Michal Čihař - Archive for Jan. 1, 2006

Dictionary in Debian!

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!

Be careful on upgrading firmware

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…

Security in phpMyAdmin?

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

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 :-).

Make your software scalable!

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.

Howto upset developer?

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.)

Google Ads and money transfer in Czechia

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 :-).