Michal Čihař - Archive for Jan. 1, 2010

There seems to be increasing demand for changing default theme in phpMyAdmin. Well the obvious question is which one to choose :-). There are currently 3 themes compatible with 3.3 branch, what is still far away from current master, however I don't see that they would mean big improvement over current ones.

Maybe we should just make some contest for new theme?

Anyway if we decided to change the theme, we will still get complains from users that we did the change. At least this is what I remember from last attempt to do so several years ago :-).

The phpMyAdmin's feature tracker is kind of special thing, which grows all the time. From time to time I try to go through all of them and properly mark those who are fixed meanwhile or do not make sense anymore.

Today I started with 277 (49 of them already marked as fixed in upcoming releases). After random accessing the list and about one hour I'm down to 266 (53 out of them fixed in git). Well 15 less is not that much better, but at least I managed to kill some long waiting zombies, which turned out to be bugs instead of feature requests.

One of things I missed for quite a long time in Lazygal compared to lot of other galleries is navigation using keys in between the images. Well, it should be easy to implement, shouldn't it?

A little bit of googling and reading jQuery documentation and the code is here :-).

It seems to work fine in browsers which I use, you can try it yourself.

I finally made some progress on Czech translation of phpMyAdmin and it has again reached 100%. It was first time since merging GSoC projects, which introduced quite a lot of new strings. Not that they would be hard to translate, but it was rather hard to find time for that.

However there are still lot of translations which are quite behind and would need some love. So if you can translate, you're welcome to join our translators and translate!

PS: If you're looking for more work, we're also translating documentation :-).

While working on new Gammu documentation I came to need to include some graphs showing some workflows. Looking into Sphinx documentation (which is used for the documentation for Gammu), I've discovered nice integration with graphviz.

Fortunately it was pretty easy to learn the basics, though I've never used it before and here it comes - message processing workflows for SMSD.

I always wondered why backups of my sever using duplicity are so huge, but simply looking at list of files to include seemed to be correct. However I should really spend more time by reading documentation, because now it was obvious to me that the file list is simply wrong.

What a small difference in file list:

- /var/lib/vservers/
+ /var/lib

Versus the old one:

+ /var/lib
- /var/lib/vservers/

Spending almost whole day on network infrastructure at home. I decided to say good bye to commercial provider and move to JM-Net, which is local community network. I bought EapStation earlier this week and tested the setup, but what was left was to install the device permanently and connect it to my home (OpenWRT based) router.

Everything went quite smoothly and I now use new connection. It's faster, lower latencies and cheaper than what I used to have. Plus as a bonus it should have soon native IPv6.

The only little issue I've faced is how to add additional IP address to otherwise DHCP interface in OpenWRT. Googling did not reveal much, however this seem to do the trick:

cat > /etc/hotplug.d/iface/40-second-ip << EOT
#!/bin/sh
[ "$ACTION" = "ifup" -a "$INTERFACE" = "eth0.1" ] && ip a add 192.168.1.100/24 dev eth0.1
EOT

I was quite unhappy with nanoblogger which I was using for quite some time on this blog. Not that it is bad, but it really scales bad. Having more than 600 of blog posts is something which it really has troubles to handle.

So I decided to go somewhere else. After looking and testing some ready solutions, I rather decided to implement my own engine using Django. The implementation took exactly one evening including script to migrate old posts, so it was really an easy task. As a bonus I get quite easily reusable components once I decide to change my main website to Django as well.

Also while doing this change, I changed the look quite a lot, hopefully this one is easier to navigate and it did not lose any of old functionality.

It looks like quite popular thing on Planet Debian to start using flattr. I registered most of software on which I'm involved already week ago, but I did not have much time publicizing it. Surprisingly people have found things just on flattr without any external links. You can see all of them listed on my flattr profile.

Today I decided to add my blog as a thing and integrated it to my blog, so you can now see flattr button under each post. I decided not to spread this into RSS, at least for now :-).

If you have not yet heard about flattr it is social micropayment site (lot of buzzwords included, so it has to be cool, right?), where you need to register, put there little amount of money and it will be spread each month among projects you "flattr". Sounds like a nice idea for appreciating free software.

GSoC 2010 is over for some time and I should write some summary how students projects ended up. The very short summary is that all five students were successful and their work got merged. Follows description of the project in no particular order.

Thanks to Martynas Mickevicius you can now get charts out of various parts of phpMyAdmin. They are used on server status pages or you can get query results in form of several charts. It seems to work pretty well at least what I've tried so far.

Ankit Gupta was working on Visual Query Builder for phpMyAdmin. Unfortunately this is only project which is not yet merged to master branch, mostly because some UI things were not yet finished. But hopefully it will be merged soon.

Adnan Mughal was converting our schema export feature from PDF to support multiple formats. You can now get the schema as SVG, DIA or even Visio formats, some of them will require a little bit of tuning still, because the scaling is not perfect.

Ninad Pundalik did a lot of work on AJAXifying phpMyAdmin. His changes touched quite a lot of places and there are still some rough edges (as you can see in our bug tracker), but this is definitely welcome improvement and I hope it will get stable soon.

Piotr Przybylski basically continued in his effort two years ago when he had reimplemented setup script and now he had focused on user configuration. It can be stored in session, browser local storage (HTML 5 feature) or in separate table in phpMyAdmin configuration storage (that's new name for pmadb). This is something what people were requesting for very long time and I'm happy we can finally bring this feature.

And last but not least is Lorikeet Lee, who spend lot of time on tuning user interface of phpMyAdmin. The most visible changes are on export and import pages, which now should be less scaring for new users, but there are other changes in lot of other places, for example the main page.

Generally it was a great summer and I hope we will be so successful also next year.

PS: You can try all these features on http://demo.phpmyadmin.net/.