Internationalized Top-Level Domains

After about a week that eleven Int'lized TLDs had been in root servers, yesterday ICANN officially announced them, the localized IDNwiki pages are open to the world. Here are the Persian one. Go ahead and test your softwares. Firefox has them in the IDN whitelist in the trunk, and will have them in an update for Firefox 2.0 soon. Unfortunately they started using pe as the two-letter code for Persian, which is not a standard, and know it's changed to per. I hope they fix it soon, and use just fa.

This is a big step forward to have dot-iran (.ایران) TLD in the root servers, which has currently more than two thousand registered domains. In fact supporting fully int'lized domain names was one of the major reasons of developing the new IRNIC domain registration system, which has been up since early September. Come on! Register a future dot-iran domain now!

Jalali GCal, Version 1.2

Here are an update for Jalali GCal (old: Jalali Calendar for Google Calendar). Installing the new one will replace the previous version. Also I changed its description to Jalali calendar for the web interface of Google Calendar. All features work well on Firefox 1.5 on my Linux desktop. Bug reports are welcomed.

Update: Jalali GCal moved to Google Code

Mozilla/Firefox Hacks for Power Users (Hack 200C+0002)

Here is some preferences I have set, and you may like to set them, if you are a power user, bidi user, or your locale is not en-US, but have to use this locale.

Newbie HOWTO: use "about:config" to set this key/values.

Power User:

• layout.word_select.stop_at_punctuation
• layout.word_select.eat_space_to_next_word

Set them to TRUE if you want Ctrl+Left/Right-Arrows stop at the start/end of alpha-numeric words (like what you get on Gtk+/Gnome). Default values make it to jump to the next/previous Space/Tab character! The second one also affects word boundary on selecting with mouse double-click.

• browser.triple_click_selects_paragraph

(Mozilla >= 1.9, Firefox >= 3.0a1)
This option allows you to select whether triple click should select the whole paragraph, or just the line you are clicking. If it's FALSE, you can select the whole paragraph with quadruple-click (Wait, it doesn't work on Gtk+/Gnome, as Gtk+ doesn't support quadruple-click. If you like it, here are the Mozilla bug: #348751.)

• network.http.max-persistent-connctions-per-proxy
• network.http.max-persistent-connctions-per-server

If you use Tor, or any other proxy in your LAN, just set the first one to a big number (I use 50). Also I set the second one to 8, as Flickr and many other photo-sharing sites use just one domain for almost all images on the their pages, so I cannot get even two pages simultaneously. (maps.google.com is smart enough)

• network.protocol-handler.external.ed2k
• network.protocol-handler.app.ed2k

Here are how you can define a protocol and set the external application. In this example, I set ED2K protocol. Create the first key as Boolean, and set the value to TRUE. Then create the second key as String, and set the path to your ed2k link-handler ("/usr/bin/ed2k" for me) as its value. That's it.
Homework: Create a protocol-handler and write a script to handle Yahoo! Messenger links, and make GAIM do the requested action (add buddy, send message, etc). Of course you should mail them to me to get your point. :D)

• mousewheel.horizscroll.*.action

Try possible values for this key (0..4 IIRC) to get more functions under your fingers (horizontal scroll of your professional mouse, or the touch-pad of your laptop).

Localization:

• printer.printer_PostScript/*.print_paper_name

If you live in a country (or organization) which the default paper size is A4, not Letter, just set the value of this key to "A4".

• browser.fixup.alternate.suffix

And if your want to set the default ".com" value to something else (i.e. ".co.uk" or ".ir"), just set it in this key.

Bi-Directional:

• bidi.browser.ui

And this is the best part for Arabic, Iranian (Persian), and Israeli (Hebrew) users. Setting this key to TRUE will do some magic for you. You can switch the text direction and alignment of input fields with just one keystroke: Ctrk+Shift+X! Also you can switch the page direction from the View menu. Help yourself!

• mousewheel.horizscroll.*.numlines

If you use Mozilla/Firefox in a right-to-left locale, just set the value of these keys to "1" instead of default "-1". Here are the Mozilla bug: #350594.

Ok, that's all. Let me know if you have problem with this hacks, or other L10n (localization), Bidi (bi-directional), or RTL (right-to-left) problems with Mozilla/Firefox.

Metro Lines I Have Used

In order of time:




Here are Behdad's and Luis's. Should it be more than ten to blog it? I'm not sure... but, how you will update it?

What Microsoft did to the Persian Language

Recently I installed Microsoft's Persian UI for Windows XP. Seems like Microsoft can't do anything right for Persian. They use SPACE instead of ZWNJ everywhere in the UI. WTF?! After spending about 1.5 million USD on Persian (they even call it Farsi) support on Windows, the real Persian Windows is still a dream. They are practically removing ZWNJ from Persian, just because they don't know how to use it (or rather, their American-grown confused Iranians don't.)

Microsoft is the one who brought U+064A ARABIC LETTER YEH (Yeh with two dots bellow in final and isolate forms) to Persian, instead of U+06CC ARABIC LETTER FARSI YEH (Yeh without any dots in final and isolate forms), with their buggy fonts. Even Windows Persian keyboard layout have never been compatible with the Iranian standard layout. Now it's so common to see Arabic Yeh and Keh instead of Persian ones everywhere, everytime. More info.

This story reminds me of an old joke:
A British guy was arguing with a Hindi guy.
The British guy says:
We f**ked your country for one hundred years!
The Hindi guy responds:
We f**ked your language forever!

Tehran Avenue and Intellectual Property

New issue of Tehran Avenue online magazine has some articles and news about Intellectual Property issues in Iran, in both English and Persian. Here are the items:

• On Intellectual Property
• General Call for the Submission of Works
• Intellectual Rights in the Laws of Iran

Flickr Hack 200C+0001: EasyDownloadr

Behdad and I prefer to have the "Original" size of a photo to view, or use (if it's under a CC lisence). So we wrote a Bookmarklet to make it easy to save the original size of an image on Flickr.

Here is the Flickr EasyDownloadr bookmarklet.

HOWTO: Right click on previous link. Bookmark it (preferably in Bookmarks Toolbar Folder and rename it if needed). Open the Flickr page of the image and use this bookmark to save the original size of the image.

UPDATE: And here are the Flickr EasyOpenr which just opens the original size.