Michal Čihař - Archive for Jan. 1, 2010

With increasing popularity of Flattr (114,057 € has gone through the Flattr system in two months), several people start to recommend what things to flattr. I'm not going into this business, however they seem so find interesting things for me so you might like it as well.

The Flattr Free and Open Source Software by Raphaël Hertzog is actually thing which has attracted me to the Flattr. It collects recommendations how to tag your free software on Flattr and each month it publishes five recommendations which projects to flattr.

The other thing I've noticed is list made each month by Evgeni Golov, which I've mostly noticed because increasing popularity of phpMyAdmin on Flattr, because he was really fast in advertising it :-).

While working on my new website, I've decided also to put documentation for Python modules into more pleasant format and use Sphinx for that.

As it can include docstrings automatically and writing text in rst is really easy, after few minutes, the photo-uploader documentation got migrated to photo-uploader manual, which indeed looks nicer that old man page + epydoc generated stuff.

After recent switch of this blog to Django, I've also planned to switch rest of my website to use same engine. Most of the code is already written, however I've found some forgotten parts, which nobody used for really a long time.

As most of the things there is free software, I don't like idea removing it completely, however it is quite unlikely that somebody will want to use these ancient things. Especially when it quite lacks documentation and I really forgot about that (most of them being Turbo Pascal things for DOS, Delphi components for Windows and so on). Anyway it will probably live only on dl.cihar.com in case anybody is interested.

The phpMyAdmin thing on Flattr has been around already for some time. I just created it together with other my stuff and somehow did not find time to discuss it with other project members and push it to our website. Despite this fact it got some attention and even recommendations.

Today, being pushed by Linus Olsson from Flattr (who just forwarded questions about authenticity of phpMyAdmin on Flattr), I finally find time to get an agreement from other project members and placed the button on phpMyAdmin's website.

Let's see how popular it will become now :-).

I've just set up another database to phpMyAdmin demo server - Drizzle. At first attempt phpMyAdmin did not work at all, but after few fixes (basically disabling all charsets/collation handling we do on connect), we're at least able to connect and show the interface with some databases and tables.

However there is much more things to fix (for example phpMyAdmin does not see all tables for some reason) and definitely more to test. However the question is if we want to officially support Drizzle and put some effort into it.

You can try phpMyAdmin with Drizzle here: http://demo.phpmyadmin.net/master-config/?server=3

I've just finished another step for new Gammu manual - it includes also documentation for gammu utility. It includes all content from the man page, reformatted and improved in some sections. So now the documentation does cover all important parts and can contain correct cross references.

The only problematic thing was to handle non dash starting commands in Sphinx. Unfortunately it does not seem to like this idea, so I had to invent some ugly hacks, which workaround that (just changing the regexps which sphinx.domains.std uses).

The man page will be from now on generated from this source as well.

More than year ago, I've generated mysel new PGP key (4096 bit RSA), with intention to migrate to it sooner or later. Being little pushed by Bits from keyring-maint, I've decided the right time is about now.

As I was giving the key for signing in past more than year, it already has quite a lot of signatures (actually more than the old key). You might notice that the old key has signed far more keys. This is mostly caused by simple fact that I did use both keys for signing, while only giving new one to be signed.

So if you're among these people who signed the old one (0x36E75604), please check the transition document and consider signing my new key (0x42B7511D).

Thanks to contributions of other people, I can now announce new release of Ukolovnik. It brings theme updates and en_GB translation.

Full list of changes:

• Explicitely mention that we do not provide authentication (bug #993).
• Updated Oxygen theme.
• Added en_GB translation.

I had this topic in mind for quite a long time, but it got more recently more attention because of discussions on gammu-users mailing list. Gammu should use some library for do basic stuff like strings or date manipulations, logging and so on.

The reason is that having own implementation of all that is not really useful and just source of another amount of bugs. Currently mi intention is to use GLib, simply because I don't know any C alternative (though there are probably lot of C++ cross platform libraries).

Of course the biggest question is how to make the change, because it will be obviously intrusive and making such big changes will probably lead to several months of work without really making another release. Even if it will be done on separate branch (what would be most likely the case), developers will spend most of time on this issue and not much time will be spent on bug fixes (and backporting them).

Today I decided to ask for adopter of GPointingDeviceSettings. The single reason is that I no longer have hardware (touchpad) needed to diagnose most of bugs which appear within it.

So if you want to get a(nother) Debian package to maintain, go ahead for it.

The sources are in collab-maint svn and currently use svn-buildpackage:

svn://svn.debian.org/collab-maint/deb-maint/gpointing-device-settings/trunk/

Should the new maintainer need package sponsoring, I'm definitely available.