Nijel's weblog | blog.cihar.com

I quickly got used to MPD for playing music. The client-server approach perfectly fits my needs and I can control it using any interface I want. Command line is always appreciated, but nice GUI is also helful.

So far I used Pygmy, which is far from being perfect, but was best of those I tested. Now I found its fork called Sonata which looks much better. Unfortunately it is not yet in Debian, any volunteers? :-)

As I already complained, spammers seem to like my phone database. It has not been a major problem so far, but I started to get about ten invalid records per day.

This forced be to find automatic solution to get rid of this. Inspired by recent article on root.cz, I wrote simmilar solution as is used on php.vrana.cz. It should not harm regullar users who have javascript enabled, others will have to fill in one extra field.

Wammu 0.16 is of course available in my debian repository and on next dinstall run is should be in official repositories. Thanks to fEnIo for quick upload!

Wammu 0.16 has been just released. New features:

• Include platform in crash log.
• Fix SMS composer on Windows.
• Fix adding part to SMS after removing all.
• Fix editor on Windows.
• Now requires wxWidgets 2.6.

At same time as python-gammu has been releases, I also made available packages for new gammu and python-gammu releases in my private repository. The gammu differs a bit from official version as I found ugly bug in AT driver just after the release.

Official debian packages will be available as soon as my sponsor uploads them.

python-gammu 0.15 has been just released. New features:

• Support for recent gammu versions.
• Fix bug in SMS code.

After my mailserver started to reject mails from servers where I want to accept mails, I decided to finally try to disable DNS blacklisting. Earlier I whitelisted some domains, but the list has grown too much.

I still use DNS blacklists as helping criterias for SpamAssasin, but being on blacklist is now not enough to reject legitimate mail. Let's see if spam amount in my mailbox will increase, but I doubt it will, other checks are also quite restrictive.

During regullar review of additions to phone database, I noticed that some people tried to add spam and links to their sites. I'm not going to add any further restrictions on database, but to make spammers life a bit harder, I added logging of IP addresses which I'm going to block if they attempt to add some links.

Fortuntely spam volume is htere low enogh to be still handled manualy.

I started to collect developer information on wiki. Please add there any hints that might be useful for people who are interested in contributing to phpMyAdmin.

While working with documentation, I used phpDocumentator to generate our API documentation, you can see it on my website.

As announced on friday, I addopted nanoblogger and prepared new upload of it. Until my new sponsor reviews and uploads it, you can find it either on mentors or in my private repository.

What the hell am I doing wrong that I can not send mail to any @debian.org address?

SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
host master.debian.org [70.103.162.30]: 550 Administrative prohibition

None of SMTP servers I used is blacklisted and I haven't seen problem with any other recipient than master.debian.org. Anyway it would be great if I would know what this Administrative prohibition means. After googling I found out that it might be something bad in my headers, but nothing what would tell me how to fix it...

As Marc has recently commited some new themes into CVS, I finally forced myself to make automatic inclusion of new themes in demos (and snapshots). So now you can try all three new themes which has been added to CVS (Grid, Very small and Graphivore).

My notebook started to behave quite strangely, yesterday I ended without root filesystem, because kernel detected error while reading disk and shut it down. I expect disk to definitely die in next days, so I'm going to buy new one next week, but until that I'm affraid of doing much work on it. XFS survived all those failures good so far, but I allways affraid a bit of data loss. Well everything is backed up, but I hate installing new system, it takes quite long time till I have everything I need. The good side of this is that I will get faster and larger disk and system clean of all historic stuff that I don't use anymore :-).

When I thought about blog engine to use for this blog, I primarily searched in Debian archives, so that I don't have to maintain own copy of that system. At the end I anyway chosen nanoblogger, which was not (and still is not) in perfect state in Debian package and I used CVS version at the end anyway.

I just noticed that nanoblogger package has been orphaned yesterday. After ensuring that I won't have problems with finding sponsor, I decided to addopt it and bring it back to usable state. As I will me mostly offline during weekend (or busy with new Wammu release), I will try make new upload within next week.

After complaining almost month ago I finally decided to start new maintainer process. I did it after consulting with sponsor of most of my packages.

Let's see how long it will take to proceed through all required steps.

As it already appeared on Gammu wiki, I consider it official. I'm happy to announce that there is another python-gammu based open source application to manipulate your phone. It is called gMobileMedia and it is focused on multimedia data stored in phones.

It's nice to see that somebody else is actually using my Python bindings :-).

Okay the release I promised will be delayed as I didn't manage to rewrite editor widget fast enough. Right now I have the editor itself working, it only needs some code cleanup and implement returning of value. After this "minor" thing will be implemented, you can expect new version, what will hopefully happen this week.

As announced yesterday, I started to translate my website to Czech. I take it mostly as experiment how to do such thing easily. I don't want ot maintain different pages for each language, so the logical step seemed to use gettext which I know for translating regullar applications.

Using gettext from PHP is quite easy. You can just follow documentation and you will get basic idea. Only tricky part was to set encoding so that messages are displayed correctly.

The whole magic that selects translation based on host name is few lines of PHP code:

$lang = 'en';
if (substr($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'], 0, 3) == 'cz.') {
    $lang = 'cz';

    setlocale(LC_MESSAGES, 'cs_CZ.UTF-8');
    setlocale(LC_ALL, 'cs_CZ.UTF-8');
    bindtextdomain('website', 'locale');
    bind_textdomain_codeset('website', 'utf-8');
    textdomain('website');
    $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] = substr($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'], 3);
}

You can see that is't just locales and gettext initialisation and cutting host name so that rest of code doesn't have to deal both possibilities.

