Michal Čihař - Archive for Jan. 28, 2011

As my Gammu Hackweek 6 project went smoothly, I've decided to spend some time today on phpMyAdmin as well.

My work was mostly inspired by (IMHO unfair) comparing of Adminer and phpMyAdmin. I could surely create similar comparing where would be dozens of things why is phpMyAdmin better, but I don't want to go that way and I rather decided to spend my time on coding.

First and easy task was bit which is in comparing described as "Status variables", where I've added documentation links, so phpMyAdmin now has both short executive summary and link to the official documentation. While looking at server status page, I've categorized some newly added variables, so they now appear in right place. I also reconsidered formatting of numbers and hopefully current solution will work for everybody and not produce contradicting bug reports like the old one.

Then I did focus a little bit on testing AJAX and fixed some minor issues, mostly affecting Chrome/Chromium browsers, because they are strict in case of some errors.

Last but not least I've added URL redirector inside phpMyAdmin, so no external links will now reveal what did user actually was doing in phpMyAdmin, but rather the url of the redirector.

And when speaking about phpMyAdmin, I need to mention one thing as well: contribute yourself! You don't have to be developer, there is currently ongoing themes contest and we're always looking for translators.

Hackweek 6 is over and my project is done - Gammu can now talk to Symbian phones. All the work is based on Series60 - remote applet. The changes on Gammu side were not just to implement new protocol, but also some more general improvements it enforced. I think the diffstat summary tells how much was changed:

166 files changed, 23126 insertions(+), 15738 deletions(-)

All code is is available in our Git repository and check documentation for information how to set it up. There will be testing release incorporating these changes next week to give broader audience chance to test it.

So now Gammu has long requested support for Symbian and we need other challenge. That seems to be Android right now and there are already two approaches which might help there. One of them is porting Series60 applet to Android, what is planned by Series60-remote author. There is also other promising way, where I can not share much details right now, but I can give you a little teaser:

$ gammu identify
Device               : 192.168.1.4 5210
Manufacturer         : HTC
Model                : unknown (HTC Nexus One)
Firmware             : FRG**
IMEI                 : **************8
SIM IMSI             : **************7

Yes, getting basic information already works for the developer working on it :-).