Michal Čihař - Archive for 4/2009

Now when there is already some content, it's time to announce planet phpMyAdmin. You will find there posts from phpMyAdmin contributors including Google Summer of Code students, so you might find there what interesting ideas they have. Please note that this blog does not have to contain only phpMyAdmin related posts, it's just for all what contributors do (as usual on other planets).

It currently lives on http://pmaplanet.cihar.com/.

PS: If you think your blog is missing there, please drop me a note.

If you can read this, it means that new server is running. It looks like migration went quite smoothly, at least I do not see any problems so far.

So now the phpMyAdmin demos, wiki and other not so popular services will have enough power to run nicely. I hope that quad core CPU with 8 gigabytes of RAM will last at least few ears ;-).

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.

This year it looks like Google Summer of Code will bring me much more work than it has brought in past years. Currently I have four students on the track:

• Mobile phones synchronisation for OpenSUSE. This will hopefully bring improvements to both Gammu and Conduit and the outcome should be working solution for at least some phones.
• Import improvements for phpMyAdmin. I would say this has been the best GSoC proposal I have seen so far, so let's see how it will progress.
• Changes tracking in phpMyAdmin. At the end we do have two projects on similar topic, but I want to push one of students more to synchronisation direction.

Let's see what will this bring to participating projects, but I hope all projects will end up at least with partial success and will bring great additions to free software.

Gammu 1.24.0 is out! It does not bring any new outstanding features, just small optimizations in SMSD, documentation improvements and various bug fixes.

Full list of changes:

• Better detect Bluetooth ports on Samsung (bug #862).
• Ignore security errors on AT init (needed for Huawei).
• LUID reading requires IrMC profile.
• Locations for GlobeTrotter 3G+ start at 0 (bug #847).
• More verbose logging of delivery reports (bug #824).
• Increase default DeliveryReportDelay (bug #824).
• Fixed handling of SMS locations (bug #853).
• PostgreSQL backend now supports IDs for RunOnReceive.
• RunOnReceive is started through shell not directly.
• Fixed reading of empty phonebook entries from Samsung (bug #809).
• Reread messages if CMGL shows them corrupted (bug #691).
• Added support for vNote files.
• Properly detect Nokia 6220 Classic (bug #840).
• Fix writing of phonebook on Motorola V8 (bug #827).
• Detect daemon on FreeBSD.
• Ignore charset errors on AT init as some phones might need PIN.
• Optionally use MT for phone phonebook for AT phones.
• Added support for quick dial numbers on AT phones.
• Fixed decoding of Samsung memory entries.
• Properly handle corrupted messages from Nokia phones (bug #811).
• Fix parsing of calls from Alcatel C701 (bug #831).
• Fixed handling of error states with -len and -autolen parameters.
• Fixed possible crash in DBI engine.
• PostgreSQL engine properly uses sequences instead of reinventing.
• MySQL engine properly uses auto increments instead of reinventing.
• Fix escaping of field name in PostgreSQL engine.
• Better SMSD files logging.
• Added testing of SMSD files engine.
• Increase timeout for AT settings SIM card SMS storage.
• Fixed date formatting in PostgreSQL SMSD service.
• Add option to install without documentation.
• Add -textutf8 option for TEXT sms.
• Fix crash when some lines in config are too long.
• Make smsdrc example better looking by removing obsolete docs.
• Make dku2 connection types work on Linux (alias to fbususb).
• Better calculation of signal percent.
• Fixed getting of memory status for some Nokias (bug #836).

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/,

Debian users will find packages in unstable soon, SUSE, Fedora and Mandriva users can check repository in OpenSuse Build Service and Ubuntu in my PPA.

Looking at student proposals for phpMyAdmin, we have at least five for improving import functionality in same way. It's good to have a choice, but if you are thinking about filing another proposal for import, I have to say it is really not a good idea, because we simply have too much of them already.

PS: Student checklist can help you to increase your chance being the chosen one ;-).