؟ Irony Mark is not another corporate technology blog. Its about the essential contradictions that makes life and software fun. It is interesting that the Arabic question mark matches the irony mark that was proposed a French poet to denote a hint of sarcasm. I had “solved” bi-directional text support in the 80’s but have spent the following 20 years fixing Bi-Di again and again and it is still hopelessly broken (Arabic URL’s anybody?).

I am Technical Director of Diwan Software and have been working in computing for 25 years. If you don’t know Diwan, we were the company that worked with Apple to make the Arabic Mac, started the desktop publishing revolution for Arabic and maker of one of the few publishing applications that is struggling to make a space for itself beside the juggernauts that are Adobe and Quark.

Having had most of my letters to the editor published by the Financial Times and have never been turned down yet at the Unicode Conference I think I may have something to say that someone somewhere will find useful. My interests are Software, education, Unicode, fonts, technology, Arabic on computers and a little politics.

Enjoy and leave me a note if you like this blog.