Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for English

Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions 2017-W42

Last week was mostly focused on refactoring and code cleanup. This time I've worked on authentication plugins, which now fully handle authentication (previously it was partly done in the mighty common.inc.php).

Handled issues:

Gammu 1.38.5

Today, Gammu 1.38.5 has been released. After long period of bugfix only releases, this comes with several new noteworthy features.

The biggest feature probably is that SMSD can now handle USSD messages as well. Those are usually used for things like checking remaining credit, but it's certainly not limited to this. This feature has been contributed thanks to funding on BountySource.

You can read more information in the release announcement.

Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions 2017-W41

Last week I've continued on cleaning up common.inc.php, but there were other bug fixes as well. Most notable probably being fixing SQL parser to better handle CREATE TABLE queries defining partitions.

Handled issues:

Weblate 2.17

Weblate 2.17 has been released today. There are quite some performance improvements, improved search, improved access control settings and various other improvements.

Full list of changes:

  • Weblate by default does shallow Git clones now.
  • Improved performance when updating large translation files.
  • Added support for blocking certain emails from registration.
  • Users can now delete their own comments.
  • Added preview step to search and replace feature.
  • Client side persistence of settings in search and upload forms.
  • Extended search capabilities.
  • More fine grained per project ACL configuration.
  • Default value of BASE_DIR has been changed.
  • Added two step account removal to prevent accidental removal.
  • Project access control settings is now editable.
  • Added optional spam protection for suggestions using Akismet.

Update: The bugfix 2.17.1 is out as well, fixing testsuite errors in some setups:

  • Fixed running testsuite in some specific situations.
  • Locales updates.

If you are upgrading from older version, please follow our upgrading instructions.

You can find more information about Weblate on https://weblate.org, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Weblate is also being used on https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, OsmAnd, Turris, FreedomBox, Weblate itself and many other projects.

Should you be looking for hosting of translations for your project, I'm happy to host them for you or help with setting it up on your infrastructure.

Further development of Weblate would not be possible without people providing donations, thanks to everybody who have helped so far! The roadmap for next release is just being prepared, you can influence this by expressing support for individual issues either by comments or by providing bounty for them.

Using Trezor to store cryptocurencies

For quite some time I have some cryptocurrencies on hold. These mostly come from times it was possible to mine Bitcoin on the CPU, but I've got some small payments recently as well.

I've been using Electrum wallet so far. It worked quite well, but with increasing Bitcoin value, I was considering having some hardware wallet for that. There are few options which you can use, but I've always preferred Trezor as that device is made by guys I know. Also it's probably device with best support out of these (at least I've heard really bad stories about Ledger support).

In the end what decided is that they are also using Weblate to translate their user interface and offered me the wallet for free in exchange. This is price you can not beat :-). Anyway the setup was really smooth and I'm now fully set up. This also made me more open to accept other cryptocurrencies which are supported by Trezor, so you can now see more options on the Weblate donations page.

New projects on Hosted Weblate

Hosted Weblate provides also free hosting for free software projects. The hosting requests queue has grown too long, so it's time to process it and include new project.

This time, the newly hosted projects include:

  • Hunspell - famous spell checker
  • Eolie - a web browser for GNOME
  • SkyTube - an open-source YouTube app for Android
  • Eventum - issue tracking system

Additionally there were some notable additions to existing projects:

If you want to support this effort, please donate to Weblate, especially recurring donations are welcome to make this service alive. You can do that easily on Liberapay or Bountysource.

Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions 2017-W40

Last week I've finally got to common.inc.php cleanup which is assigned to me for more than year. I've again managed to cleanup some parts of it, but it's quite challenging task as whenever I touch this (mostly ancient) code, I found some issues with it and have to fix other things as well.

Another interesting topic was fixing operation with database or table called 0. This is well known PHP issue that empty function in string containing just 0 will return true, however some of our code was using that to test whether database or table are set. This should be now fixed in master branch.

Handled issues:

Better access control in Weblate

Upcoming Weblate 2.17 will bring improved access control settings. Previously this could be controlled only by server admins, but now the project visibility and access presets can be configured.

This allows you to better tweak access control for your needs. There is additional choice of making the project public, but restricting translations, what has been requested by several projects.

You can see the possible choices on the UI screenshot:

Weblate overall experience

On Hosted Weblate this feature is currently available only to commercial hosting customers. Projects hosted for free are limited to public visibility only.

stardicter 1.1

Stardicter 1.1, the set of scripts to convert some freely available dictionaries to StarDict format, has been released today. The biggest change is that it will also keep source data together with generated dictionaries. This is good for licensing reasons and will also allow to actually build these as packages within Debian.

Full list of changes:

  • Various cleanups for first stable release.
  • Fixed generating of README for dictionaries.
  • Added support for generating source tarballs.
  • Fixed installation on systems with non utf-8 locale.

As usual, you can install from pip, download source or download generated dictionaries from my website. The package should be soon available in Debian as well.

Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions 2017-W39

Last week was mostly focused on catching up after two weeks of vacation. That involved quite a lot of things in our issue tracker and cleanup of pending things in pull requests.

Handled issues: