render it in this box I don't care what you do."

Of these, HarfBuzz only does shaping. That is, hb_shape() is functionally equivalent to pango_shape().

API implications: Here is how moving to HarfBuzz affects the Pango API:

Everything in pango-ot.h will be deprecated and be a thin wrapper around hb-ot.h. This is already done in the harfbuzz-ng-external branch of Pango.
There will be new API in Pango, perhaps in pango-hb.h to help extracting various HarfBuzz structures from their Pango equivalents.
pango_shape() will be a thin wrapper around hb_shape() (read below).

Pango Modules: pango_shape() calls into Pango shaper modules to get the actual shaping done. There are two kinds Pango shaper modules depending on what they do (the API is the same, so Pango doesn't differentiate between the two classes):

Bridge modules: The basic-win32.c, basic-atsui.c modules call into another, platform native, shaping system to get the work done. The external (not integrated in Pango yet) modules basic-graphite.c and basic-m17n.c also do the same for the SIL Graphite and m17n shaping libraries.
On Linux, since there currently is no native shaping engine, Pango has multiple shaping modules, one per script, to do the actual shaping (arabic-fc, syriac-fc, indic-fc, thai-fc, ..., and basic-fc for all the non-complex scripts).

Now, as HarfBuzz becomes the shaping engine on Linux, all those script-specific modules will be removed and basic-fc will simply call into hb_shape(). That's indeed what the basic-fc.c in the harfbuzz-ng-external does.

Later on, when we add support for native win32, CoreText, Graphite, and m17n to HarfBuzz, all those other modules will also be replaced by HarfBuzz-calling equivalents.

Which one to use: Pango or HarfBuzz? Depends.

PangoLayout is designed to be the 'render this text in this box I don't care how' kind of API. That's a perfect fit for GUI toolkits like GTK+, but not suitable for lots of other uses, for example:

Web browsers
Word processors
Designer tools
Font design tools
Terminal emulators
Batch document processors
TeX engines

while in many of those cases PangoLayout can be made to work (with much pain, mind you), Pango still provides the lower level API and lots of other bits and pieces to get something going. What it doesn't give full control on however is font selection, which happens to be a deal-breaker for many of those usecases (browsers following CSS rules, etc).

So, each of those kinds of applications need to assess the pros and cons of using Pango vs using HarBuzz and providing all the other bits themselves. For example, HarfBuzz doesn't provide:

An itemizer
A Unicode Bidirection Algorithm implementation
A Unicode Line Breaking implementation
Glyph rasterization
Glyph metrics information
etc

There's also a hybrid use possible: to borrow those pieces from Pango on platforms that it's feasable, but drive HarfBuzz directly. It all depends. When in doubt, ask! We have a mailing list.

That said, Firefox will use HarfBuzz as soon as it's ready (there are patches circulating around). Google is using old HarfBuzz for their Webkit and will port to the new one. I'm also attending the Webkit-GTK hackfest in December to port that to the new HarfBuzz. We'll work towards sharing the HarfBuzz-dealing code among Webkit backends.

This is already a long post. Let me finish now. Hope I made it a tiny bit more clear.

On Unexpected Hanging Paradox and applications in law enforcement

2009-11-15T17:14:00.000-05:00

[Note: this post has nothing to do with the ongoing executions in Iran.]

Unexpected hanging paradox is a well-known alleged logical paradox about a prisoner's response to an unusual death sentence. To quote Wikipedia, here is the statement of the paradox:

A judge tells a condemned prisoner that he will be hanged at noon on one weekday in the following week but that the execution will be a surprise to the prisoner. He will not know the day of the hanging until the executioner knocks on his cell door at noon that day. Having reflected on his sentence, the prisoner draws the conclusion that he will escape from the hanging. His reasoning is in several parts. He begins by concluding that the "surprise hanging" can't be on a Friday, as if he hasn't been hanged by Thursday, there is only one day left - and so it won't be a surprise if he's hanged on a Friday. Since the judge's sentence stipulated that the hanging would be a surprise to him, he concludes it cannot occur on Friday. He then reasons that the surprise hanging cannot be on Thursday either, because Friday has already been eliminated and if he hasn't been hanged by Wednesday night, the hanging must occur on Thursday, making a Thursday hanging not a surprise either. By similar reasoning he concludes that the hanging can also not occur on Wednesday, Tuesday or Monday. Joyfully he retires to his cell confident that the hanging will not occur at all. The next week, the executioner knocks on the prisoner's door at noon on Wednesday — which, despite all the above, will still be an utter surprise to him. Everything the judge said has come true.

