Michal Čihař - Archive for Jan. 1, 2011

GSoC projects for phpMyAdmin

This year we will have two more projects is GSoC comparing to last year, the chosen ones being:

  • OpenGIS support for phpMyAdmin by Madhura Jayaratne
  • Zoom-search by Ammar Yasir
  • Browse-mode Improvements ++ by Aris Feryanto
  • Drizzle support by Piotr Przybylski
  • AJAXify phpMyAdmin Interface by Thilanka Kaushalya
  • Support for Procedures: Creating a user friendly interface for the manipulation of routines, triggers and events in phpMyAdmin by Rouslan Placella
  • Query statistics & charts for the status page by Tyron
  • phpMyAdmin Automated Testing by Zarubin Stas

Looking forward to cooperation with new students, especially Madhura, Rouslan and Tyron, which I will be mentoring.

Photo of a week 15

As you can see in week number, I failed to take photo every week. Nevertheless I will try to continue, maybe I won't skip that much. To compensate it a little, I've decided to publish two photos taken in Prague Botanical Garden on annual butterfly event.

Butterfly Butterfly

phpMyAdmin translation status

We're heading to release candidates for phpMyAdmin 3.4.0 (probably once GSoC application/evaluation rush period is over), so the translators have less time to make the translations better. There is no new complete translation, so we still have 14 translations at 100%:

There are still lot of translations which would need some love, for example:

Recently two of our prospective GSoC students started to contribute to translations, so there is great progress in Sinhala and Hindi translations. Looking forward to have these completed soon :-).

You can also help make translation to your language better! If your language is missing just let me know (either in comments or by email).

Bits from GSoC applications

Reading GSoC applications is sometimes funny. This year I've decided to be active only in phpMyAdmin projects, but this still gives enough interesting texts.

Some people definitely did not even care about looking at our name and think phpMyAdmin is written in C:

I assume this project would require C/C++ programming and, of course, SQL.

We ask people to tell us a little about their real life, in most cases this includes information where did the student study and so on, but sometimes it is just:

I'm a fairly standard guy.

In some cases people rather use some random file sharing service to post their CV and I'm too impatient to wait for several minutes till free download is available and I'm definitely not going to pay to download it.

PS: As usual, the last day we receive most incomplete proposals over the time. Generally I think that the best proposals arrive at beginning and the quality lowers. This is probably heavily influenced by our requirements for students to know the code before and advertising GSoC early, so that the really interested ones are ready to submit proposals as soon as the interface is open, while others trying to catch train later.

Pushing harder on incomplete translations

Looking at current state of some phpMyAdmin translations, I came to conclusion that some are not worth shipping, because they really do not translate reasonable amount of the interface. The problematic question is where to draw the line. For 3.4.0-rc1 I drew it at 50% of messages, what means that 25 languages currently pass. It might look too strict and the threshold will most likely change for final 3.4.0, but we need to start somewhere.

While discussing this topic on mailing list, Tyron Madlener came with idea to tell users of incomplete translations about it and point them to information how to contribute. I quickly implemented this idea and it is now in git and live on demo server. I deliberately decided not to remove incomplete translations on demo server, maybe they will attract new contributors thanks to new warning on main page.

Pleased by GSoC applications quality

So far I'm quite pleased by quality of GSoC applications we receive for phpMyAdmin. Tightening our applicant guide seems to be good idea and getting people active early and discuss the proposals seems to filter out the bad ones.

This also means that we will probably receive much less applications than last year. We've received 64 last year and we're not yet at half of the count, while only three days are left for students to submit their proposals.

Anyway take this as friendly reminder that not much time is left, especially if you want to receive some feedback for adjusting missing bits in the proposal.

phpMyAdmin translation status

We're heading to release candidates for phpMyAdmin 3.4.0, so the translators have less time to make the translations better. The Italian translation got to 100% this week thanks to Rouslan Placella. So there are now 14 translations at 100%:

There are still lot of translations which would need some love, for example:

The progress recently started to work on Bulgarian and Brazilian Portuguese translations seems to be stalled for now, what is not good.

You can help make translation to your language better! If your language is missing just let me know (either in comments or by email).

phpMyAdmin in GSoC

As students will be able to submit applications to GSoC later today (see timeline), it's time to promote that phpMyAdmin again participates.

The ideas list is based on the one from last year with few additions, but as always, you are welcome to bring your own ideas. All information you want to know before applying can be found in our applicant guide. The most important thing is that we require you to submit patches to fix some bug or implement feature request before deadline for application submission. This proved last year to be useful to get people in touch with code base before accepting them, so that they have all things set up even before community bonding period.

So all students are welcome, you will be able to apply later today on our GSoC page.

Playing with DLNA aka uPNP

Having Synology diskstation, notebook with XBMC and smart phone with Symbian, it should be possible to make all these talk together being able to play music stored on the diskstation using XBMC and controlled by phone, right?

I tried to set it up some time ago, but I used samba export on the diskstatio and all I found for controlling was XBMC Symbian S60 Remote v2, which is indeed useful, but choosing what to play remotely is quite limited. Luckily yesterday I've discovered world of DLNA aka uPNP and was surprised that this works pretty well. I've configured diskstation to behave as a uPHP media server, XBMC is able to act as media renderer and my Nokia E52 has ability to act as a controller. If you are lost in these terms, good overview is available here.

Well the control interface of Nokia E52 is far from perfect, but still provides good way to control all the stuff. Maybe I will look for some other solution in future, I'm sure it will exist as well.

phpMyAdmin translation status

We're heading to release candidates for phpMyAdmin 3.4.0, so the translators have less time to make the translations better. There are still 13 translations at 100%:

There are still lot of translations which would need some love, for example:

Recently, new people started to work on Bulgarian and Brazilian Portuguese translations, so we will hopefully have these two on the list soon as well.

You can help make translation to your language better! If your language is missing just let me know (either in comments or by email).