Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for Life

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!

As I wrote recently, I was decided to switch from Vodafone to T-Mobile because of prices they offer. I filed request for number transfer on Sunday and today I got call from Vodafone with attempt to keep me with them.

And I must say they were quite successful. I'm at least considering to stay with them, because current conditions look much better. I only wonder why they don't offer such things automatically to old and good customers (as I was called today). Yes that would cost them money, but this way they would make me more happy, than by convincing on last minute.

Some time ago I applied some of project I work on (Wammu and phpMyAdmin) into some activities, where students can choose it as work for their semester. I didn't look for such events, better to say is that those two found me. After that I completely forgot about that, but suddenly they both now replied asking for more details. I was quite surprised, as I thought that nobody was interested in them, but it looks like it only takes quite long. So maybe in some of next Wammu and/or phpMyAdmin releases, you will see fruit of this :-).

BTW: Does anybody has idea, why everybody wants something from me right now? No I'm not complaining, I just wonder why everything has arrived right now…

I finally ordered new phone for me. I decided to buy it together with switching to T-Mobile as they offered quite good price (and I want to switch anyway).

It will be Sony-Ericsson K750i, so you can expect increasing support for Sony-Ericsson phones in Gammu and Wammu. My goal is to have simmilar feature set as FMA has, what I think should be enogh for most of phone users :-).

I just heared in radio, that Create is going to make firmware update for their MP3 players. That would be nothing special, but this firmware doesn't add new features and doesn't fix any bugs. It only disables recording from radio which seems to be illegal in the US. No matter where you live, with next upgrade, your Creative MP3 player will loose this possibility…

Okay, I finally give up with SubStats. It is software that might be useful for repository with few commits, but definitely not suitable for phpMyAdmin:

1. You can not make graph for more than 1000 revisions of phpMyAdmin, it crashes because "stack is too low".
2. Generated SVG make most browsers really busy as it contains too much points and they usually render it few minutes.
3. I managed to analyse about 5000 revisions, but it now requires about 800 MiB of memory.

So I have unusable graphs of 1/10 of repository and analysed data for 1/2 of repository where I can not continue.