This has intrigued me again and again and I could never come to peace with it. While researching this recently I came across this paper which is a non-exhaustive survey of various tries to model the paradox. Great read.

Today I came across a blog post by Ed Felten called Targeted Copyright Enforcement: Deterring Many Users with a Few Lawsuits. While I find it very disturbing that a scientist like Ed Felten may be helping RIAA better screw people by their copyvio lawsuits, the puzzle and the solution provided are well worth a read. Not irrelevant to the Hanging Paradox, though in this case the reasoning may actually work.

litl by litl

2009-11-04T14:20:00.004-05:00

Finally litl's product is out: it's a webbook. The easel mode looks quite interesting, and reading their website, it looks like the kind of gadget/netbook/appliance I'd be more than happy to have around (in a theoretical family setting, not /me as lone hacker).

But at the starting price of $700, I'm not sure who they are targeting. Sounds like Apple customers... And that does not include the remote or the HDMI cable. And the twinpack offers exactly $0 dollars discount over buying two units separately. I found these very cheap of them. Otherwise it all looks very promising.

While at gadgets, anyone knows whether n900 will have a developer program?

HarfBuzz HackFest

2009-11-04T11:55:00.004-05:00

Here is a quick update re HarfBuzz:

During May and August I finished rewriting the OpenType Layout engine to use mmap()ed font files. This is in Pango 1.26.x already. Pango and fontconfig also received a lot more optimization love. That deserves a long and separate blogpost. The net result is that the text stack's memory usage is considerably lower now. All this goodness will be in the upcoming Fedora 12.

In October, I attended the 33rd Internationalization and Unicode Conference in San Jose to present the free software text stack (useless slides) as well as present and promote HarfBuzz (useless slides). That was a very fruitful event and I received lots of interest from many major industry players. With the liberal license that we are releasing HarfBuzz under, we expect broad adoption, which is exactly what we are looking for.

This week, Jonathan Kew and myself are having a small HarfBuzz HackFest here in Mozilla's Toronto office. Here's what we have got done so far:

Jonathan has a version of Firefox using harfbuzz-ng (the codename for the rewrite) that has advanced layout features controlable through CSS. Very very cool stuff. He updated it to the latest harfbuzz-ng code.
I ripped harfbuzz-ng out of the Pango tree and into a standalone module. Finally! Took a couple hours of git surgery plus ten minutes to put together an autotools build system. Git clone URL is this. The harfbuzz-ng-external branch in Pango uses that as an external module. The plan is to reach a stable 1.0 release of harfbuzz-ng before next stable GNOME and most probably, Pango will require harfbuzz unconditionally (that is, on all platforms). Note that harfbuzz is NOT tied to FreeType, so you can use it with any rasterizer you have around.
We fixed all portability issues Jonathan had faced when compiling harfbuzz-ng with MSVC.
Jonathan is working on the shaper side, while I'm working on the API and pulling it all together.
I added glue code for using harfbuzz-ng with glib, ICU, and FreeType.
Lots of API and design review.

At the rate this is developing, by the end of the week we should have basic shaper (Latin, Cyrillic, CJK, ...) and Arabic+Syriac working perfectly and tackling Indic family. We're closer to 1.0 than you may think!

Iran at the Toronto Int'l Film Festival

2009-09-11T18:40:00.000-04:00

It's Toronto International Film Festival time again. TIFF has been growing leaps and bounds every year, and one of the nice features this year is the free screenings at the Yonge & Dundas Sq., plus a few short concerts too. Looking forward to finally see Joan Baez live. And I digress.

I'm typically not a huge fan of following the Iranian films at TIFF, not living a nostalgic life and all, but this year is different. The five Iranian-directed films in the festival present a valuable and remarkably synchronized view into what's currently going on in Iran, its roots, and its historical background.

