Nijel's weblog | blog.cihar.com

Ukolovnik 0.4 has been just released. New features:

• Modularized code.
• Change of translation format.
• Add installation script.
• Move configuration to database.
• Add configuration page.
• Customizable add page.

I just updated Software section of my pages. It now lists all projects I work on and also provides quick overview of latest update and released version. While working on this, I also translated this page, so you can see it also in Czech language.

I just got new LCD at work - Acer AL1916W. I thought it will be much easier to setup than it actually was.

First attempt was only to add "1440x900" to modes in X.org configuration. It failed as well when I added modeline for this mode. After some Googling I found that for my stupid onboard card - i945 - I need to do some voodoo with it's BIOS to make it work.

Fortunately there is tool 915resolution which does this black magic, so it was not that complicated at the end:

# aptitude install 915resolution

It complains that it can not detect display, so I had to modify /etc/default/915resolution manually:

MODE=5c
XRESO=1440
YRESO=900

After starting 915resolution init script, you should be now able to start X.org server with following configuration (kept only relevant parts):

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier      "Acer AL1916W"
        Option          "DPMS"
        HorizSync       30-82
        VertRefresh     56-76
        DisplaySize 410 260
        Modeline "1440x900" 136.0 1440 1520 1672 1904 900 903 909 934 +hsync +vsync
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Device          "Intel i945"
        Monitor         "Acer AL1916W"
        DefaultDepth    24
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           24
                Virtual 1440 900
                Modes           "1440x900" "1400x1050" "1280x1024" "1280x960" "1152x864" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
        EndSubSection
EndSection

And finally I can use widescreen display!

As DocSQL import in phpMyAdmin was quite old and obscure code, I decided to convert it to regullar input plugin. This is now done in SVN, however there is one slight problem - I have only fuzzy idea what DocSQL actually is and I don't have any data to test it (besides those I could guess from plugin source). So I'd welcome if somebody who knows this beast, would give new plugin a bit of testing.

This has already happen yesterday, but I decided to announce it today, because now there is snapshot with all those changes.

With Subversion we can rename files without losing their histrory and this possibility lead to huge cleanup of file names. I dropped all _details and _properties parts of table and database pages. As user you should not notice anything (except for different URL), but there might be still some problematic parts which has not been detected when I did this change.

So please give a current trunk snapshot or demo a bit of testing so that we can find problems before going to RC stage.

In-Reply-To: Newer version yield unexpected result....

No I will never understand why somebody wants to submit bug report (which is duplicate anyway) in OpenDocument text, with yellow background, huge fonts and other crazy stuff. I'm probably old-fashioned, but I still think that plain text is enough (especially when another reporter was able to write it in few sentences). And of course writing useful summary is useless thing, the reason for summary field is just to write nothing saying sentence.

Marcin, I don't say that Gammu+ is generally bad. Simply there is not enough man power for Gammu and you will only trash your effort by doing another project. Most of improvements in Gammu+ can be also implemented in Gammu and you will not loose support for lots of phones.

I simply do not think we're powerfull enough to make revolution in Gammu sources which you call Gammu+.

I haven't yet deeply checked it's sources, but I'm affraid of it a bit from few parts I already saw.

I finally pushed myself on doing some progress on ukolovnik task tracker. It got some wanted features, brand new setup script and there is core of database based configuration.

Setup script works only for MySQL >= 4.1 and I will probably raise requirements to this version as I can not check anywhere correct functionallity with older versions. Anyway if there is some user of older version, please contact me, and we'll find a solution.

I can not promise new release date, but I want to finish db config soon and it is only remaining issue for next release.

As I wrote recently, I was decided to switch from Vodafone to T-Mobile because of prices they offer. I filed request for number transfer on Sunday and today I got call from Vodafone with attempt to keep me with them.

And I must say they were quite successful. I'm at least considering to stay with them, because current conditions look much better. I only wonder why they don't offer such things automatically to old and good customers (as I was called today). Yes that would cost them money, but this way they would make me more happy, than by convincing on last minute.

Some time ago I applied some of project I work on (Wammu and phpMyAdmin) into some activities, where students can choose it as work for their semester. I didn't look for such events, better to say is that those two found me. After that I completely forgot about that, but suddenly they both now replied asking for more details. I was quite surprised, as I thought that nobody was interested in them, but it looks like it only takes quite long. So maybe in some of next Wammu and/or phpMyAdmin releases, you will see fruit of this :-).

BTW: Does anybody has idea, why everybody wants something from me right now? No I'm not complaining, I just wonder why everything has arrived right now…

I already wrote patch for this some time ago, but it turned out that it can be done more effectively using plugin interface. So after few minutes I wrote plugin for generating article list for each category which can be used for inclusion in other pages as you can see on my website (eg. pma.cihar.com).

