czyborra.com
= Roman Czyborra's publications

Hello world! Здравствуй мир! My name is Roman Czyborra. I am the artist formerly known as czyborra at cs.tu-berlin.de where I studied computer science, at dds.nl as I wanted to migrate to Amsterdam (while my brother Marek made it to København), and now at taz.de, i.e. Germany's glorious alternative daily newspaper taz, die tageszeitung, where I work as one of the Unix administrators, and also as roman at bi.org because I like to educate the world with my bisexuality pages.

In my pre-Internet age I went to school in Hamburg and nearby Bargteheide and lived for two years in Upstate New York in Syracuse learning from and caring for a bunch of disabled Americans for Aktion Sühnezeichen, as I like many Germans had a Nazi grandfather.

You are now walking on my own private hypertext landfill, the Czyborra Republic. Its first emphasis is on

Unicode in the Unix Environment

Unicode (UTF-8) enables me to show you how I write my Polish name in various scripts:

Roman Czyborra (Latin)
= 'rɔman tʃɨ'bɔra (IPA)
= Роман Чибора (Cyrillic)
= チボラロマン (Japanese)
= ሮማን ቺቦራ (Ethiopic)
= רומן צ'יבורה (Hebrew)
= رومَن تشيبوره (Arabic)
= 로만 치보라 (Korean).

On 1998-11-30 I turned in a snapshot of the following documentation on as my master thesis. Then I made the big mistake of signing up for a big math exam, consequently flunked and found myself trapped having to study a thousand hours worth of boring optimization and group theory with a deadline of one year. Hence I had to pull the emergency brakes and temporarily abandon all of my meaningful Internet activities. That threw me into a depression. In the retry on 2000-03-10 I passed with a 4+ so now I have earned the academic degree of Diplom-Informatiker. Much has happened in the meantime: Markus Kuhn globalized the standard X fonts, Thomas Dickey programmed the xterm -u8 option that can for example be used with ToWo's mined 98, Bruno Haible wrote us a Unicode-HOWTO, Markus a Unicode-FAQ, there's growing Unicode support in the (Uni)X window system XFree86 4.0 and the GNU POSIX C library. I haven't even found the time to try them all out. Nonetheless I think that until I get a chance to gradually bring my outdated documentation up to date after attending the International Unicode Conference in Amsterdam, you will find many sufficiently eternal truths in all the

existing chapters written / started / planned:

Motivation:
- Why Unicode?
- Why Unix?
Illustrated Prehistory: What was there before Unicode?
(compiled using Unicode on Unix)
- ASCII and its variants
- ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup
- Cyrillic Charset Soup
- Ching Chang Chong: JIS, GB, KSC
- Codepage & Co.
The Unicode Standard
- Unicode Standards (version history)
- Unicode's Characters (repertoire and numbering)
- Unicode Transformation Formats (binary representations)
Unicode in Practice
- input methods
- rendering - proposal for a GNU Unicode font + updates
- handling complex scripts - arabjoin
- recoding and transliteration
Unicode on Unix
- Unicode editors -- Yudit
- Unicode terminals -- uxvt
- How can you get your Unicode text printed on paper?
- What libraries help Unicode programmers?
Unicode on the Internet
- How can you send Unicode text all over the net?
Further Reading
- Where can I read more about all this?

Imprint

This site is hosted by Eva Marbach on a solid GNU Linux Apache server. I am gladly paying the small fees for it to provide my documents at short and constant URLs. My pages rank very high on google.com but alltheweb is often better for very rare search words. These pages look grape with every great browser. Download Lynx 2.8 now! Procrastinate later!

Czyborra.com Freeware License

Does the ".com" stands for communism, communications, computer addiction or commerce? I dunno. All of my works you find here are free software, with no stupid M$-¢opyrites to introduce artificial scarcities. You may freely copy, use, quote, modify or redistribute them as long as you properly attribute my contribution and have given a quick thought about whether Roman might perhaps be interested to read what you did with his stuff. Horizontal rules don't apply.

Contacting Mr. Czyborra

Best is to mail anything important for me to know to me as roman@czyborra.com. I speak German (de) + Dutch (nl) + English (en) fluently, and Russian (ru) + Polish (pl) not quite so easily. Although I definitely have an e-mail addiction, I will not answer everything, not even half of everything. At least not tonight.

You may use my PGP key 1024R/87329995 or my GPG key 1024D/E3F99CF7 for privacy. Unlike with condoms in the more physical domain, you may also keep on bare-backing in the electronic domain and send your stuff more comfortably readible unencrypted because I believe in transforming the world through glasnost and radical honesty.

But I don't like spam, says Sam-I-am! I appreciate the help of spam fighting heroes like uce@ftc.gov + politik-digital + abuse.net + relays@orbs.org + nana + whois in tracking down spammers like the Secure Marketing from Houston.

As some older institutions still don't have , I often send emails onto fax machines through the Faxaway service, but rarely receive any replies the other way around through my fax number +49.30.25902.507. I don't understand why there still is no bank that provides offline banking services so you can manage your finances comfortably by email without the long waits and online costs and even our postbank isn't turning into an e-post-bank yet. Be my guest if you want to treat me with books or CDs. Locals may also wire me euros at 2614049500@10010111berlin.bfg.de 3304443@arnhem.postbank.nl or 436249700@38070724bonn.bank24.de or 3000142714@20110022hamburg.postbank.de (Postsparbuch).

Use 01051 to call. My telephone numbers are +49.30.68237969 at home, +49.30.25902.107 at work and +49.172.3930027 on my mobile while sunbathing, riding my Gudereit RC-30 bicycle or occasionally S+U-Bahn in between and everywhere else. If you plan to send me snail mail or to bill or sue me or come visit me for a chat on my balcony: I have moved to

	Schudomastraße 45 (Böhmischer Platz)
	12055 Berlin-Neukölln
	DE-Germany

Before I joined the taz on March 8th, 1999, I mostly worked offline on my SuSE Linux notebook using fetchmail with ssh, fetchnews, procmail, pine, and sendmail. I almost wrote my thesis on mobile and disconnected internetting. In July 1998, I sued my school because I fell victim to their mailserver misconfiguration - the case (VG 2 A 89.98) is still pending.