Nijel's weblog | blog.cihar.com

No I will definitely not participate on pissing contest which does not include my home town. Please include Prague and I can imagine I will fill in how many metros arround the world have I been in :-).

I just looked over Google webmaster tools which looks like interesting way to get some information from Google about page ranking, top search where it is being listed and crawler found errors on pages. It also suggests everybody to supply sitemap with information about last update time of pages on site.

I found plugin for MediaWiki so I added it to phpMyAdmin wiki, generating it for this blog was pretty easy as here is only static content and for phpMyAdmin demo server with few indexable pages it was trivial. However I'm not yet convinced to invest much effort in creating sitemap for cihar.com as it is too complicate to create. Let's see if sitemap will make Google sooner index my changes.

As time goes, I again needed to touch NanoBlogger code. I again saw there is bug with calendar alignment, for which I made simple patch, hopefully it will get soon into CVS.

Another thing I wanted to improve is displaying of feeds in web browser. This can be simply done by adding CSS style.

If you want to list all category feeds on main page, you can find it in my patch for generating this listing.

Next code is to allow inclusion of blog listings in other pages on my site such as phpMyAdmin demo. This is achieved by generating special pages which only list entries.

And last thing is enabling and fixing of title based permalinks, which was first thing I hacked for NanoBlogger :-).

Update: I filed NanoBloggers patch tracker with all those patches, let's see how much of them will get included.

This is a bad day. I'm bad guy because I don't have web pages about Wammu in my native language, I hacked absolutely useless CSV import code in phpMyAdmin. What comes next?

I would make bilingual pages if I'd have time for that, but I will rather write new feature in Wammu than spend time on this.

And I know export is not perfect, everything can be improved and you are welcome to do that!

Since we've removed default configuration from top level directory, people often copied config.default.lib.php what was not something we wanted.

Last week I finally decided to make some sample config which will be placed in top level directory, so that people can easily start from it and add further options after reading documentation or wiki. Let's see if it will prevent people from copying defaults in upcoming release.

Ouch, I see all symptomes of WORK virus on me, so it's time to leave work and go cure myself. Thanks Martin for saving my life :-).

After seeing several hacks to achieve this I finally decided to write something what might be later integrated inside phpMyAdmin codebase. You can find result in our patch tracker, if it turns to be usable for somebody, I will commit it in CVS.

Hmm it looks like I'm doing something wrong when trying to find sponsor for some package which I want to put into Debian. I already gave up with wmmp as I lost interest in using it meanwhile, but I'd love to see Czech-English dictionary in distribution as there are quite a lot of users here.

I hope that this time I will manage it earlier than in half year as it took for Gammu, because I'd like to have in in next stable…

Maybe it's time to start new maintainer process to avoid begging for each upload.

I just found out that Mantis is not troll resistant bug tracker. I haven't noticed that in default configuration any reporter can "remind" all registered users and make them monitoring any issue. And there is no way to stop monitoring from Mantis. This is exactly what happened to bug 161.

I removed them using phpMyAdmin and I hope that I didn't break anyting. As next I disabled reminding for reporters in Mantis and I hope I didn't upset too much people. If I did, I'm really sorry.

Update: It looks that user was only too impatient and expected reply…

I will never ever play casino through jabber, it just cost too much time and man still wants to win back money (even if it is not about real money).

Anyway it is nice Jabber application, thanks guys!

I spent (longer) weekend by biking in Šumava national park. Wheather was nice and we visit many interesting places (photos will be online later). But I will never ever make a mistake to travel on MTB with people on treking one, they are simply too fast on road (and they affraid leaving it). If you will be nearby, I can recommend you nice (and quite hard) trip starting at Zadov (where we were accomodated) to Churáňov mountain, then through Nicov to watchtower Javorník, following peak to Kašperk castle and then down Kašperské Hory city and back to Churáňov. It's only 45 km, minimal parts on the road and several nice downhills.

Also this was my first real life experience with geocaching as my friend had GPS there. We found about seven caches, several of them were multicaches where you need to visit several places to calculate final location. Nicest trip was to follow Vchynicko-tetovsky kanal, but finding some stages was quite difficult.

Anyway I'm considering buying GPS, it looks like a good toy :-).

Russell Coker, if you have enabled comments for blog, make sure that they can be used. And no, I do not think creating blog on blogger.com is appropriate way to post a comment.

Hmm all I wated to say to your spam blocking is that you can do SMTP time bayes (using spamassasin) using sa-exim, but I'm pretty sure there exist more alternatives.

Today I decided for first time to cut somebody out of my website. He tried mirror recently created phpMyAdmin wiki and was simply too much aggressive to be overlooked.

Looks like somebody got great idea to package games for DosBox :-). I haven't yet tested repository at dosboxed-games.sandbox.cz but it looks interesting so far. It reminds me good old times when I was playing Arena :-).

It looks like anybody didn't notice that it is not possible to login to bug tracker. I didn't because I use permanent login and nobody didn't tell me.

Anyway I just upgraded Mantis to 1.0.5 which fixes this issue, feel free to report bugs :-).

Today I lanched experimental period of phpMyAdmin wiki. Feel free to share your experiences with phpMyAdmin and/or contribute documentation.

I'd like to move it later to wiki.phpmyadmin.net, so don't think that this URL is permanent, but we will see later if this is possible.

Thanks John for writing DVCS comparison, it looks like document I was looking for. I'm getting more and more convinced that darcs will be the best solution for me...

I just included QA_2_9 branch in demo and snapshots, so you can use what will become 2.9.0 in few weeks.

Additionally all demos now include all themes from CVS. Some are a bit outdated, but at least you can test how do they look like.

On tuesday I realised how to become number one on mobile market. At least what marketing says is number one.