I finally ordered new phone for me. I decided to buy it together with switching to T-Mobile as they offered quite good price (and I want to switch anyway).

It will be Sony-Ericsson K750i, so you can expect increasing support for Sony-Ericsson phones in Gammu and Wammu. My goal is to have simmilar feature set as FMA has, what I think should be enogh for most of phone users :-).

Finally it has happenned: English-Czech dictionary has been accepted and should appear in archives on next mirror pulse. It unfortunately has to go to non-free due to GNU FDL with invariants sections, anyway it will be much easier for you to get it - no more fiddling with sources.lst!

I just heared in radio, that Create is going to make firmware update for their MP3 players. That would be nothing special, but this firmware doesn't add new features and doesn't fix any bugs. It only disables recording from radio which seems to be illegal in the US. No matter where you live, with next upgrade, your Creative MP3 player will loose this possibility…

As there seems to be no volunteer for packaging Sonata for Debian as I requested recently, I filed ITP bug for it. Quickly after that I uploaded package to mentors, so until I find sponsor, you can grab it there.

There was recently bug in our bug tracker that we compete with Microsoft to achieve highest number of security bugs. We definitely do not compete! However there always be security issues in such big application.

Majority of them are XSS issues, which are hard to detect automatically, so you either have to test various inputs or deeply analyze the code. Most attackers choose testing method and it sometimes bring them fruit. We try to fix any found issue as soon as possible, but it is not in our possibilities to fix it for all past releases that might have been included in some distribution.

Anyway I'd like to improve phpMyAdmin in this area and I think nobody would object if somebody would help us with code audit. I'm not enough experienced to see all possible flaws in code.

Wammu 0.17 has been just released. New features:

• Fix searching.
• Remember column sorting.

As you can see there is not much to mention, because this is mostly bug fix release. Hopefully I didn't make much new bugs :-).

Finally I made some subversion stats available. At the end I used mpy-svb-stats, it ran fine right now, so there was probably some server side problem when I tried that last time.

You can find them on same place where CVS stats were, however I still miss total line stats, but it looks to be quite complicated with Subversion.

phpMyAdmin webpages are down for more than day right now. This is caused by SourceForge outage (which has still not been officially announced). Maybe it's time to switch to another provider?

Anyay if you want to access website, you can use phpmyadmin.sourceforge.net address.

Okay, I finally give up with SubStats. It is software that might be useful for repository with few commits, but definitely not suitable for phpMyAdmin:

1. You can not make graph for more than 1000 revisions of phpMyAdmin, it crashes because "stack is too low".
2. Generated SVG make most browsers really busy as it contains too much points and they usually render it few minutes.
3. I managed to analyse about 5000 revisions, but it now requires about 800 MiB of memory.

So I have unusable graphs of 1/10 of repository and analysed data for 1/2 of repository where I can not continue.

Just set priority to highest and when developer decreases it, just tell him to stay **** off . Okay I will stay off your fucking issue, no problem.

(Side note: I have nothing against the issue itself, but this attitude won't make me to do anything about it.)

As I already wrote, I randomly found that I can receive direct payments from Google Ads. Today I received testing payment, so I enabled it instantly.

So finally I can receive my money without giving 1% to my bank.

Is it random that both Paypal and Google Ads offer this service in same time? Paypal has already updated their website, but on Google Ads help you won't find mention about this possibility in Czech Republic. Maybe they're using same provider for money transfers? I definitely don't know :-).

As they send me today update of policy, where the change is officially mentioned, I decided to enable PayPal option for donation (on my site as well as on SourceForge). I hope this won't cause troubles to anyone, it's just another option.

Donations are welcome :-).

If you will be first weekend in November near Brno, you might be interested in LinuxAlt, where I will have a talk about Gammu and generally mobile phones under Linux.

The talk will be in Czech language as most of audience is expected to be Czech speaking.

It looks like PayPal has recently allowed accepting of payments in many EU countries, maybe they finally realised that EU has grown few years ago :-).

Anyway I'm still not convinced whether to enable this option for donations, but you're free to use it, my account is same as email - michal@cihar.com.

Thanks to Marcin who wrote about availability in Polland, this way I found I have now also full featured account. I don't have idea why they didn't announce it to me...

Okay, I failed to use both tools to do subversion stats I found - SubStats crash somewhere around 1000th revision (out of almost 10000 we currently have), MPY SVN STATS crashed even sooner. We're not that big project! Is there something else what can I use? I'd welcome any ideas.

Otherwise I will probably try to debug SubStats sometimes, but I lack time for that right now.

Just for record: I didn't use remotely overloaded SourceForge SVN server what was cause of my first problems, I did setup own server using SVN data from them. Only change it did made is that error appeared sonned and my computer had lot of work to do for about an hour.

