Nijel's weblog | blog.cihar.com

I'm sorry for outage of this server. It was caused by short power down in serverhouse, which lead to server reboot. Unfortunately network interface didn't reset properly and thus computer was unreachable.

Everything looked fine, except it was not able to enable link intreface. PHY was somehow confused and it reported different state than usual (0x786d vs 0x7869). I will try investigate details later to avoid repeating this.

Marc yesterday proposed to remove inactive developers from project on sourceforge. This would clean up the list to show actual state of developers instead of everybody who contributed in past.

For past contributors there is huge credits section in documentation, so it should be enough for anybody ego ;-).

Lets see how it will evolve, at least Garvin seems to be against his removal.

Time to time I do full update of local PGP keys from keyserver. This reduces need for updating keys when checking not so important signatures.

This time it looks like lot of signatures were added:

gpg: Total number processed: 1442
gpg:               imported: 1
gpg:              unchanged: 810
gpg:           new user IDs: 78
gpg:            new subkeys: 14
gpg:         new signatures: 31038

Updating of all keys should be done with gpg --refresh-keys. It attempts to receive keys from not respoding servers defined in some keys, so I wrote simple script to do the same using default key server:

gpg --list-keys | grep ^pub | grep -o '[0-9A-Z]\{8\}' | sort -u > /tmp/keys
< /tmp/keys xargs gpg --recv-keys

There are many sites where www.foo.bar points to different web than foo.bar. Random example that comes to my mind is http://opensuse.com/ and http://www.opensuse.com/. This sucks. I'm probably not the only lazy men in the world and typing www everytime is pointless.

So I much appreciate www. is deprecated website, which tries to persuade people about pointless keeping of www in many cases. So if you can, please classify your site as Class B, which is the best solution right now.

Many times I needed "intelligent" way to grab key path from my key (and others I somehow trust for signing purposes) to other random key that gets to me.

Receiving keys for all signatures is quite expensive operation and you soon end with most of PGP keys on the world in your database. The best seems to fetch only needed keys. You can find path using PGP pathfinder & key statistics by Henk P. Penning. It's extremely useful site, where you can find many information about PGP keys.

So the logical step seems to be to write down script which will grab needed keys:

#!/bin/sh

if [ "$#" -lt 1 -o "$#" -gt 2 ] ; then
    echo usage `basename $0` ID [gpgparam]
    exit 1
fi

url=http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/henkp/henkp/pgp/pathfinder/mk_path.cgi

(
links -dump "$url?FROM=36E75604&TO=$1"
links -dump "$url?FROM=B3B2A12C&TO=$1"
links -dump "$url?FROM=65D0FD58&TO=$1"
) | grep -o '[0-9A-F]\{8\}'  | sort -u | xargs gpg --recv-keys --no-auto-check-trustdb $2

gpg --check-trustdb $2

And special bonus for Sylpheed-Claws users. Here is action to call above script:

ID=`gpg --verify %p /dev/null 2>&1 | \
grep "key ID" | tr -d "[:space:]" | \
tail -c8`;echo "==== Fetching $ID ===="; \
~/bin/gpg_get_path $ID --no-tty

For some time, I've been using free vserver hosting on pipni.cz for phpMyAdmin demos. It had always so much troubles, so I decided to move that to my own server. As I don't want to drop it completely as it might be useful for some testing, I placed there mirrors of arch.cihar.com and dl.cihar.com under names arch2.cihar.com and dl2.cihar.com under hope that they will be available at least sometimes.

But I was wrong. Server doesn't autostart anymore and after starting it survives around 1 day, so it is not usable at all. I know it is free service, however I thought they offer it as advertisement for more expensive services they offer. I doubt this way will attract anybody…

Looks like this week SourceForge finally showed me what priority and immediate words mean in their dictionary:

Subject: [ alexandria-Priority Support-1484474 ] Developer CVS down?
Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 12:34:12 -0700

Priority Support item #1484474, was opened at 2006-05-09 04:15
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by burley
You can respond by visiting: 
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=629337&aid=1484474&group_id=1

Please note that this message will contain a full copy of the comment thread,
including the initial issue submission, for this request,
not just the latest update.
Category: None
Group: Immediate Fix Needed
>Status: Closed

Okay, I just cancelled my subscription, it's simply not worth of provided services.

Hey Paypal is cool service. Sourceforge relies on it for their donation system as well as other service providers with payments. It (probably) works well if you live in US or other country which Paypal likes. If you live in one which they don't like, like Czechia, you have only chance to get limited account from them. Why the hell do they limit this. I can understand when I'd have to pay more for money withdraval as internation bank transfers are expensive, but why I can not receive money?

