This Friday, I will finally change hardware which runs this server. As there are quite a lot of services to migrate, you can expect downtime tomorrow evening (starting around 18:00 CEST) of unexpected length.
As soon as everything is up, feel free to complain what is broken and did not survive migration.
Today we finally got to setup official URLs for phpMyAdmin wiki - http://wiki.phpmyadmin.net/ and demo server - http://demo.phpmyadmin.net/. Now I should find time to match demo server look and feel with rest of phpmyadmin.net website, just make people feel they are still on our official pages.
Update: http://demo.phpmyadmin.net/ layout now matches http://www.phpmyadmin.net/!
The downloads amount for Gammu and Wammu is still increasing and when Ben Waymark offered me possibility to make an mirror, I happily accepted it. So from now, you can choose alternate download location for all downloads on my site!
The mirror is placed in UK, so if you have for whatever reason problems with connectivity to Czech Republic (where the primary site lives), it can be also good benefit for you to use alternate download location.
New Firefox is complaining about untrusted certificates in even more painful way and the time when CAcert certificates will be widely accepted seems to be far away, so I had to do something with bug tracker certificate. Otherwise I would receive too much of mails about broken certificate (which has been always valid, just signed by CAcert, which is usually not between trusted certificate authorities).
As a cheapest way to deal with this issue I found seems to be StartSSL. The problem is that their root certificate is not everywhere, but at least Firefox contains it. Anyway it is just an attempt to make things work better, if you have any problems with new certificate, just drop me an email.
I was today just too lazy to do much actual work, but I spend time on playing with something new - this time it was Google Chart API or better Python Google Chart module. I wanted to have some visualisation of growth of data in Gammu phone database for a long time and this module seemed to be good way to achieve good charts.
After a bit of playing I got following chart:
What we can see from it? Number of garbage grows very fast. Mostly it is caused by Wammu, which asks user for feedback after some time of active usage and this sometimes leads to duplicate records (but it also brings information which phones are really being used).
The bad thing which is visible here is that mostly half of reports is about unsupported phones! I think we should do something about this as the reality is not really that bad and from my POV, most of failure reports are caused by wrong configuration being used. I know it is sometimes tricky to find working one especially when you use Nokia phone with cable, where exists simply too much possibilities. It's time to tweak up autodetection so that it can handle most of such cases (and recent HAL features to export capabilities of modem devices might also help in this area).
Today I finally made something for phpMyAdmin :-). First I've updated Czech translation of 3.0, so it is not that behind as it used to be (only some PBXT strings are missing right now) and then I fixed some potential issues which Thijs has found (thanks to him for his great security work not only for Debian).
Later I focused a bit on demo server. As we already have new setup script from GSoC (made by Piotr Przybylski), links to setup script have been updated and I also reorganised links to all demo versions including direct login links for cookie based authentication. I hope it is now a bit easier to navigate and choose which demo version you want to test :-).
Moving of server seems to go quite well. There were some outages for users during night because of too big TTL in DNS, but after setting up redirector at old IP during morning, this should not be a problem. Now only few hosted sites were still unable to change their DNS settings, but it's not my problem :-).
On the other hand, it looks that moving server to new server room will have some positive effect on it's health:
This night, long delayed operation has been done and server which gives you this page has been moved to another server room. It should bring a bit better conditions for server and you should not notice this except short outage in this night till all DNS caches on the way will will update their records. This is a theory and lets see what problems will appear tomorrow morning ;-).
It sometimes funny to review web server stats to see what people are looking for in my blog. I usually expect something like my name and projects I participate on. But there are some surprises:
For most of them I'm in first page in Google results, even though I have no idea why are my posts ranked so high even for such generic things as "product names", but I don't care. What surprises me most is "pissing". I guess I know what are people looking for when they enter this word to Google ;-). But according to Google webmaster tools, I'm somewhere near 110th position. Why the hell does somebody look so deep in results? And why does he go to one line blog post? I really don't understand this. Maybe I should focus on this word and bring my post to first page of Google results ;-).
Finally happened the thing which I expected to happen since I left to Japan. My server (currently being few thousands kilometers away) crashed and exactly followed Murphy's law to break in time when it would caused largest possible downtime. Anyway it's now back and I hope all services are correctly running.
And no, I have no idea what caused power led to blink and make the computer unresponsive for anything except plugging it out of power and then pugging it back. Hopefully it will not repeat, at least not until I'll be back in Prague :-).