First release of Persian Mozilla Firefox ever!

Download Persian Mozilla Firefox 3.5 now! This is the first time Firefox is released in Persian. The number of supported languages has raised to 70 this time!

I started the Mozilla Persian localization team back in 2002 and after almost 7 years, this is our first release, which is very very close to perfect! I should thank Ehsan Akhgari for his great help to the Persian team and the Mozilla project generally in the past couple of years.

Gmail Wish

Wish Gears had GPG integrity so Gmail could sign and encrypt emails via the web UI...

RIRA.IRAN (ری‌را.ایران)

We got a new Persian domain name (IDN) for RiRa, the free Persian digital library. It's وب.ری‌را.ایران.ir. (translation: web.rira.iran.ir ;)

UDHR in Persian

Finally the Persian translation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is available on the UDHR in Unicode project. (get the PDF)

This Persian (Farsi) version is an encoding of this old printed version. If you know any newer translation available in public domain please inform us.

Jalali GCal 3.0 & Greasefire

Jalali GCal has a major update, version 3.0.

• It's updated to recent changes by Google on the Calendars's HTML code;
• now uses jQuery for some operations, which makes it somehow faster now and later updates will be easier as well;

Get the new English and Persian edition from the Google Code download page. If you cannot access Google Code, or have problems with Persian text, please try the userscripts.org mirror; English and Persian.

OTOH I found this handy Firefox/Greasemonkey extension named Greasefire, which lists all available user-scripts (from userscripts.org) for current site in just one click, and you can install them rightaway!

The exciting news is that Jalali GCal has the 6th place in the list of scripts for Google Calendar in Greasefire (actually userscripts.org)!

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.