Michal Čihař - Posts tagged by english, page 10

phpMyAdmin translations status

As phpMyAdmin is approaching to 3.5 release, it has come time to share about translations status. Here comes second round of translation status update.

Since last update we have two more translations at 100%:

  • English (Great Britain)
  • French
  • Russian
  • Slovenian
  • Spanish
  • Swedish
  • Turkish

There are few which are really close to 100% and I hope they will get there soon:

  • Danish
  • Japanese

Just on next level is Czech, where I'm progressing quite slowly and would welcome help :-).

There was also great improvement in Romanian in past week so I hope we will see it soon on top of the list as well.

Was your language not mentioned? It's now perfect time to contribute to it.

Future of Gammu

All of Gammu and Wammu related projects are slowly dying under my hands in past months (maybe I could even say years). The reason for this is lack of motivation and time to work on that properly.

Last year I've managed to collect some bugfixes and to fix some bugs myself what lead to releasing Gammu 1.31.0, which seems to be quite good release. But since then, I've again hardly done any work there and my biggest motivation for working on Gammu is that without my involvement the project would be probably completely dead. This is definitely not the best motivation and the outcome can be clearly seen.

The project definitely has it's problems (I could name them, but let's avoid making this blog post too long), but there are quite a lot of users using it. Currently most interesting feature seems to be SMS daemon, which is probably superior to what others provide, because this is where Gammu gets most of it's new users.

Unfortunately not much of them are active in development, the biggest contribution I can expect there is to fix issues they face. On the other side bug tracker and mailing list are full of reported bugs. Not speaking of feature requests to support new phone models. Some of them should be easy to support like new S40 based Nokia's, but things like Android, iPhone or Windows Mobile would require much more work.

Of course the big question is whether somebody needs anything else than SMSD. In modern phones, you anyway have most of the data on "cloud" as well, being it Google, Apple or Microsoft and possibility of doing backups to the computer are not that important as in past.

I'm definitely not using Gammu to backup my phone (anyway MeeGo is not supported) and I don't think I will in near future. Simply there are better and easier ways to get my data out of phone than implementing support for Gammu.

Anyway if anybody is willing to help Gammu now or in future, I'm definitely willing to help him.

Dictionaries for N9/N950

I was just about to start writing own viewer for StarDict dictionaries for Harmattan, when I noticed that somebody already took the effort and the application is available. It's called DictionaryStar and it's developed on gitorious.

With the hard part done, I've adjusted packaging of various dictionaries I've made available for StarDict so that it works fine on Harmattan. For now only English-Czech one is completed, you hopefully be able to get it soon at Nokia store.

The reason I've started with only one is that this pretty much does not fit into content guidelines for Nokia store and I expect problems when this will be passing their QA. So I've decided to push only one for now and once I get it through, adding others will be easy.

It's too early for GSoC 2012

It looks like with start of the new year, people started to ask for phpMyAdmin's projects for GSoC 2012. Given that we have no information whether there will be Google Summer of Code this year and whether we will be chosen to participate, these questions look quite premature.

On the other side you can start contributing any time and if you are already known in the community, you might have better chance being accepted. So forget speaking about hypothetical GSoC projects for now and start fixing some bugs, which is something much more needed right now (given that 3.5 is in alpha state).

If you are looking for more information, we have basic facts for developers on our website, there is also a wiki page mentioning some tasks for junior developers.

More on Flattr

My last post about Flattr has received much more attention than I would expect from short rant, but the feedback forced me to think a bit more about the issue.

I guess that most of Flattr early adopters jumped in for getting some money for things they produce (regardless it is music, text, software or anything else). The initial setup required users to also give money to others and this limitation was later removed and now you can only receive money without giving anything out. In the beginning every now and they I've discovered some interesting thing to flattr, so I usually had to postpone it to next month to give at least some reasonable value. This way initial money people have put there circulated between users and on each transaction they were reduced by 10% fee, what could lead to natural reduction of money available in the system.

Flattr is of course trying to introduce new features to attract new users. Flattr-a-Twitter is probably nice thing, however I somehow did not really get on Twitter train and I think I never will. The new catalog looks nice, still I don't think I will spend time browsing it and looking for content there. So basically this adds nothing useful for me.

Another recent feature - thanking to people who have flattered your thing in last month is IMHO bad idea. I've always seen Flattr as simple way to give little money to lot of various things. In case everybody would send thank you email, it would become every month spam, which I would simply ignore.

phpMyAdmin translations status

As phpMyAdmin is approaching to 3.5 release, it has come time to share about translations status. Same as with past releases, you can expect this "spam" every week or so.

The 3.5 release comes with lot of new strings, so it's some work to get to 100%. However some translators have already managed this and we currently have five translations on 100%:

  • English (Great Britain)
  • Russian
  • Spanish
  • Swedish
  • Turkish

There are few which are really close to 100% and I hope they will get there soon:

  • Danish
  • French
  • Japanese
  • Slovenian

Just on next level is Czech, where I'm progressing quite slowly and would welcome help :-).

Was your language not mentioned? It's now perfect time to contribute to it.

ColorHug in openSUSE 12.1

Finally I've also find time to test ColorHug on openSUSE 12.1. For my experiences on Debian check previous blog post.

Unfortunately on openSUSE calibration is also not that easy. First of all, you have to install patched argyll CMS from multimedia:color_management repository. You can also install gnome-color-management (and colord), but for some reasons they did not offer me any screen for calibration, so I gave up on this and tried manual calibration using Argyll.

After looking into documentation, it seems to be pretty straightforward:

$ dispcal -y l -o /tmp/L220x
Place instrument on test window.
Hit Esc or Q to give up, any other key to continue:

Display adjustment menu:
Press 1 .. 7
1) Black level (CRT: Offset/Brightness)
2) White point (Color temperature, R,G,B, Gain/Contrast)
3) White level (CRT: Gain/Contrast, LCD: Brightness/Backlight)
4) Black point (R,G,B, Offset/Brightness)
5) Check all
6) Measure and set ambient for viewing condition adjustment
7) Continue on to calibration
8) Exit
Doing check measurements

  Current Brightness = 190.74
  Target 50% Level  = 36.14, Current = 47.98, error =  6.2%
  Target Near Black =  1.91, Current =  4.11, error =  1.2%
  Current white = x 0.3424, y 0.3179, VDT 5910K DE 2K 18.3
  Target black = x 0.3424, y 0.3179, Current = x 0.3123, y 0.2711, error = 18.06 DE

Press 1 .. 7
1) Black level (CRT: Offset/Brightness)
2) White point (Color temperature, R,G,B, Gain/Contrast)
3) White level (CRT: Gain/Contrast, LCD: Brightness/Backlight)
4) Black point (R,G,B, Offset/Brightness)
5) Check all
6) Measure and set ambient for viewing condition adjustment
7) Continue on to calibration
8) Exit
Commencing device calibration
The instrument can be removed from the screen.
$ dispwin -I /tmp/L220x.icc 
$ dispwin -L

It turned out, that the change after calibration are quite minor here. This is sort of thing I've expected from past experiences with editing photos here, but anyway, now I trust results here even more :-).

ColorHug has arrived

Yesterday, I've unpacked new toy - ColorHug. It came in small packet with CD (which is unfortunately not that useful as it should be), mini USB cable and a letter from Richard Hughes.

First attempt to use was of course just connect and make it work :-).

The basic access works out of the box:

$ /usr/lib/colorhug-client/colorhug get-firmware-version
1.0.3
$ /usr/lib/colorhug-client/colorhug get-hardware-version
Hardware Version 1
$ /usr/lib/colorhug-client/colorhug get-serial-number
000019

Unfortunately calibration with colord does not yet work out of the box on Debian due to bug 655888. Hopefully it will be fixed soon and it will work nicer. For now you have to rebuild Argyll with Colorhug support (with extra pain caused by Debian package using different build system than upstream). I won't provided binary packages as I pretty much gave up after effort to build clean packages from same sources on i386 and amd64, which always failed on patched autoconf based build system.

Side note: I somehow hoped that I won't hit new (in meaning that I don't know them) open source projects which do not use some version control. Unfortunately Argyll CMS is one of such projects...

After this update (and restarting GNOME), when connecting ColorHug, the Gnome Color Manager pops up and man can calibrate the screen. The biggest problem is to make ColorHug hold on desired place on screen, if it is not close enough to screen, you will get really bad results.

The first result is of course far from being perfect, but colors are definitely better than without calibration or with ICC profile shipped with notebook.

Fixup of historical data

This blog consists not only of posts created in it, but also older posts written elsewhere. The vast majority of them comes from older blog engine I used here (Nanoblogger), but almost same amount are posts written in Czech originally posted on abclinuxu.cz.

It turned out that when I was doing import of those, I somehow forgot (or rather did not care) to fix links between them and links to rest of abclinuxu.cz website. With few lines script and huge help of BeautifulSoup these should be now fixed. So you can properly navigate over almost seven years of my blogging history.

While looking at other failing URLs here, I've also added number of redirects, so that most people end up on pages where they expect :-).

