Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for Website

I just spent some time on improving my website. Well I'm not graphic designer, so the site won't ever be according to latest trends and won't look sexy.

Anyway I tried to improve visibility of some things a bit. The main page now includes small screenshots of some programs I want to point out, small screenshots on application page are clickable and there is more visible download link on some pages as users complained they have problems finding this. While working with stylesheets, I also added maximal width of main content. This probably does not work with all browsers, but I don't care, the text is still visible.

Other thing I updated is information about last year talk about Gammu, which now contains links to videos. I haven't seen them yet, but they might contain interesting information for Czech speaking people :-).

I finally managed to migrate some things to Subversion from Bazaar. This does not yet include Gammu related things (Gammu, python-gammu and Wammu), because they are more tricky to migrate.

However all Debian packaging now can be handled using svn-buildpackage, which makes things a bit easier. Also smaller projects like Ukolovnik, polld and dictionary converter have been migrated.

You can see list of repositories at http://svn.cihar.com/, where is also link to web based browser.

Please note that repositories might change in future, because everything is not yet completely settled down.

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!

I just updated bug tracker to latest version, which again fixes some security issues. I hope this won't break any existing functionality, but if it does, please write me at michal@cihar.com.

Hmm, maybe it's time to look for some BTS with less security problems? The only problem is that I don't follow others that hard, so I maybe only don't know about such issues…

After few days of outage, demo server is back running. To avoid possible problems, I now run it under separate vserver. This should limit any impacts of demo server to rest of services running on this host as it provides much better separation than chroot used before.

There still might be some issues with new setup, please tell me about them.

I was unable to complete demo server setup today, so you will have to wait longer for demo server availability. I hope I will manage this during weekend.

I'm sorry for todays server outage, but it seems to be caused by some DOS attack. As a result of this I decided to temporary disable demo server, because it was target of this attack.

Demo will be back during tommorow, when I make some stricter restrictions on access to it.

When I talked last November about 10,000 visitors, I really didn't expect that in four months, wiki will double this value. Looks like it is useful source of information for users. Only thing a bit frightens me - there are only few contributors and almost none except developers and few well known users. This is wiki, feel free to edit it!

PS: Server with twice more memory serves pages much better, hopefully you also noticed this. Anyway further donations are welcome ;-).

I finally managed to make screenshots page on wammu.eu. Now you can see small thumbnails directly on first page and it really looks like screenshots page :-).

Meanwhile also Gammu Phone Database got some improvements, but you should not notice anything there (besides added BenQ manufacturer).

I probably made something not popular, but I decided to add (minimal) advertisement on all demo pages (using config.footer.inc.php). You can dislike this step, but if number of visits for demo server will grow this way, it will soon need hardware upgrade and I'm not willing to pay it from my money.

If you want me to remove ads, the only way to do it is to donate some amount which might be used for hardware upgrade. In really near future server will probably need more memory.