As we switched to subversion last night, I've also switched demo and snapshots to use subversion instead of CVS. Please report if there is something wrong or still refering to CVS.

The only thing which remains are statistics, for which I need to find good enough tool. For now I tested substats.rb, but it seems to miserably fail on some internal server error from Sourceforge.

Update: SubStats seem to work now, but it will process all data for quite a long time, so maybe there will be some results tomorrow :-).

Sorry I accidentally inserted Google Ads code twice on Gammu pages and didn't notice it for several days. It was not intentional and I really don't want to have site full of Ads.

Anyway I also decided to switch to smaller banners and see how they will work.

BTW: If you have interest in placing ads somewhere here, I'm open to your offers :-).

I already wrote about Google's CodeSearch, but just thanks to blog post about exploring dark corners using it, I found two problems in Gammu code. Bug report with patches is already filed.

Sometimes when I found problem in free software which tortures me too much, I try to fix it and submit patch to upstream. What riles me is how many authors ignore submitted patches.

I came to this idea when recently somebody complained that patch I submitted for Python 2.3 (in times when it even was not final) does not apply to current Python 2.5. What a suprise! I had to create several patches for Python when I worked for SUSE and most of them didn't receive even single comment. Same applies to several other patches I made, however I don't probably remember most of them.

Only SourceForge allows me to review what has not yet been accepted. There were several attempts to improve detection of search engines and browsers in AWStats, but author seem to prefer to add own list instead of using patches from tracker. There is support for non-latin languages in Klear, but even posting to mailing list didn't rise interest in this patch. And of coure few Python patches I mentioned at the start.

I try to do my best to integrate patches for my projects (mostly phpMyAdmin and Gammu related software) as soon as they arive as it saves time and energy of both sides. And contributor is then willing to provide more patches if he can see they will be most likely accepted.

But it's your choice how you want to develop your software! Either stay alone or accept patches from community.

I was wondering why aptitude doesn't automatically purge not needed packages and keeps tons of configs I don't need on my disk. If I'd read documentation, I'd have fount out is sooner, but it has to came to me through random post to debian-devel about apt-findremovable.

The solution is simple:

echo 'Aptitude::Purge-Unused "true";' >> /etc/apt/apt.conf

I haven't seen this announced anywhere, but I was able to enter by bank account in Google AdSense settings and it semed to proceed fine. I'll see if test payment will go throught and then I can finally get rid of expesive checks Google used to send me before.

It seems that Dunc-Tank is not enough, now we have also Dunc-Bank. I didn't much get idea behind Tank and how it is supposed to improve anything. In contrast to that Bank has clearly defined target and even described way to achieve that. Hopefully they don't manage to delay release much :-).

BTW: What comes next? Dunc-Gang?

For quite a long time phpMyAmin provided downloads in zip, tar.bz2 and tar.gz formats. As time went and project grow up, files were larger and larger.

Recently we finally decided to make change in that. We provide several stripped down versions and better compression, so that you can freely decide whether you want to download 761 KiB English only version compressed with 7zip or full bloated 3573 KiB version compressed by regullar zip. You can see all other variants in between on SourceForge Files section.

I'm considering about creating community site in Czech language for phpMyAdmin. However I don't want to build yet another custom CMS for that and would rather use something already written. Based on languages I know I prefer solution in PHP or Python. Current considerations count Plone, Joomla! and WordPress.

I worked with Plone/Zope some time ago and it worked quite well, but maybe I could try something else?

Maybe it's not that new, but I noticed it today :-). You can search source codes using it and it is called /* Code search */.

I just tried to find functions from projects I know and it worked surprisingly well, only CodeConv doesn't seem to be indexed.

NM process seems to go faster than I expected, I just got assigned application manager. I hope I will not cause much troubles to Christoph Berg :-).

As I wrote some time ago, my notebook started to crash randomly. I was affraid that I will have to buy new disk or even whole notebook. But the fix was quite less expensive: To disassemble it and use vacuum cleaner. Since that everything works like a charm :-).

Thanks to Andreas Metzler who kidnly offered sponsoring for me, updated nanoblogger package (which fixes all bugs reported in debian BTS) will be in archives on next dinstall run (tommorow).

As this is RC version, there might still be some problems, but it should be better than previous version in archives.

Good news everyone: most of my nanoblogger changes were accepted upstream, so next nanoblogger version will come with friendly links, RSS indexes and other tiny things I mentioned before.

PS: This post also serves for testing whether everything works as expected :-).

On Saturday night I arrived back from vacation to Austria. I just felt it's time to get to know neighbouring country :-). We visited Vienna and Salzburg and it was quite relaxing time there. I will try to write details later, but for now I'd like to thank to all people who helped Wikitravel with its content as it is marvelous source of information, I will do my best to improve articles about places I know.