Jalali GCal moved to Google Code

Finally I created a project for Jalali GCal in code.google.com. Here are the Installation Guide and the downloads list.

Thanks to Mehdi Ahmadizadeh, the new versions work fine with current Google Calendar UI. Also some ideas from Shayan have been implemented.

Here are latest features (for version 2.4):

• The userscript is now available in two editions: English and Persian. Using Persian edition gives you Persian numbers and months' names;
• The font of Persian texts in Persian version is bigger than the default texts;
• The name of the Jalali month is shown in the first day of the month (in the table).

Hope you enjoy it. Feel free to report enhancement requests, bugs, and issues.

Persian in Console, using Bicon and console-setup

This is a screen-shot of Persian translation of The Little Prince, in GNOME Terminal, using Bicon.

A few days ago Ahmed El-Mahmoudy told me about his recent work on Bicon, the Bidirectional Console program. He has made a Debian package, so I made one for Ubuntu Hardy, with a little fix on builddeps, through Launchpad's Private Package Archive build system. You can find the package at my PPA.

I just started using PPA and this is my first package there. By the way, I've also became a Launchpad Beta Tester and am using Launchpad as my OpenID server.

Also I found console-setup works fine with XKB's Iranian keyboard layout, with a change on CODESET. This is how you can get a Persian/Iranian keyboard on your Linux console. Open /etc/default/console-setup and change the lines like these:

CODESET="Arabic"

XKBMODEL="pc105"
XKBLAYOUT="us,ir"
XKBVARIANT=","
XKBOPTIONS="grp:shift_caps_toggle,lv3:ralt_switch,grp_led:scroll"

Bicon project is not so active, but if you need Persian support in console, it's a good start. Please report bugs, or inform us at #arabeyes at irc.freenode.net. Thanks.

Iranian Firefox Users Survey

A couple of friends have been running a survey for Iranian users of Firefox. It contains at most 17 questions, based on whether you use Firefox, and its version.

It's open for another couple of weeks, and the results will be out soon after that. Till now, there's been more than one thousand participants.

Dot-IR on Firefox IDN White-list

Just a quick notice. ".ir" TLD has been added to the IDN white-list of Firefox, and will be effective on next updates for 2.0 (Gecko 1.8.1.12) and beta-3.0 (Gecko 1.9).

Now you can use your Persian domain names, ".ایران.ir", easily in Firefox. Enjoy it!

P.S. ".ir" has been in white-list in IE since version 7.0.

On Bugmail RFE and My Bugzilla Accounts

After my RFE, about adding an option to Bugmail to not put my email address in To/CC fields of email header, rejected as WORKSFORME by one of bugzilla maintainers (Mozilla bug 410671), I had to change my Bugzilla email addresses (GNOME, Mozilla, and freedesktop.org for now). I have added a "bugs+" to the beginning of previous one, so it's bugs+<my-name>@<this-blog-domain> from now on.

The reason for this change is that I prefer to use the Mute feature of Gmail, so I can get rid of some discussions, which I cannot unsubscribe them directly. Now I get them in the same mail box, but Gmail doesn't detect them as a To or CC one for me, so when I mute a bug, I won't see the thread again. The more interesting part is when a bug's title changes, I'll get it again, which seems very useful.