Michal Čihař - Archive for Jan. 1, 2006

Můj free software 10. - ukolovnik

Začalo to klasicky tím, že jsem si ze stávající nabídky tisíce todo listů nebyl schopný vybrat nějaký, který by mi vyhovoval. No a po pár hodinách vznikla první verze Ukolovniku . V podstatě je to jenom další ukázka toho, že co si člověk nenapíše, to mu nevyhovuje. Už pomalu začínám chápat to že si každý napíše svůj klon Total Commanderu :-).

Nebudu znovu popisovat důvody, které mě k napsání vedly, to si najdete ve starším zápisku . Dnes umí vše co potřebuji a v plánu jsou už jen nové vlastnosti, které by bylo dobré mít, jako třeba instalační skript a přesun konfigurace do databáze. Na Freshmeatu si to nevede až tak špatně, ale zatím se nikdo neodvážil nahlásit chybu, tak nevím jestli to nikdo nepoužívá nebo je to opravdu bezchybné :-).

Cryptic names

Why the hell do wakeup devices for ACPI need that cryptic names? I'd like to enable wakeup on keyboard, however I have no idea whether my notebook supports is or not. And the names don't help much:

$ cat /proc/acpi/wakeup
Device  Sleep state     Status
USB1       3            disabled
USB2       3            disabled
USB4       3            disabled
 LAN       4            disabled
MPC0       3            disabled
MPC1       3            disabled
VIY0       3            disabled
AMDM       3            disabled
 LID       4            * enabled
PWRB       4            * enabled

Proplacení šeku

Pokouším se prokousat weby českých bankovních institucí, abych zjistil, kde mi z mého šeku zbyde nejvíc peněz :-). Nečekal jsem, že se jedná o tak složitý úkol. Většinou se člověk ukliká k smrti, než tuto informaci objeví.

Nabídky začínají na úžasných podmínkách jako 2 % z částky šeku, min. 1 000 Kč , které člověka spíš lákají k tomu si ten kousek papíru nechat. Moje banka mi nabízí 1 %, min. 100,-, max. 3000,- , třeba u eBanky je to velmi podobné, jen limity jsou nižší - 1%, min. 50, max. 1 500 . Jinde si zase nehrají na procenta a prostě si naúčtují 650 Kč za šek . Nějak se v tom začínám ztrácet :-).

Tak nějak doufám, že tu někdo podobný problém řešil. Třeba mi poradí, kde ten kousek papíru přeměnit na peníze s co nejmenšími desátky věnovanými bance :-).

Security forever?

It looks like XSS attacks against phpMyAdmin will be there forever. There is floating another in the air (if SourceForge would have working CVS, it would be already released). Maybe it's time to make complete rewrite of phpMyAdmin codebase? But that's too long term project and nobody seems to be interested in that. Maybe some security audit would help resolving at least most painful issues, but this is again same problem. Any volunteer to do this hard work?

phpMyAdmin vs. TurboDbAdmin

I finally found some time to quickly look and try to use TurboDbAdmin. It's sort of competitor to phpMyAdmin. Why I write sort of? Firstly there are still users which prefer non javascript solution, second reason is that TurboDbAdmin definitely needs some time to get matured. Right now it looks to me more like demo of their AJAX toolkit than real application. But it is getting better version to version.

However they have some ideas which we might incorporate. First think I noticed in documentation is that they have settings for broken setups of MySQL which lead to wrong displaying of data. Just put names="latin1" and it should work. Nice, but I still think that people should rather learn how to use encodings in MySQL properly.

Second usefull thing is reload link in left frame. Well they aren't able to reload it automatically, so they need it right now, but that simple link is requested by our users anyway.

Future of Wammu?

Most of users noticed that there is not much progress in Wammu development. This is mostly caused by problems which wxPython already caused me and drops my motivatio to create something new using it to zero. However I want Wammu to have future, so it looks obvious, that it has to leave wxPython.

For now I'm decided to go either with PyGTK or using some high level framework as Kiwi. The latter gives advantage of better abstraction, but pure PyGTK could attract more developers. I'm not yet decided about this choice and I'm creating proposal for highly modular core, which should allow (somewhat, at least for beginning) idependent plugins to handle different data in phone (and later maybe even different backends).

If you would like to join me in developing wammu-ng (the name will probably change), you're welcome to drop me a mail on michal@cihar.com.

Icons for RSS feeds

I just randomly found Feed Icons website which is trying to standardize icon for feeds. I'm not sure whether having exactly same icon on all sites is really needed, but thanks for the icon guys. Now I use it for related blog entries over rest of this web site.

Gammu popularity

It's nice to see how more and more people install Gammu since it has been included in Debian. Thanks to popcon I can see graph how it's popularity grows to sky :-).

Lets see whether Wammu will follow.