Trying to talk with their support and trying to get answer why it is not possible to receive money in country which is member of EU doesn't tell more than their website:

PayPal is constantly working to expand and improve services for our customers. We hope that we can enable you to use more of our award-winning services in the future.

It's great you're trying to improve services so hardly, that you were not able to allow me to receive money during two yers. Really good job.

Just after previous change to link to FoneWiki.org, I was notified that Wikipedia has information about phones as well. As the links seem to be more or less same, next obvious step was to link Wikipedia also. So have a fun with more information about phones.

FoneWiki.org is great wiki for sharing user experiences with phones. You can find there information about phones which are usually not provided by manufacturers as various usage hints.

As I think this might be interesting for more Gammu users, I decided to add links in Gammu phone database, which will point to FoneWiki.org pages. Linking is done by phone name, so it does not have to be always working, but works at least for some phones :-).

Mark yourself on phpMyAdmin map on Frappr to see how phpMyAdmin users are spread worldwide.

I just activated some rewriting for Gammu phone database, so that URIs are now more user and search engine friendly. This also fixed navigation in top of page. If you find any problems with this change, please contact me.

It looks like searching was not working since transfer to new server. There was problem in SQL used as one field now became keyword. I fixed this, so you can again search phone instead of browsing whole database.

It's getting a bit sad, but it looks like all of us hardly find motivation and/or time to work on phpMyAdmin. There are tons of feature requests which are not being solved and nobody seems to be really interested in them. It looks like project needs fresh blood. Where to find it? Nobody contributed more patches so that he could be invited into project.

I believe there must be plenty of skilled developers using phpMyAdmin all over the world, but why they do not contribute?

As I already wrote, I'm currently thinking of major rewrite of Wammu code. This is partly inspired by problems I have with wxPython, partly by with to change data handling a lot, what is needed for support for multiple phones and intelligent caching of it.

Today I started to add design notes to bug tracking system. Well it was mostly core dump of my brain inspired by questions one user had about future. All design notes are now publicly available and all of them are childs of bug #147.

These ideas are not yet definite and no code has been yet written (except of some proof of concept stuff), so you have great chance to influence Wammu future by reading and commenting them. I will also add there more stuff as most of my ideas is currenly on paper and I didn't transform everything into electronic format.

I just noticed that Gammu compressed tarball for first time reached 1 MiB. Well most of recent additions were caused by inclusion of gnapplet (I tried to find some page dedicated to this, but it seems to be tightly integrated with Gnokii), but it still indicates that code is alive :-).

I just noticed that GoogleBot already downloaded 1 GiB from archzoom. As there is nothing new on this server, it might be quite conservative about downloading. Maybe they decided there must be something really important :-)

I often heard complains about MSNBot, but this time it got just 160 MiB, so it looks like we have another evil bot.

It looks that the code basically works. At least I already got information from several users, who managed to run it. However there are still some things broken:

• Phone searching doesn't work. There is some Unix only code and I'm going to fix it during weekend.
• setup.py is somewhat wrong. Maybe I missed something while writing it, but you don't need to invoke this script to run Wammu - just execute wammu script in top level directory and it should work.

Finally there exists python-gammu module for Windows. Thanks to BitPim and especially Simon Capper for building it. You can grab it from usual place.

I will merge needed patches soon into regullar python-gammu relese.

Now I need volunteer to test Wammu on Windows, but it should not be that hard.

In recent days I got two announcement about starting projects using python-gammu. Both of them are GUI applications, so it looks like Wammu will have competitors.

It's good to see that, because I seriously don't have much time for writing Wammu and this will bring users other possibility. And maybe it will push me harder to finally make PyGTK rewrite of Wammu :-).

Let's see how will these projects evolve, but I hope they will be successful.

As most users are anyway using cookie based authentication, I decided to make it available on demo server. You can login as root without password or any limited user you create.

Those were effectively dead since breakage of CVS on SourceForge. As this issue seems to be resolved, statistics are back up to date. You can check how developers are active and translation status. If you know some language that is not well translated, feel free to addopt it.

Good news everyone, Wammu has just entered Debian testing:

Subject: wammu 0.13-1 MIGRATED to testing
From: Debian testing watch <noreply@henning.makholm.net>
To: wammu@packages.debian.org
Date: Sun, 14 May 2006 15:08:41 -0600

FYI: The status of the wammu source package
in Debian's testing distribution has changed.

  Previous version: (not in testing)
  Current version:  0.13-1

Main website has been finally transfered to new server. Please be patient while things settle down, as something might be missing. If you miss something or something is broken, please contact me ASAP.

On this occassion I also removed obsolete stuff. This mostly consists of various stuff from my university studies and some photos.

