Michal Čihař - Archive for 10/2006

Nanoblogger plugin for include pages

I already wrote patch for this some time ago, but it turned out that it can be done more effectively using plugin interface. So after few minutes I wrote plugin for generating article list for each category which can be used for inclusion in other pages as you can see on my website (eg. pma.cihar.com).

New phone ordered

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 :-).

Dictionary in Debian!

Finally it has happenned: English-Czech dictionary has been accepted and should appear in archives on next mirror pulse. It unfortunately has to go to non-free due to GNU FDL with invariants sections, anyway it will be much easier for you to get it - no more fiddling with sources.lst!

Be careful on upgrading firmware

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…

Security in phpMyAdmin?

There was recently bug in our bug tracker that we compete with Microsoft to achieve highest number of security bugs. We definitely do not compete! However there always be security issues in such big application.

Majority of them are XSS issues, which are hard to detect automatically, so you either have to test various inputs or deeply analyze the code. Most attackers choose testing method and it sometimes bring them fruit. We try to fix any found issue as soon as possible, but it is not in our possibilities to fix it for all past releases that might have been included in some distribution.

Anyway I'd like to improve phpMyAdmin in this area and I think nobody would object if somebody would help us with code audit. I'm not enough experienced to see all possible flaws in code.

Wammu 0.17

Wammu 0.17 has been just released. New features:

  • Fix searching.
  • Remember column sorting.

As you can see there is not much to mention, because this is mostly bug fix release. Hopefully I didn't make much new bugs :-).

Make your software scalable!

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.