Shoja Azari, Shahrnoush Parsipour, and Shirin Neshat at the North-American premier of "Women Without Men" at TIFF

Shirin Neshat's adaptation of the similarly named novella by Shahrnoush Parsipour, "Women Without Men" depicts the story of five women in the Tehran of early 1950s, struggling to find their freedom each in their own way. The story is set around the CIA-run coup d'état of 1953 that removed the democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, an event that is as relevant today as it was in 1953. Other than its historical significance and candid view into the lives of Iranian women (of 50 years ago, but still quite accurate today), I particularly liked the pale colors and the cinematography. Not surprising given that Neshat's background is of a visual artist and this is her first feature-length film. Neshat was also present at the UN hunger-strike event last month that was organized by Akbar Ganji.

Fast forward to Iran today and Shalizeh Arefpour's "Heiran" tells the story of a teenage Iranian girl, Mahi, falling in love with an illegal Afghan worker, Heiran. They take their relationship from their small town to Tehran, hopefully a more forgiving place for their controversial romance, but they are faced with the cruelties of adulthood, and that of the megacity that is current day Tehran. Following the theme of Neshat's film, Heiran has a lot to offer to those curious to better understand the Iranian people, with all their complexities. Same people that are in the streets simply asking for their votes to be counted today.

If Heiran is the story of lower-class youth trying to break free of their social rank, Granaz Moussavi's dangerously-filmed "My Tehran for Sale" is the story of creative middle/upper-class young people in Iran struggling to express themselves in a country that enjoying pop music is a sin and women are banned from singing in public. It is only appropriate that it scores music by Mohsen Namjoo, the Iranian Bob Dylan as he has been dubbed by New York Times. Namjoo imposed exile upon himself recently when in the aftermath of the election decided to stop self-censorship and directly attacked the Supreme leader in a satirical poem.

Hana Makhmalbaf's film was not part of the original TIFF schedule and was added later. No wonder, since "Green Days" bears a title that did not mean much in Iran just three months ago. Include footage of the post-election movement never seen before, this one has a lot of promise. What raises the expectations is that Hana is the younger daughter of Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the world famous Iranian director who happens to be one of the outside leaders of the Green Movement (to the extent that one can attach leaders to this movement).

Last but certainly not least, Mehran Tamaddon's Bassidji looks into the lives of bassidj members, the paramilitary forces largely responsible for the crack-down of the popular post-election protests. In a way, this is the one movie to have a close eye on, if we are to better understand the ruling party in Iran (and specially so for us Iranians). Not surprisingly this is the one film I couldn't find a ticket for. Fortunately my friend Ben was so nice to offer one of his passes to the press screening tomorrow morning. Not many films can make me want to wake up at 8AM on a Saturday, but this one certainly does (or so I hope!).

Canadians: make your voice heard

2009-08-19T13:48:00.002-04:00

To all my Canadian friends:

As you may know the Canadian government is currently seeking public opinion on the various Canadian copyright and DRM proposals on the table.

Here is a guide to writing an effective entry to them (PDF). Takes five minutes only.

Thanks

History Repeats Itself

2009-08-13T13:39:00.004-04:00

Side by side photos of Tehran comparing 1978 (before the 79 revolution) and 2009.

Also a good read from Spiegel on the history of what's actually going on in Iran, from 60s on: The Fight for Iran's Political Future: Revolution Leaders Struggle for Power in Tehran.

Again, for more Iran news, follow @lotfan.

"I AM IRAN" wristbands

2009-08-02T14:32:00.003-04:00

Support the Green Movement!
Get the original wrist band.

GCDS / GUADEC slides and videos

2009-07-28T15:08:00.002-04:00

Slides. Videos.

If your slides are not there, send them in.

