Michal Čihař - Posts tagged by life, page 5

This was feature which I always hate - phone made strange sound when taking photo. Fortunately I'm not alone who hates this and there are several howtos on net which should guide you to do this.

The only way which worked for me at the end was replacing sounds in phone filesystem, so that it plays silent sounds. For Sony-Ericsson K750i with CID 49 BROWN you need specially hacked FAR from SE-tuning.cz and just replace files in filesystem (/tpa/preset/system/sound). Now phone magically makes no sounds when taking photos :-).

I just looked on server statistics and I was shocked by amount of spam and viruses rejected during last three days. Is there some new virus for Windows which tries random email addresses on all servers it can reach? I didn't analyse those messages, as they are rejected at RCPT time, because sender tries random addresses which do not work on my server. For now I try to reduce them by blacklisting in iptables, but this doesn't seem to help much as IP addresses change too often.

I think that graph shows best what big change has happened:

Update: It seems to be new Sober variant causing this mess.

After returning from Easter vacation, I was afraid of my full mailbox. This was quite correct, but fortunately some people also were not working, so it is not that bad. Anyway I didn't read it all so far, so don't be afraid if reaction on your mail (especially about Gammu and Wammu) will take longer.

The worst thing which happened was, that somebody managed to fuck up MySQL server serving phpMyAdmin demo in some very unusual way, which was not detected by my scripts, which are checking whether demo server is still alive. This lead to almost day outage, because I had to restore MySQL manually this morning. Anyway this case should be now also caught and the script for checking is getting more and more complex. Maybe I should better use Monit (or other monitoring software) for this instead of home made shell script. But shell script seems to do good job in most cases :-).

Off topic PS: Thanks to everybody who helped to release Debian 4.0!

While translating CouchSurfing to Czech, I again noticed funny mistake which often repeats in Czech translations of web mails or similar applications.

In English there is "File into folder". Some translators tend to translate this as "File in folder", which changes meaning a bit :-).

I have no idea why this is so popular, but I saw this for first time in Sieve plug-in for Squirellmail and several times since this time.

For most of winter, we had troubles because there is no snow. Right now there is trouble because there is too much snow. And it is still falling. This happens just few days after Kyrill has caused quite a lot of damage, maybe the Earth wants to get rid of people who destoy its environment ;-).

In most places in Czechia 15 to 30 centimenters of new snow occured over night. Many people can not drive their car safely in these conditions and this causes lots of traffic problems. Maybe they should think before going out and use public transport instead, but it is not as comfortable as driving damn slow, because they still have summer tires…

It's funny how big are differences in authors of open source programs and their bug handling. Yesterday I finally managed to report problem in gtkthml plugin for Claws mail which caused some HTML mails to be displayed in wrong encoding. I got instantly reply and in few minutes it has been fixed in CVS. Thanks a lot Colin Leroy!

Exactly opposite situation is with Klear. I wrote bug report with patch more than a year ago and it is still without reply from developers. Funny is that somebody else was brave enough to port this patch to curent version. Looking at their bug tracker, I can see that my report is not alone, let's call it black hole…

Maybe I'm a bit late, but happy new year! I was quite silent in last days as I was having rest from computer and enjoyed real life.

What will this year bring? I will hopefully become Debian Developer, as only required step right now is account creation. This is good news for Gammu users who run Debian, as I would like to upload testing versions to experimental (as well as appropriate python-gammu builds).

What else? Some new releases of my projects :-). I'm still working on Wammu and configuration wizard. There is a bit more work than I expected, but it should be ready during January. I don't expect much new features in python-gammu, it will be just kept in sync with gammu.

The only remaining project is Ukolovnik, which is in perfect state for me, however other users request more features and I should sometimes get at least to patch merging :-).

24th December has started few minutes ago and the Christmas crazyness is going to end soon. No more carols whenewen man enters shop, no more fantastic Christmas offers wherever you look (well they will be replaced with New Year, Valentine's day, etc. offers, but they are usually not that aggressive.

