Michal Čihař - Archive for 11/2010

phpMyAdmin 3.4 is just in the alpha state (second alpha release being done right now), so it's time to continue in presenting new features. As usual, just download 3.4 alpha or try them on our demo server. If you find any problems while playing with it, do not hesitate and ask or report bug.

phpMyAdmin is now much faster in modern browsers, thanks to using AJAX in lot of places instead of loading whole new page. This is probably the most intrusive change made in 3.4 and at time of writing this post, there are still some rough edges, but the developers are polishing them right now.

Also there is not only AJAX, but lot of user input can be validated on client side now allowing faster reactions on invalid input.

This feature was implemented by Ninad Pundalik during Google Summer of Code 2010.

As phpMyAdmin is heading closer to 3.4 release, we would like to invite translators to be able to bring this version localized as much as possible.

We don't expect any message changes to happen in 3.4 anymore, so it's best time to start translating right now. You can find more information about translating on our website, but you can as well start translating right now at translation server.

There are so many languages, but majority of languages are really in bad shape right now. This is your chance to contribute to the free software!

While doing some bigger downloads, my wifi network used to have big problems, seeing tx errors, frame errors on the router. The router is old ASUS WL-500g Deluxe which was running OpenWrt Kamikaze up to now. I was anyway thinking going for something with 802.11a or 802.11n support, so I started to look for replacement. While looking for it and checking what newer boxes are supported by OpenWrt, I noticed, that I can finally try using 2.6 kernel and I should get working wireless as well with free (what was not possible for very long time).

I gave it a try and upgraded to Backfire 10.03.1-rc4. And looks there is no need to upgrade hardware right now. No more tx errors, the wireless is much more stable and faster.

Thanks to anybody who helped to create free drivers for Broadcom 4306 wireless chip.

PS: Upgrading OpenWrt while keeping configuration lead to horrible mess in my case, so I rather did clean install reconfiguring everything and rediscovering all errors I've made in the past.

Surprisingly, my Monday blog post has received much more attention than I did expect and was source for at least one article full of speculations (in Czech). Hey, there was no new information in the post, nor some secret information leak (not that I know something what is not known publicly).

Anyway meanwhile public announcement about UNIX copyrights has been made. I don't think it changes much, but it seems to be one if things people wanted to know.

What I find more interesting (and hard to read and understand) is explanation of the currently publicly available bits from a transactional lawyer at The Standards Blog. At least it gave me basic idea why some things are so complex in this deal and just confirmed that I want to avoid need for contact with lawyers language as much as possible :-).

Next article highlighting some new features which will come in phpMyAdmin 3.4 is about more little changes. You can try them it out on our demo server. Or just wait few hours for first alpha release of 3.4.

The user interface cleanup is partly connected with previous changes, because some functionality simply required more Javascript (for example editor for ENUM/SET fields). Besides these there were major changes in export and import pages, which now should be easier to understand, hiding advanced options from unexperienced users, while still providing ability to change them.

This feature was implemented by Lori Lee during Google Summer of Code 2010.

Today was quite strange day for me - at the morning I felt quite bad so I took sick day to rest a bit. During afternoon I turned on the computer to see announcement that Novell agrees to be bought in $2.2b deal. As this is company where I work, it of course has attracted my attention.

Novell was bought by Attachmate, a company with one quarter of our employees, and over a third of our revenue, what sounds strange. And this is the first time I hear of this company...

The information is now very scarce (we as employees were not really given more information than is available publicly), so all what remains to people is to speculate. What does it mean for openSUSE? What is the "certain intellectual property" transferred to CPTN Holdings LLC (owned by Microsoft Corp.)? And some people just comment on current situation of Novell and some of it's products :-).

Next article highlighting some new features which will come in phpMyAdmin 3.4 is about relations export. This feature is not much known anyway, so if you have not seen it in phpMyAdmin, just try it out on our demo server or configure phpMyAdmin configuration storage in your copy.

In previous versions, it was possible to export database relational schema into PDF format. The 3.4 release comes with modular system for exporting schema adding SVG, Dia, EPS or Microsoft Visio. Especially SVG and EPS are useful for embedding schema into other documents.

This feature was implemented by Muhammad Adnan during Google Summer of Code 2010.

The upcoming 3.4 release will bring lot of new functionality. Some of that has been developed by core members, but many contributions were made thanks to Google Summer of Code program, where five students were working on improving phpMyAdmin. If you want to try new features, you can do that on the phpMyAdmin demo server. And I will introduce them in series of blog posts.

One of long requested features was ability to change configuration for each user. And phpMyAdmin now has it. If you have configured the phpMyAdmin configuration storage, settings are permanently stored in the database, otherwise in session and optionally in web storage in your browser.

You can configure any aspect of phpMyAdmin not affecting security or server performance, like confirming DROP queries, default export settings, user interface tweaks and so on.

This feature was implemented by Piotr Przybylski during Google Summer of Code 2010.

Yesterday, stardict-czech got accepted to Debian. So there is yet another useful dictionary for Czech users available in Debian without need to use my repository (however daily builds are still available there).

The dictionary is built from ABZ.cz: slovník cizích slov using my set of scripts, which are also capable of converting other dictionaries.

Thanks to FTP masters team for accepting new package even in freeze, when they are busy with other things. Great work guys.

During the weekend, I've found some time to improve documentation for Gammu. One of user accessible things which did lack documentation are native file formats used by Gammu.

There is not that much of them as Gammu supports standard formats for most data (like vCard, vCalendar, iCalendar), but there are things where standard simply does not exists and we need to store that data as well. This is the case for backups (both data and SMS), where SMS backup format is used as well for files backend in Gammu SMSD.

So I went through the SMS backup internals and wrote the documentation. While reading the code I of course discovered quite obvious bug, which was for some reason undiscovered for very long time.