Looking forward to FOSDEM

I just got confirmed my flight bookings for FOSDEM 2012, so I'm looking to meet all great people there again. This year we've again arranged there meeting of phpMyAdmin developers, now it also includes three new faces from last years GSoC.

As for my schedule I did not yet find time to check all the schedule, but what definitely sounds interesting for me is Open Mobile Linux Devroom and some talks in MySQL and Friends Devroom. Rest will be (as usual) scheduled on the fly as I meet people there. This year I decided to deliberately skip keysigning as last year I anyway did not manage to attend it and I expect this year to be equally busy.

In case you want to meet me there, just let me know, we can try to arrange something in free slots :-).

Tiny blog improvements

Finally, I've found some time to do some improvements on this blog engine.

First thing which was more and more missing is reasonable content for description in HTML headers. This lead to sites like Google+ always fetch the constant text and that did not look that. So now, there is something really relevant to the content, either first paragraph (what is the case for all old entries) or something I can manually edit (in case I won't be too lazy).

For automatic extraction I tried several approaches. First attempt was simply extracting first paragraph from Markdown, however I quickly remembered that quite a lot of older posts were written directly in HTML, which made this big failure. Later trying BeautifulSoup on rendered HTML, what lead to missing spaces around text which was originally in links. Finally I discovered html2text, which worked pretty easily and does what I need.

In the end the code looks like following:

def get_auto_summary(self):
    h2t = html2text.HTML2Text()
    h2t.body_width = 0
    h2t.ignore_images = True
    h2t.ignore_links = True
    h2t.ignore_emphasis = True
    text = h2t.handle(self.body.rendered)
    return text.splitlines()[0]

Other change affects Flattr, as providing Flattr links for each posts is now possible even without javascript (it's called Auto-submit URL), I've decided to implement them this way. Let's see how many things will get on Flattr this way (at least it will give me better indication what somebody considered being useful). Thanks for commenters on my older blog post for hints.

Call for translations of phpMyAdmin 3.5

First phpMyAdmin's alpha release for 3.5 is out for some time and it's best time to start translating if you want to be on time for final release.

For information about translating, check our website, in short you can translate either offline (get file from Git, translate and post it to translations tracker) or use online translation system available here:

https://l10n.cihar.com/projects/phpmyadmin/

As you can see in the summary, there is lot of new or changed strings, many of the new ones coming from advisor. I suggest you to keep these as last to translate as there is quite lot of them and it is more important to have translated rest of application. The advisor messages are placed at the end of po file.

I believe we can reach good amount of complete translations by final release with your contributions!

PS: You can expect me again to publish translations stats on this blog as we're heading to release.

Configuring standalone XBMC

I have a laptop used for playing music (and occasionally also videos) which is currently running Windows XP with XBMC. Reinstalling this beast to Linux is on my todo list for ages and now I've finally found time to try that.

Starting Debian installer worked like charm and in few minutes I got Debian system running. I've chosen to run sid, well for reason I run it usually on place where I want latest software. Installing XBMC from Debian multimedia worked also fine and you can easily find some howtos for directly starting XBMC.

And that's where I ran into trouble - XBMC is damn slow. Notebook has oldish nVidia GeForce FX Go5200 card, which seems to be poorly supported by nouveau (and "Do not file bug reports about this driver." suggest that this is what authors do expect). Okay, I can survive having some binary crap so let's try nVidia proprietary drivers. I've quickly realized that the legacy drivers won't work with recent xserver and probably also not with the kernel.

Maybe I should try installing something older, what would run binary drivers, but for now I gave up and system is back on Windows (with all problems I have there...).

Flattr losing it's momentum?

From what I can see on both my personal Flattr account (where was never really much going on) and on (more attractive) phpMyAdmin's profile, the amount of people using Flattr there goes down there every month. There was definitely big momentum when it has been introduced, many geeks saw it as great opportunity for making micro payments work. Maybe people who started to use it at beginning are slowly abandoning it (what is true for me as well) and new ones simply don't come that much or whatever else. Anyway I definitely don't have the big picture to see whether is global trend or just my project is more unlucky...

Adding API to Django application

One of Django applications I maintain is our internal tool used at SUSE used for managing incoming L3 requests. Recently request to add some API arose (read only for now). Looking at available solutions, I came to conclusion that django-piston should be the best choice for me.

Adding simple model based API with it is indeed quite simple, all basic information you need is written in getting started part of their documentation.

On the other side, things can never go without problems, so I was hit by well known bug. Fortunately fix exists, though it is not yet merged upstream. While digging so deep into problem anyway, I've submitted a request to include this patch in devel:languages:python OBS repo.