Michal Čihař - Archive for Jan. 1, 2011

As most of the GSoC projects in phpMyAdmin go on quite well, we're already merging some of the new features to our master branch. You can try them all on our demo server and you are welcome to report any issues found :-).

First big part which has been changed is rewriting of server status page done by Tyron Madlener. It now provides more information, provides real time charts and much more. This change also included change in charts produced in other places in the code, so they are now more interactive and allow easy exporting.

The browse mode got improved as well, you can now reorder columns (by Aris Feryanto) and there are new options for displaying GIS data (by Madhura Jayaratne). While speaking about GIS, I have to mention another new feature - rendering of GIS data, either as polygons or on OpenStreetMap map (you can see it by clicking on "Visualize GIS data" link on browse page, it is not possible to link it directly due to XSS protection).

Many smaller changes are being done by Thilanka Kaushalya to convert various parts of user interface to AJAX.

And last but not least we have nice support for editing stored procedures and functions. Support for events and triggers will follow soon. All these are being done by Rouslan Placella.

I hope you will like these new features and thanks to all our GSoC students who are doing great job.

You can see it from my blog activity as well, I simply lack time for lot of things.

My Gammu mail folders are horribly full of unread mail, it took me there three months to release a new testing version and there are still some patches pending for review.

On phpMyAdmin side I spend most time with my GSoC students, who progress really well, but that's pretty much all I can do there. The good news is that phpmyadmin.cz website has new maintainer and is again getting new content. Hopefully it will stay alive for longer time to bring back lost visitors.

My Debian contributions are in still pretty good shape and I manage to fix important bugs, though my MPD related packages are still for sale. Still considering whether to go or not to go to Debconf, my decision will be probably based on fact whether I will get travel sponsorship or not (and when it would happen).

Besides these free software activities I began to be more active in Společné aktivity (in Czech) project for organizing various activities to spend free time.

Occasionally I also contribute to OpenStretMap, but it's more or less random time when I notice something is wrong or when I manage to visit some place which is not that good mapped. The good thing is that Prague is pretty good shape there, so it does not motivate me to spend too much time on this :-).

And of course there is my work at SUSE, working on usual L3 front and improving our Django based incident tracking tool.

Maybe I should step down from some of these, but it would be pretty hard for me to choose which one...

Today, Marc has released phpMyAdmin 3.4.0. This is huge step and introduces lot of new features. The most noteworthy are:

• User preferences
• Relation schema export to multiple formats
• ENUM/SET editor
• Simplified interface for export/import
• AJAXification of some parts
• Charts
• Visual query builder

As you can see, many of new features come from last GSoC, it took us almost half year to stabilize all new stuff and make it work nicely together.

Thanks to last minute improvements in Japanese, it is fully translated to 15 languages, other translations are little behind, but you can still help improving them for future releases.

The master branch is now open to development and we will start to merge patches accumulated in patch tracker for addition after feature freeze.

PS: I forgot to mention that this release fixed largest number of feature requests and bugs ever - over 160 issues from sf.net tracker got closed. This can be nicely seen on tracker stats.

PS2: Package with new version was just uploaded to Debian.

Finally some outdoor morning photography from spring. Taken at fields near Hovořany.

Taken again using PENTAX K7 + PENTAX-DA 70mm F2.4 Limited.

While working on dictionaries for StarDict today, I've decided to finally bring them to openSUSE as well.

First step was to fix my favorite tool to access them - sdcv. The fixed package is now in my home project and will be hopefully soon accepted to Education project so that it is more visible (see request 69901 if it is already the case).

When I had the tool working, it was time to package dictionaries themselves. It was quite simple task and the rpms are available in my home project.

To install packages on openSUSE 11.4 simply do:

zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/Nijel:/stardict/openSUSE_11.4/ stardict
zypper ref
zypper in  stardict-czech  stardict-english-czech  stardict-german-czech

I've just changed scripts used to generate dictionaries for StarDict to avoid creating new tarballs when there is no real change in the data. This should avoid needless updates of the tarballs and automatically built packages when there is no real change in the data underneath.

If you somehow relied on fact that there is new tarball/package every day (or month for "stable" versions), this is no longer true and new ones will be generated only on changes.

I only hope I've tested everything properly and tarballs will really be generated on change :-).

It's time to report again progress on phpMyAdmin translations. I will make it shorter this time :-).

There has been great progress in translation progress. Japanese translation is near completing (only 55 messages are missing right now) thanks to Yuichiro who did tremendous work there. There is also ongoing effort for Sinhala translation lead by Madhura Jayaratne. Nevertheless the number of complete translations is still 14 (see my previous post for complete list).

Besides translating phpMyAdmin itself, there was lot of work on translating documentation, so we now have complete documentation translated to Spanish and very good progress on Chinese one.

As the final release of 3.4.0 is really close, anybody is welcome to translate missing bits. Any Norwegian, Polish or Finnish readers of this blog? I'm sure you can still make your translation complete! (Others are welcome as well of course.)

There seem to be lot of momentum in discussions about making Debian testing more attractive to users on debian-devel mailing list (see Lucas's summary for summary of the lengthy discussion).

One of the raised points there is that Debian misses equivalent of Ubuntu's PPA or openSUSE build service. As Debian is usually about do-ocracy, it will be there once it will be implemented, but I still don't think it is always useful to have such thing.

The problem with both (but this is especially the case for openSUSE build service) is that you need to add dozens of home: projects with questionable quality of the software. This usually leads to horrible mess, especially in case of incompatible libraries with different build options (anybody using wxWidgets?).

It can definitely lower barrier for people to create packages for the distro, but is it really good to lower barrier that much? I'd really prefer new things to be uploaded to Debian itself without need to use any external repositories, it would ensure at least some level of quality and compatibility with other packages.

Finally some picture published on time. Going to slightly larger animals this week. Picture taken at parkour race in Prague.

Taken again using PENTAX K7 + PENTAX-DA 70mm F2.4 Limited.

Slightly delayed, but here comes photo for last week. I simply failed to download it from camera and process it. Continuing in animal macro, this time it is frog somewhere in Beskydy mountains.

Taken again using same combo PENTAX K7 + PENTAX-DA 35mm F2.8 Macro Limited.