When I recently found one of forgotten old childs living in dark side of internet hidden under tons of advertisements, I decided to move it back to my server. This step doesn't mean revival of that testing, I just don't want to be connected with that site full of ads :-). So it doesn't really live.

Now I decided that it maybe deserves own domain. So if you want to see what I did more than six years ago, visit packtest.cihar.com.

Packages for python-gammu 0.13 are ready in my repository, upload to distro will happen as soon as my sponsor finds time for that.

python-gammu 0.13 has been just released. New features:

• Implemented adding of entries even when phone does not directly support that.
• Error messages are now also unicode objects as they might be translated by gammu.
• Properly handle locales in case other python module also uses them.
• Added some examples.

As we recently started MAINT28_1 branch, which will be used for 2.8.1 release, demo server and snapshots now also contains it.

Additionally CVS is switched back to anonymous service, but SourceForge promises there will be no more than 2 hours delay. This also means that CVS snapshots are again usable as CVS sources after unpacking.

Downloads server is now in addition to ftp available using rsync. If you want to mirror some stuff please use rsync as it saves bandwidth. URL for it is

rsync://dl.cihar.com/dl

It's nice to see reports that some large SMS services run on Gammu. I know there are more, but mostly such information is hidden and nobody except people who wrote that know about used software.

Make such reports more often, it makes people happy. Usually mailing list is just full of complains that something is not working and few good words can't make anything bad :-).

Well I expected this would be more complicated than defining DNS blacklist servers list. Hower thanks to great defaults, all you need is to put list into user defines (separate file which is included early like /etc/exim4/conf.d/main/000_localdefs should be best place):

CHECK_RCPT_DOMAIN_DNSBLS = dnsbl.njabl.org : \
                            bl.spamcop.net : \
                            blackholes.five-ten-sg.com : \
                            cbl.abuseat.org : \
                            smtp.dnsbl.sorbs.net : \
                            spam.dnsbl.sorbs.net : \
                            zombie.dnsbl.sorbs.net : \
                            web.dnsbl.sorbs.net : \
                            rhsbl.sorbs.net : \
                            sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org : \
                            psbl.surriel.com : \
                            list.dsbl.org

phpMyAdmin started to be hosted on SourceForge long time ago (AFAIR it was in 2001). It has served mostly good for it's purpose, but these days, it's getting like nightmare.

First, at the end of March, CVS servers crashed and since that time anonymous CVS is disabled. Well at least that does not stop developing. Last week developer CVS server crashed. It has been disabled since then and we're now waiting for new CVS infrastructure, which should be ready several months ago (at least they promised so). This stopped phpMyAdmin development and also delayed deployment of some security fixes.

Okay, problems happen, but why the hell they didn't announce this on status page until some personal intervencies happened?

And I'm a bit confused about their "priority support" which is provided for subscribers. More than two days old report and no answer? I'm probably not going to pay next year...

I told this for many times before, so I just repeat: Such project needs version control system. No matter which one, but having at least CVS would make things lot of better than now. However Marcin seems unfortunately not to be interested in such "innovation". So I will still use my fixes branch, some people will want to use snapshots from that and we will sync with Marcin by sending patches and randomly forgetting about some parts (good luck that bazaar won't forget).

Version 1.06.00 finally got there, now we just need to wait till cron jobs do their work and package page will contain link to correct gammu home page and not the link farm living currently on gammu.net.

Why the hell do wakeup devices for ACPI need that cryptic names? I'd like to enable wakeup on keyboard, however I have no idea whether my notebook supports is or not. And the names don't help much:

$ cat /proc/acpi/wakeup
Device  Sleep state     Status
USB1       3            disabled
USB2       3            disabled
USB4       3            disabled
 LAN       4            disabled
MPC0       3            disabled
MPC1       3            disabled
VIY0       3            disabled
AMDM       3            disabled
 LID       4            * enabled
PWRB       4            * enabled

It looks like XSS attacks against phpMyAdmin will be there forever. There is floating another in the air (if SourceForge would have working CVS, it would be already released). Maybe it's time to make complete rewrite of phpMyAdmin codebase? But that's too long term project and nobody seems to be interested in that. Maybe some security audit would help resolving at least most painful issues, but this is again same problem. Any volunteer to do this hard work?

I finally found some time to quickly look and try to use TurboDbAdmin. It's sort of competitor to phpMyAdmin. Why I write sort of? Firstly there are still users which prefer non javascript solution, second reason is that TurboDbAdmin definitely needs some time to get matured. Right now it looks to me more like demo of their AJAX toolkit than real application. But it is getting better version to version.

