Michal Čihař - Archive for Jan. 1, 2011

As I have complained quite loudly in this blog, I think it's fair to post a status update again.

Yesterday the emails started suddenly to work. So the major reason for my complains is gone.

What I still don't like that this issue was not at all communicated to project admins. It stopped to work, what was sort of announced in blog post. It started to work again without any announcement and last status update in blog still claims they do not work.

At least for direct question, we've received reply that they have intentionally re-enabled this service.

Better late than never. Here comes photo from sixth week. Taken during tour in Cantillion brewery in Brussels.

Another week is over and it's time to look again at state of translations for phpMyAdmin 3.4. There was quite a good progress in last week and hope it will continue this way.

We now have eight translations at 100%:

• Czech
• English (United Kingdom)
• French
• Russian
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish

There are three which were close last week, but are still not at 100%:

• Greek
• Chinese (China)
• Catalan

Was your language not listed? You can help it being better!

About month ago, we've announced contest for new default theme in phpMyAdmin 3.4.

The submission period is over and now it's time to decide which theme will be the winning one. You can choose from five themes (all of them are listed on our wiki).

Every opinion counts, so please visit our survey and choose the one you like most:

http://survey.phpmyadmin.net/index.php?sid=72977

Besides the Original and Darkblue_orange themes, there are following to choose:

Toba:

Graphite:

pmahomme:

As I've already written, SourceForge.Net has limited things which you can do on git/mercurial servers and one of the things they have prohibited is sending emails.

This is one of few things which almost every projects uses so it has brought quite obvious reaction, people are reporting bugs that it stopped to working. The major reason for reporting bug is that this change was not at all communicated to users (nor users nor project admins), so it was just a surprise and every body expects bug and not this kind of reply.

As I don't have way to reopen the ticket, I had to open another one, that the documentation is wrong and I hope the reply will be slightly better.

SF.net, if you still don't believe people used this feature quite a lot, just look at number of bug reports you have in your tracker right now...

After recent attack on sf.net servers, some services have been unavailable for some time. Now things are returning to "normal" operations, CVS has been made available yesterday.

But this has lead to other (quite unrelated) change, affecting all SCM services:

outbound email is not functional, so any script utilizing this will fail. If you need to send outbound email, a workaround would be to use curl and and external site or Project Web to send the email.

I think this is just wrong. If this is as a measure against spam, it will rather open dozens of other places where to send spam, because every project wanting commit notifications (or using CIA.vc), will need to deploy some script on web to send mail. And I guess it simply won't be much protected.

Maybe it's time to consider changing service provider...

PS: The bug I've reported on this topic is here.

I've decided to try to get rid of some more Debian packages. The main reason being that I don't use MPD anymore so following packages are for sale:

• mpdris
• mpdscribble
• python-mpd
• sonata

I will continue to upload new versions (should there be any) until somebody steps up, but that's pretty much all I can do.

PS: And there is still gpointing-device-settings for sale as well.

Today we've got new submission for phpMyAdmin theme contest and I must say it really looks great.

The new theme is called pmahomme after it's author Mike Homme:

It's now also available on the demo server, so don't hesitate and try it there.

Looking forward for other submissions to our contest.

As we're slowly heading towards phpMyAdmin 3.4, it is good time to look at current translations state.

There are few which are already at 100%, so they are in best possible shape:

• Czech
• English (United Kingdom)
• French
• Slovenian
• Turkish

Some languages really miss just few messages, so they will hopefully get to 100% soon:

• Swedish
• Greek
• Chinese (China)
• Catalan

And there is huge progress in Russian, which will at this pace get to 100% this week.

Was your language not listed? You can help it being better!

Squeeze was released this weekend and it's time to slowly migrate servers to it. The first to upgrade came the ones backing up phpMyAdmin demo server. Reason for trying them first is they have mostly same setup as other, while definitely not being critical to run all the time. For simple reasons that users break them time to time as well :-).

Everything went surprisingly smoothly, the only problematic thing being no availability of MariaDB packages for Squeeze right now. But it does not matter that much, as Lenny packages still work fine.

There should be no visible changes on the servers, but in case there is something broken, please let me know.

While having experience with upgrading database servers, I went to production database server and it is now running Squeeze as well. What still remains is the server doing virtualization, but I prefer to do this in time when I can quickly get to the housing, in case something goes wrong with the reboot.