Michal Čihař - Archive for Jan. 1, 2006

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 DocSQL import in phpMyAdmin was quite old and obscure code, I decided to convert it to regullar input plugin. This is now done in SVN, however there is one slight problem - I have only fuzzy idea what DocSQL actually is and I don't have any data to test it (besides those I could guess from plugin source). So I'd welcome if somebody who knows this beast, would give new plugin a bit of testing.

This has already happen yesterday, but I decided to announce it today, because now there is snapshot with all those changes.

With Subversion we can rename files without losing their histrory and this possibility lead to huge cleanup of file names. I dropped all _details and _properties parts of table and database pages. As user you should not notice anything (except for different URL), but there might be still some problematic parts which has not been detected when I did this change.

So please give a current trunk snapshot or demo a bit of testing so that we can find problems before going to RC stage.

In-Reply-To: [Newer version yield unexpected result....][b]

No I will never understand why somebody wants to submit bug report (which is duplicate anyway) in OpenDocument text, with yellow background, huge fonts and other crazy stuff. I'm probably old-fashioned, but I still think that plain text is enough (especially when another reporter was able to write it in few sentences). And of course writing useful summary is useless thing, the reason for summary field is just to write nothing saying sentence.

Marcin, I don't say that Gammu+ is generally bad. Simply there is not enough man power for Gammu and you will only trash your effort by doing another project. Most of improvements in Gammu+ can be also implemented in Gammu and you will not loose support for lots of phones.

I simply do not think we're powerfull enough to make revolution in Gammu sources which you call Gammu+.

I haven't yet deeply checked it's sources, but I'm affraid of it a bit from few parts I already saw.

I finally pushed myself on doing some progress on ukolovnik task tracker. It got some wanted features, brand new setup script and there is core of database based configuration.

Setup script works only for MySQL >= 4.1 and I will probably raise requirements to this version as I can not check anywhere correct functionallity with older versions. Anyway if there is some user of older version, please contact me, and we'll find a solution.

I can not promise new release date, but I want to finish db config soon and it is only remaining issue for next release.

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 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).

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 :-).