I'm just finishing packing of presents for my family and only thing that keeps me up and running is Radio Beat on high volume … This is only style of music I can accept whole year ;-).

Anyway happy Christmas to all blog readers and I hope you got lot of presents from whoever gives presents in your country.

This is easiest way how to contribute, if you know some foreign language (well most time English is required). Recently after announcement of translating interface for IEs4Linux, I completed Czech translation :-).

BTW: Wammu has also on-line translation system, use it!

I upgraded to Iceweasel 2.0 on most places during this week. And this convinced me to start looking for another browser. I didn't like Firefox in past much, but I was too lazy to look and start using alternatives. But this new release convinced me. It haz crazy new look. Why it doesn't look like regullar Gtk application? I'd prefer that over special custom tab bar it is currently using.

And why the hell does not Ctrl+W close window when closing last tab? Maybe it was too confusing for some users to have window closed…

PS: Oh now I see: I have to use Ctrl+Shift+W to make it close last window. Why is it not standard Ctrl+Q? And it looks like I'm not alone who complains on new Firefox :-).

Yesterday I visited concert of Prague hard rock band Clyde. It was first time I've heard them live and I wasn't really happy with sound in this concert. It sounded overexcited and it was probably caused by sound mixer crew. Anyway the music itself is pretty good and I like it, you can download some MP3s on their website.

You can find some photos from concert on my sister's pages. There are only pictures of the band, because there was almost no audience (something around 20 people). This was quite strange experience, as I've never been on so empty rock concert :-).

I was just shocked by recent order of our minister of culture - fees for empty media will be increased from current minimal ammount (around 0.20 CZK) to 5 CZK (0.2 €) for DVD. Now it will be quite important part of price of empty DVD medium. It's strange for people like me, who use such mediums mostly for backup purposes. Looking for country where such crazy fees do not exist!

During my sickness last week and half, my mailbox was slowly filling with various messages. Mostly feedback about Gammu, Wammu or phpMyAdmin, but also various other issues. Now I finally managed to get through all of them and I have zero unread mail. Hooray. Well I don't think it will keep on this state long, but it's good to cleanup old issues sometimes :-).

I use this phone almost 1 day, so it is now time to write down firste experiences.

• I have Vodafone customisation, seeing their logo everywhere is not something I like.
• MP3 player and radio integrated in phone is great idea - you can listen to music and you don't miss any phone call or message as with regullar MP3 player.
• Camera is not perfect, but 2MPix is enough for making random photos with good light conditions.
• It is great that it has USB storage.
• I didn't find way to communicate with phone over IrDA except file transfer.
• Why the hell I could not upload whole calendar from my old Alcatel 535? It says something about low memory, but there is enough free space.
• I miss distinguishing from payed content and regullar phone menus. When do I enter Vodafone Live!? When do I download game data?

But generally it works much better than old phone, I only need to get used to some different functions.

I just got new LCD at work - Acer AL1916W. I thought it will be much easier to setup than it actually was.

First attempt was only to add "1440x900" to modes in X.org configuration. It failed as well when I added modeline for this mode. After some Googling I found that for my stupid onboard card - i945 - I need to do some voodoo with it's BIOS to make it work.

Fortunately there is tool 915resolution which does this black magic, so it was not that complicated at the end:

# aptitude install 915resolution

It complains that it can not detect display, so I had to modify /etc/default/915resolution manually:

MODE=5c
XRESO=1440
YRESO=900

After starting 915resolution init script, you should be now able to start X.org server with following configuration (kept only relevant parts):

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier      "Acer AL1916W"
        Option          "DPMS"
        HorizSync       30-82
        VertRefresh     56-76
        DisplaySize 410 260
        Modeline "1440x900" 136.0 1440 1520 1672 1904 900 903 909 934 +hsync +vsync
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Device          "Intel i945"
        Monitor         "Acer AL1916W"
        DefaultDepth    24
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           24
                Virtual 1440 900
                Modes           "1440x900" "1400x1050" "1280x1024" "1280x960" "1152x864" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
        EndSubSection
EndSection

And finally I can use widescreen display!