GCDS days 0,1,2, GUADEC day 1

2009-07-06T02:06:00.004-04:00

Lots going on here in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Here's my update as of Monday 7AM while I wait for breakfast to be served:

Done so far:

All day old+new GNOME meeting, featuring Rosanna this year. On my defense, I was jetlagged and had to take that nap.
Opening party sponsored by Canonical. Got to see many many old and new faces and partied till 3AM, at which point we walked on the beach back to our hotel rooms.
Still managed to wake up at 8:30 and sit on the opening panel at 10. Though Vincent thinks that I was quite sleepy,
Sat through morning keynotes. Loved Walter Bender's presentation tool.
Had board meeting with RMS over lunch. As usual, he ordered for everyone and it was pretty good. We talked about a couple issues. Nothing surprising.
Took an afternoon nap and woke up to prepare for my talk 10AM the next day. Finally started typing around midnight, and my performance didn't hit its peak until 3AM or so. Skipped sleep and finished the slides right on time at 8:30AM. The actual slides didn't make more than 30 min to prepare since I used slippy again. For the first time however, I first wrote a paper about what I wanted to talk about: State of Text Rendering.
Got to the venue, took us ten minutes to find the room, right on time, first session, 10AM, no surprise: no one there. I knew these back-to-back 30min slots are going to be a pain (I didn't decide). Anyway, projector issues, and people just starting to come in, I started at 10:15AM and managed to skip enough stuff to finish on time at 10:30. But Matthew didn't show up until 10:50, so I had to entertain people and do a demo of Matthew's stuff. Was good to see Simon Hausmann again.
Sat through the Poppler talk and finally met Albert Astals Cid, the Poppler maintainer. Another benefit of co-location.
Attended the real GUADEC opening in the afternoon with Owen's GNOME Shell keynote. Neat stuff. Got to start playing with it.
MIA: Had to skip the Nokia party. I hear it was one of the better GUADEC parties, with some real action going on and what not. Oh well. Hopefully I'll make up for it at the Igalia party tonight :-D.
Actually wrote my school paper about my pre-election activities. Finished by the deadline which at 5AM. Pretty happy about it. May clean it up and publish it here later.

Still TODO:

Meet with Rosanna, Stormy, and J5 today to prepare the foundation finance presentation for adboard and AGM.
Advisory board meeting all day tomorrow (downstairs in Fataga).
Prepare GUADEC+Akademy survey to hand out later in the week to see what we are supposed to do for next year.
GNOME+KDE board meeting to discuss next year plans among other things.
GNOME Foundation AGM on Thursday 10AM. Ugh, first session again. Hope it's not a no show. Please be there!
Meet with Albert to discuss fontconfig issues in Poppler as well as better PDF text extraction.
Meet with Alberto to discuss/design new font chooser dialog.
Meet with Robster to make him learn how to use slippy.
Meet with Simon Hausmann to discuss HarfBuzz progress.
Meet with Jonathan since we're both here.
Meet with Owen and Cody for a quick Pango BoF, discussing extended attributes and extending markup as well as HarfBuzz plans.
Perhaps do a BoF on Iran situation since that's the first thing everyone asks. Drop me a line if you're interested.

Humm, anything I'm missing? Poke me if we should meet. Now to breakfast. I'll give fixing my sleeping schedule another try next. Good morning everyone in the mean time.

GUADEC Day 0

2009-07-03T11:51:00.002-04:00

Had an excellent afternoon in Amsterdam with my old buddy Mehrdad. Well, the first officer at the Amsterdam border didn't want to let me although I had a Schengen visa, the second one was happy to do so.

Anyway, got to Gran Canaria last night just before midnight, but my luggage decided to spend a night in Barcelona...

Was in board meeting all day today. Vincent is working on sending out the minutes right away.

Looking forward to meeting everyone at the opening party tonight at 9.

GUADEC: Where are you staying?

2009-07-03T05:44:00.001-04:00

Fill it in: l.g.o/GUADEC/2009/Rooms.

Amsterdam on Thursday

2009-06-28T19:08:00.003-04:00

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

Iran is

2009-06-21T02:16:00.002-04:00

ON STRIKE

"The Wall"

2009-06-19T13:15:00.001-04:00

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!

2009-06-18T13:22:00.003-04:00

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

How to Help Iran, #2

2009-06-18T13:06:00.003-04:00

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

The Times They Are A-Changin'

2009-06-18T11:26:00.002-04:00

"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

2009-06-16T16:11:00.003-04:00

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

Time: Was Ahmadinejad's Win Rigged?

2009-06-15T08:48:00.001-04:00

Time: Five Reasons to Suspect Iran's Election Results

Chronology of June 13, 2009

2009-06-15T06:20:00.000-04:00

http://lotfan.org/

Update on Iran

2009-06-14T22:55:00.003-04:00

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?