Michal Čihař - Posts tagged by english, page 11

It took me much more uploads than I expected, but ColorHug client is finally in unstable. I was fighting with various bugs, which I could not reproduce locally and of course with my own stupidity in configuring pbuilder.

Anyway the buildds overview now shows mostly green, so this is good. The remaining ones mostly wait for libgusb, which needs build on armhf and needs to be ported to non Linux (or rather libusb needs to exist there).

One of things I've learned on the way is that docbook-utils is not enough to convert docbook to man pages, you need docbook package as well. Still I don't understand why this did locally work for me...

The one outstanding issue is that client code assumes it runs on little endian host (or rather same endianity as the ColorHug device) and thus will break on PPC and other big endian machines. The upstream is aware of that an I even managed to produce patch which should fix it, though I have no means to test it (lack of big endian hardware and lack of the ColorHug device itself).

This is mostly note to myself, when I will set this up for next time.

Every time I set up test environment for Gammu SMSD, I'm lost in PostgreSQL configuration. Simple reason is that I do not use it at all for any other reason.

Adding user and creating a database:

# su - postgres
postgres@rincewind:~> psql template1
psql (9.1.1)
Type "help" for help.

template1=# CREATE USER smsd WITH PASSWORD 'smsd';
CREATE ROLE
template1=# CREATE DATABASE smsd OWNER = smsd;
CREATE DATABASE
template1=# GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE smsd TO smsd;
GRANT
template1=# \q

Next stem is to allow anybody to connect as smsd user. There might be better ways to do that, however I've chosen the simplest one - to trust any local connection - as testing of Gammu SMSD is anyway the only thing this database server does. Edit /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf:

# "local" is for Unix domain socket connections only
local   all             all                                     trust
# IPv4 local connections:
host    all             all             127.0.0.1/32            trust
# IPv6 local connections:
host    all             all             ::1/128                 trust

uTidyLib is definitely something you would call a dead project - no new release for seven years, dozens of open bugs and submitted patches and no active development. On the other side it is still used by several packages in Debian, thus worth maintaining. This is also reason, why there are few crucial patches in Debian repository to make it work (for example on 64-bit architectures).

While googling whether there is something new going on with uTidyLib, I've noticed two efforts. One is PyTidyLib, a complete reimplementation, which provides different API and thus does not seem to be used anywhere yet.

Another (well almost two years old, but I did not look earlier) effort is to fork in on Github and make it work with MacOS X. Okay, when somebody took the "effort", lets try to merge Debian patches there, hopefully there will be a release sometimes. So here is the pull request.

Update: I've just learned, there is another fork going on - https://github.com/lachlan-00/utidylib2

Today, I've spent some time on ColorHug software (which I've preordered some time ago).

The first missing bit there were Debian packages. There are already some packages available for Ubuntu, but I've chosen clean start and did all the packaging on my own. The packages are now waiting in NEW queue (which is amazingly empty in last months) and will hopefully get accepted soon. In case you are too impatient, you can look to git repository on Alioth (you will need libgusb as well). Packaging effort lead to writing (quite minimalistic) man page for colorhug-ccmx, which I've also sent upstream.

The other thing, where I can help right now (not owning the device itself) is translation. As you can see on Transifex, my task is done here and Czech translation is complete :-).

After fighting with i18n in QML, I've released GePeS 0.3.0. The only major change is that it now can be properly translated, for the first release Czech and Spanish translations were completed, however you are welcome to contribute translations!

As usual, new version was submitted to Nokia store, hopefully it will pass QA review before Christmas. You can get sources from GePeS homepage or from Git.

After some fight with qmake and lrelease/lupdate, I've finally managed to allow translations in GePeS. I see no clear reason why QML translating is that poorly supported within Qt tools, however with some hacks it seems to be doable.

As usual with my software, besides using sources (Qt's translation files in this case), you can use translation server to do online translation. As there are only few words to translate, I hope some languages will be translated soon. Of course to give you good example, I've completed Czech translation immediately :-).

Today, I've released GePeS 0.2.0. The only major difference is that it should reduce power consumption of your phone while it is running. Reducing CPU usage when application is not active was definitely on my roadmap, though email from "Publisher Support Specialist for Nokia" about this actually pushed me to investigate the issue.

It turned out to be quite easy to disable sensors while application is not active and it did the trick. While doing this I also moved to using AlignedTimer to synchronize wakeups with other possible wakeups in the device.

