Michal Čihař - Archive for Jan. 1, 2009

Today I finally found some time to work on phpMyAdmin translations. First I started on localized documentation, where I improved our current score to 24% of strings (what is still far to few to generate translated document). Anybody willing to translate lot of documentation is welcome to join us (you can choose any other language if you do not know Czech).

Later I focused on user interface translations, where Czech recently was downgraded from premium class translation (almost every time at 100%) to somewhat lower quality (fight to keep over 90%). It's time to bring it back to premium quality and I hope I will help it a lot today.

PS: If you want to help with translating of phpMyAdmin into any language, just check our instructions for translators.

phpMyAdmin je již několik let přeložený do češtiny. Nyní je ovšem možné mít přeloženou i dokumentaci. Pomožte uživatelům s horší znalostí cizích jazyků a podpořte vývoj tohoto velmi populárního nástroje. Překládat můžete (po registraci) na našem překladovém serveru .

Recently we opened up translation of phpMyAdmin documentation over web using Pootle tool. As you can see on summary page, it gained some attention, but not much. You are still invited to translate!

However this is not original reason for my post. The reason is that we got question, whether we want to use translatewiki.net for translating phpMyAdmin itself. Currently we use simple PHP files with strings to localize what probably won't change in near future and translatewiki.net seems to already support similar ways of localizing PHP applications.

Now the question is whether to invest effort into this direction. Web based interface definitely lowers barrier for translating, but nobody is really responsible there and you may end up with poor quality. What is better, no translation, or not perfect translation?

PS: I'd really prefer to migrate to gettext based solution for phpMyAdmin, but this seems unlikely, mostly because gettext as integrated in PHP is quite painful. Once you load translation, it is kept opened and any changes in the file lead to segfault and any replacing of the file is deleted. So the only way to make it see updated translation is to restart PHP (or Apache if you use mod_php).

I finally find time to make another release of Gammu. This time there are major changes in SMS decoding, especially for recent Nokia phones, what should fix several problems seen with previous code. Besides this there is usual bunch of bug fixes.

Full list of changes follows:

• Fix code problems caught by GCC 4.5.
• Compile static libraries with -fPIC (they might be later linked into shared ones) (bug #909).
• Handle own number error code in 6510 driver (bug #910).
• Add ID for Nokia 5220 (bug #910).
• Handle SMSC error code in 6510 driver (bug #910).
• Disable gcc warnings about non literal format strings (bug #901).
• Add more fuzzy logic to detect bad encoding from phone (bug #874).
• Add ID for Nokia 7500 and Nokia 7210s.
• Improve searching for Bluetooth stack on OS X.
• Fix ctype compile time warnings on NetBSD (bug #908).
• Nokia 3110c has SMS on filesystem (bug #904).
• Add ID for Nokia 5130 (bug #911).
• Faster reading of Nokia filesystem.
• New PDU decoder which properly parses PDU data.
• AT driver uses new PDU decoder.
• 6510 driver uses new PDU decoder and understands most formats of filesystem Nokia SMS messages (bug #911).

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

Debian users will find packages in experimental soon, SUSE, Fedora and Mandriva users can check experimental repository in OpenSuse Build Service.

New version of simple todo manager called Ukolovnik has been just released. The only updates are in translations (added French, German and Russian translations) and locales setup.

Yesterday I finally found some time to analyze all filesystem message dumps for Nokia phones. I always hated way Gammu used to decode these messages, because in most cases decoding was almost same function just with added some random offsets.

After some time looking into the dumps, I finally came out with description of the format. It it still not complete, but it allowed to simplify the code a lot while fixing bugs with some messages previous solution did not catch.

Now I hope I did not miss anything and new code will not introduce new regressions.

Již je tomu nějaký ten pátek, co jsem pro tu phpMyAdmina hledal překladatele . Překlad se sice díky tomu pohnul, ale stále ještě není kompletní. Nicméně to není důvod proč dnes píši. Tím důvodem je spuštění překladu dokumentace.

Dokumentace samozřejmě obsahuje nemalé množství textu (skoro 1500 řetězců, většina jsou celé odstavce) a tak bude nejlepší, když se na to vrhne více lidí.

Pokud se do toho někomu chce, stačí zavítat na překladový server , zaregistrovat a hurá do toho. Zkušenější překladatelé asi raději sáhnou rovnou po po souborech a pošlou nám patch.

I've just set up system for translating documentation using gettext, so you have another great opportunity to bring phpMyAdmin closer to non English speaking audience.

The translation is done using po4a and gettext, what makes it more standard and probably also easier than translating phpMyAdmin itself. The easiest way to start translating is to go to https://l10n.cihar.com/projects/pmadoc/, login and translate.

If you prefer more control, you can get po file (either by svn co https://phpmyadmin.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/phpmyadmin/trunk/localized_docs/po or by finding it online using ViewVC) and send us updates.

I added all languages which have reasonable amount of translation and/or recent activity in phpMyAdmin. If your language is missing feel free to ask me to add one, but consider first translating phpMyAdmin itself.

Dear students, the Community Bonding Period is almost over and I have not seen much activity from most of you. Maybe you really do not have any questions about the project or existing code base, but I really doubt it (well, the code documentation is always the weak point).

The summer is not that long as you might think and you will have lot of things to do during it!

PS: phpMyAdmin's GSoC 2009 Student Guide is still valid.

I finally found some time to work on planet phpMyAdmin. It now has same look as phpmyadmin.net website, links to feeds are more visible and the website links to it at some places.

All templates and planet configuration are now stored in our SVN repository.

Now let's hope that I will not be the only one who regularly posts there :-).