Stop random people in shopping centre and give them free precharged SIM cards. This way you will quickly have largest number of active SIM cards. No matter that those people never paid you anything, but they will be "active" for next year (or how long does card takes to expire when there is no credit). Good job T-Mobile :-).

I ran cvs update on NanoBlogger and I was suprised that it has new feature :-). So since today you can view per day archives. It doesn't make much sense for my blog, but sometimes it happens to contain more entries, like last Sunday.

No that I'd miss this feature, but I felt there is something missing when man followed structure of generated files. Thanks to developers!

Yesterday I tested µswsusp for first time and everything suprisingly worked well on my desktop computer. I can suspend to disk and RAM and resume without any problems. Now it only needs my board to be whitelisted so that I don't have to force it. But for some reason ASUS have chosen to fill in total crap in DMI, probably to make identification harder:

Handle 0x0001, DMI type 1, 25 bytes
System Information
        Manufacturer: System manufacturer
        Product Name: System Product Name
        Version: System Version
        Serial Number: System Serial Number
        UUID: 94C96C90-74FE-D511-A6B9-13393877187A
        Wake-up Type: PCI PME#

Handle 0x0002, DMI type 2, 8 bytes
Base Board Information
        Manufacturer: ASUSTeK Computer INC.
        Product Name: P5LD2-VM
        Version: Rev 1.xx
        Serial Number: MB-1234567890

So the patch for whitelist would look a bit funny:

{ "System manufacturer", "System Product Name", "System Version", "0406    ", 0},

Yes it's too much work to fill in this information if you call your product "The Best Intel All in One Solution with Dual Core CPU Support"…

It looks like Wammu for Windows was deployed quite good. Three days after annoncement and no major complains were reported so far to bug tracker (only one minor which I managed to find just after release). And people are downloading big installer as frequently as source codes (and I hope they actually use this tool :-)).

But if you have a problem, don't affraid of reporting, I will do my best to fix it.

While looking at webserver statistics, I noticed that people often write URLs wrongly. But the computer is here to fix it :-).

So you can now safely use gamu insted of gammu, wamu instead of wammu and even pyhon instead of python (this one was the most frequent).

PS: I also added missing graphs to Pack Test site.

For upcoming Wammu-ng I have to resolve again same question that I solved for many times - what version control to use?

I know I want something distributed. I know I want to go away from arch/bazaar as they are not maintained anymore. However where to go? Mercurial? Bzr? Darcs? All of them seem to be good candidates, but I don't see much difference. I'd like to use something in Python as it's something what I can fix in case of problems (well I don't want to fix that, but who knows …).

I like bzr, but it's still quite moving target. Anyway it has some interesting ideas and it's probably what I will use at the end.

Well almost :-). But this is just a reminder for anybody trying to write 100th clone of Total Commander or any "great" software as seen on other platform. Another example might be SiDict which has been recently announced. It has nothing more than StarDict, but it was written from scratch…

As you might have noted in Wammu 0.14 announcement, I made Wammu for Windows reality. At the end there is more support for that than I expected :-). All you need it to download full installer and everything will be done automatically including start menu entry.

Wammu on Windows looks almost identically as GTK version on Linux, there is really no big difference as you can see from screenshot.

It revived my memories about creating native Windows application years ago as I used same tool for creating instalator (Inno Setup). It works still same way and is very easy to use even when I didn't remember anything from time I created installator for CodeConv.

While looking for modem driver for Alcatel One Touch 535 for Windows (thanks Alcatel for removing support for old phones!), I found the mobile phone directory website. There are nice reviews of phones and I quickly decided to add it to linked content in phone database. So enjoy more information about phones!

BTW: does anybody have that stupid inf file for OT535?

Wammu 0.14 has been just released. New features:

• Automatically append backup extension.
• PuBluez is now default for bluetooth devices lookup.
• Fixed mail export for non english locales.
• Fixed installation on Windows.
• Added support for py2exe for distributing Windows executable.
• Added script for creating Wammu installer on Windows (using Inno Setup).

There is imortant change in this release - we finally have Windows support! On download pakge you will find Windows installer which includes all needed (thanks to py2exe and Inno Setup). Please share experiences, as I'm definitely not experienced in this area :-).

There wasn't much progress on Wammu in past months. Partly it has been caused by changes in real life, but major reason was that I want to go away from wxPython and this step is quite large to happen over night :-).

Meanwhile I didn't do much in current Wammu codebase, but few bugfixes were applied. I will fix few more bugs during weekend and release new version. Don't expect much of it, I will only try to test it a bit on Windows and fix some recently reported bugs. So most changes are already in and you can see them in arch repository.

It will be most likely latest which is using wxPython and I will start writing completely (well this it not true, most code will be reused) new Wammu which will use PyGTK. It will be highly modullar and should provide all those heavilly missing features as remembering of read data and support for multiple phones.

I don't have any timeframe when new version will be ready, but I'd like to make preview available somewhere in September. But life can bring completely different worries, so everything might be completely different :-).

I used quite long time rdiff-backup for creating server backups. But I had to move away from it because it requires same program to run on the other end where backups are stored. And there was no chance that I can get it into 4Mib memory of my Asus router with OpenWrt which will now act as bacup server.

So I googled a bit and after reading several articles I decided to try duplicity. This decision was heavily inspired by article on Debian Administration website.

The setup with encryption and signing was very quickly and even restoring seems to work :-).

I pay almost all expenses using credit card as I find it comfortable. I don't need much cash and it's quite widely accepted.

However when you have full basket of goods and you hear announcement that due to technical reasons you can not pay using credit card, you have a problem.

This happened to my girlfriend yesterday. No problem, I will go there with money and everything will be fine. But Murphys law was working as usual, so as soon as I arrived credit cards were again accepted :-).