The hardest work is to make all PHP pages use gettext instead of plain text constants and translate them. I will probably never convert whole site, but it is not needed and only parts can be translated using this approach without any additional effort.

Today I looked at menu on top of Wammu pages in MSIE and it was displayed completely differently than in Firefox. So another CSS hacking session had to begin to fix the menu look.

Fortunately I found ies4linux which easilly installed MSIE on my Linux computer so that I can test the beast without searching for some Windows installation.

Anyway now it looks almost same in both browsers (there are some minor glitches in MSIE which I'm going to ignore).

Today I finally setup gettext and started to convert some page to make use of it. Currently only Wammu page contains translated parts, but I will try to improve it in future as time permits.

Translation will only affect content of main domain, other subdomains as this blog or phpMyAdmin demo will remain in English.

I'm going to fix last remaining bug marked for fixing this evening and release Wammu 0.16 after it. So if you have any problem with Wammu and want to have it fixed in next release, it's best time to report it.

I decided to split Wammu site to several pages. The one page seemed too large so this was logical step which I wanted to do for a long time. I hope there are no broken links or any other broken stuff.

I was few days offline and it looks like it was ideal situation to apply Murphys law and break thinks on my website. Bug tracker was not able to log you in or if you managed this step, you could not post anything. This issue seems to be caused by some bug in lighttpd which I'm not able to reproduce on my devel machine (most probably because of it is 32-bit and server is 64-bit).

phpMyAdmin demo server didn't work at all because somebody hardly break mysql database and my restore scripts didn't properly handle this situation.

Right now everything should be back working, please report if there are any other issues remaining.

Connex (yes, their website is broken) is one of companies handling public transport in Prague. They hadle only lines on outskirt of city, centre is handled by Prague Public Transit Co. Inc..

The largest difference between both is:

1. Connex has half of busses very old and sometimes it looks like they will never reach destination.
2. Connex never goes on time. Yesterday busses here went exactly between times specified in time table, today I missed the bus because it went several minutes sooner than it should.

Why the hell do such company still have license for public transport?

This issue has arised already for many times (I remember it from times I worked for SUSE and there were some problems with unmodificable source parts), but this time it seems really serious. Current problem is in CDDL being incomaptible with GNU GPL while both are being used for cdrecord code. I again have to say I don't uderstand Jörgs behaviour.

Debian has replaced cdrtools with for of it called cdrkit. So keep in mind that you will have to use wodim instead of cdrecord in near future.

Wammu 0.15 has been just released. New features:

• Language selection for Windows (based on GTK+ 2 ISS code).
• Finnish translation from rosetta.
• Searching can be done plaintext and not only regexp.
• Phone number matching now works even for national numbers.
• Fixed usability with inveresed themes.

Okay it looks like I again found some bug in my favourite browser. There seems to be something wrong in border handling which makes subsequent blocks to have reverse indentation of left border widht.

So instead of simple:

body.blog blockquote {
    border-left: 0.5em solid #BBB;
}

I have to use:

body.blog blockquote {
    border-left: 0.5em solid #BBB;
    /* Following need to be in for MSIE */
    border-top: 0.5em solid #EEE;
    border-right: 0.5em solid #EEE;
    border-bottom: 0.5em solid #EEE;
}

Today I finally managed to make weblog look same as rest of my pages. I know this look is not perfect, but I'm too lazy to create something better.

For now blog style is tested only in Firefox, I will look at it from others soon to fix possible bugs.

Okay now I can participate on pissing contest:

Got at b3co.com!

While googling for something completely different, I randomly found Czech article about phpMyAdmin from year 2000. It would not be something special if there would not be following sentece:

Vývoj se zaměřil na verzi 3.0. Ta bude obsahovat "databázové abstraktní vrstvy" a umožňí použití s Postrges a ostatními databázemi. Verze 3.0 bude vyžadovat nejméně jednu další tabulku. Zatím se tomu pokouším vyhnout, ale je to asi nevyhnutelné pro určité vlastnosti (jako je například ukládání preferencí a uživatelských SQL dotazů). Verzi 3.0 můžete (doufám) očekávat na konci roku 2 000.

Short translation to English:

Development goes to release 3.0, which will contain database abstraction layer to support PostgreSQL and other databases. Version could be expected by end of year 2000.

Well, we still don't have release 3.0 and no databse abstraction (and we most likely never will have), but it is nice to see that something like that has been planned six years ago :-).

Day after finding Google webmaster tools, I came to idea to grab from there information about http://www.phpmyadmin.net site. Most clicked search results are predictable (number in brackets shows average position in results):

1. phpmyadmin (1)
2. phpmyadmin download (1)
3. php myadmin (1)
4. php my admin (1)
5. download phpmyadmin (1)
6. mysql (10)
7. php admin (1)
8. mysql admin (5)
9. php mysql admin (2)
10. myadmin (2)

People garble our name in various ways, but they mostly get what they want. What suprised me is average position on generic searches like php (25th position), donwload (102nd position) and especially "net download" (8th position). When I would search for net, I'd expect something else than phpMyAdmin to appear…

Anyway it looks we need to improve our rank as MySQL admin, so let's start with it :-).