However they have some ideas which we might incorporate. First think I noticed in documentation is that they have settings for broken setups of MySQL which lead to wrong displaying of data. Just put names="latin1" and it should work. Nice, but I still think that people should rather learn how to use encodings in MySQL properly.

Second usefull thing is reload link in left frame. Well they aren't able to reload it automatically, so they need it right now, but that simple link is requested by our users anyway.

Most of users noticed that there is not much progress in Wammu development. This is mostly caused by problems which wxPython already caused me and drops my motivatio to create something new using it to zero. However I want Wammu to have future, so it looks obvious, that it has to leave wxPython.

For now I'm decided to go either with PyGTK or using some high level framework as Kiwi. The latter gives advantage of better abstraction, but pure PyGTK could attract more developers. I'm not yet decided about this choice and I'm creating proposal for highly modular core, which should allow (somewhat, at least for beginning) idependent plugins to handle different data in phone (and later maybe even different backends).

If you would like to join me in developing wammu-ng (the name will probably change), you're welcome to drop me a mail on michal@cihar.com.

I think that somebody should learn them what QA means. Testing at least some big PHP application must have revealed some bugs which were quickly fixed in next release two days later.

Yes I really enjoy closing bug reports telling that phpMyAdmin does not work with it.

I just randomly found Feed Icons website which is trying to standardize icon for feeds. I'm not sure whether having exactly same icon on all sites is really needed, but thanks for the icon guys. Now I use it for related blog entries over rest of this web site.

It's nice to see how more and more people install Gammu since it has been included in Debian. Thanks to popcon I can see graph how it's popularity grows to sky :-).

Lets see whether Wammu will follow.

When I looked for blog system to use, I have looked to various systems. From big ones like Wordpress to small ones like NanoBlogger. At the end I ended with NanoBlogger, because it looked more suitable for my needs.

However I still needed some customizations to make it work exactly how I want. First was to enable experimental titpe-based links. This makes links look better and people (and search engines) can see from link what is the entry about. Besides uncommenting some parts of code commented with experimental title-based links, there was needed little change to archive generator to make correct links for previous/next entries.

Next think I wantes was RSS feed list for categories on main pages. This is needed as many people will be interested only in some parts of this blog. This part is a bit hacky and I choose simple way to do this by only changing parts in category links.

Last thing is listing which is included on other pages like pma.cihar.com. This part only uses existing code and doesn't really add anything new except two tempates for it.

Now I enjoy NanoBlogger and hopefully it will last some time :-). If you want to use same customization, patch is available here.

Do you want to use recent themes in your phpMyAdmin from snapshot? Now you have a chance! Snapshots are now generated for all active branches and also for themes. You can grab them here.

Donwload server dl.cihar.com is now available also over ftp. If you want to mirror some content, FTP is more suited for such thing. I might ever block your access to HTTP, if your mirrorer will be too aggressive.

Finally it went through long NEW queue and it has been accepted!

Subject: wammu_0.13-1_i386.changes ACCEPTED
From: Debian Installer <installer@ftp-master.debian.org>
To: Michal Čihař <michal@cihar.com>
Date: Tue, 02 May 2006 08:49:56 -0700

Accepted:
wammu_0.13-1.diff.gz
  to pool/main/w/wammu/wammu_0.13-1.diff.gz
wammu_0.13-1.dsc
  to pool/main/w/wammu/wammu_0.13-1.dsc
wammu_0.13-1_all.deb
  to pool/main/w/wammu/wammu_0.13-1_all.deb
wammu_0.13.orig.tar.gz
  to pool/main/w/wammu/wammu_0.13.orig.tar.gz
Announcing to debian-devel-changes@lists.debian.org
Closing bugs: 326710 


Thank you for your contribution to Debian.

I just moved Mantis serving bugs.cihar.com to this host and upgraded it also to latest stable version. However it still doesn't deal correctly with recent MySQL. I have no idea why all those PHP application guys ignore charset features in MySQL.

So if you want to use non ASCII chars in Mantis with recent MySQL and you need to modify core/adodb/drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php and add at the end of _connect and _pconnect funcions code to set connection charset:

mysql_query('SET NAMES \'utf8\'', $this->_connectionID);

phpMyAdmin snapshots are back up to date and I added 7zip compression format as there were several requests for it. 7zip compresses wery well, byt it also uses lots of memory, you can find more information about 7zip on 7-zip.org.

I just updated demo server to avoid gap between current development code and demo caused by long anonymous CVS outage on sourceforge.

As special bonus HEAD demo now contains all themes which are available on phpMyAdmin site, enjoy various colours of phpMyAdmin! (Please note that not all themes are up to date with current code, so something might not look perfectly.)