As usual, the application sources can be downloaded on GePeS page, binary will be soon available in Nokia store.

I've spent this weekend with my girlfriend in Berlin, which is one of the cities staying quite long on list of places to visit. Now I've been there, though there are still lot of reasons to come back in future.

We stayed with great hosts found through CouchSurfing and have seen hopefully all important places in the city. As usual, you can find some pictures in my gallery:

Today, while merging changes to phpMyAdmin from our translation server I was very surprised that we have two languages which already reached 100% - Slovenian and Turkish (and four more just few strings from 100%). The huge amount of new strings introduced during 3.5 development (mostly being MySQL advisor hints) made me thing it will take very long time till they all get translated, but I was proven wrong.

Anyway there is still lot of work to do, so feel free to join our translators team.

Yesterday, I finally took closer look at long standing GePeS bug on displaying speed and altitude wrongly (which I've mentioned in very first posts). For some reason I believed it is not my bug, but in QML bindings and let it be there.

Receiving complain from Maarten ter Huurne, that this does not work made me look into it more deeply. Of course I found out it was caused by stupid typo and quickly fixed it. New release is now available on GePeS homepage and will be available shortly in Nokia store.

Recently my installation of Qt SDK I use for development of applications for Nokia N950 (N9) got broken. It happened by update some postinst script failed what caused almost no part of Harmattan SDK to be installed. I hoped this to be temporary error which will get fixed by later updates, but it turned out to persist even for 1.1.4 which has been released week ago.

Yesterday I finally got time to look into it and after some debugging I found out that it was trying to install x86_64 version, which was not downloaded because I was using 32bit installer. I quickly realized this was caused by using 64-bit kernel, while running 32-bit userspace, for which the installer somehow was not prepared.

Fortunately there is easy workaround for that:

linux32 ./Qt_SDK_Lin32_online_v1_1_4_en.run

What will run the binary in 32-bit personality and make kernel pretend it is compiled for 32-bit.

phpMyAdmin demo server got some updates recently. First of all I've updated MySQL and MariaDB version it uses (MySQL is now on 5.5.7 and MariaDB on 5.3.2).

Later I've finally found time to make mentions of demo server less intrusive and fit more in existing interface. I've used jQuery to inject information about demo server to main page as one of standard boxes. It fits there nicely and puts information on main page where most users land anyway (you can see it for example here). With most important information on main page, the other pages could be reduced and now only mentions demo server and Git revision it is using.

This brings user experience closer to real phpMyAdmin without intrusive information shown on top of every page. I hope you will like it :-).

During summer, I somehow managed to collect huge backlog on Gammu. This consisted on few hundredths of emails to reply, bug reports, not reviewed records in phone database and so on. Today I can finally say this is mostly over and I should be able to react more quickly. Though this does not change anything on previous statements about limiting my involvement there.

Processing emails went quite smoothly, luckily some of them resolved themselves or others have helped on mailing list. With bug reports it is more troublesome, because there are topic which I don't want to touch and thus looking for volunteers to work on that. Maintaining Gammu packages in Ubuntu PPA so that users would be able to install latest version easily is one of such tasks, which are waiting for somebody.

Anyway I feel much better without those unread emails and I hope not to collect so huge pile of them again :-).

In last weeks, I've finally managed to create my personal gallery, where I could present selection of my photographs. This task was outstanding on my todo list for pretty long time, the major obstacle being selecting photos which to present there.

During my sickness few weeks ago, I finally went through most of my photos and chosen the ones which I think are worth presenting. Still I did not manage to go through photos from half year spent in Japan, so these will be added sometimes later. Also most of the pictures miss descriptions, though I'm (slowly) fixing this.

From technical side, the gallery is being generated using lazygal with custom theme.

You can check the gallery on photos.cihar.com, I hope you will like it :-).

Translation server for phpMyAdmin and Gammu/Wammu has been updated to run latest Pootle. I had to do this upgrade to be able to run on latest Django, which is used by other websites as well (this blog is one of them).

Unfortunately it was not as easy as running apt-get upgrade as Pootle package has been dropped from Debian recently. So I had to make quick and dirty packages myself (no removal of embedded software and so on).

Installing newer version lead to major breakage as the database upgrade silently failed and I had to recover manually. In the end I've dropped all pootle_* tables and recreated them again. Unfortunately this lead to loss of some data from user profiles, but I could not see other way around.

Anyway the service should be now back running in normal shape, so go ahead and translate :-).