Michal Čihař - Archive for Jan. 1, 2012

Even though I've planned to do this on Monday, it somehow slipped to Wednesday, but I've finally filled in GSoC 2012 evaluations for all students I mentor at phpMyAdmin.

Generally all of them perform quite well, but there is always room for improvements :-).

The greatest pain every year is filling up evaluations for more students - every each of them starts with same questions for mentor (eg. how many GSoC did you participate in or how much time you spend on GSoC). I know I can copy and paste answers, but still this looks like something not necessary. Also some information is probably already known to Google (eg. in which years I did participate in GSoC).

Weblate just got new feature, which might help you attracting new translators - embeddable widgets. You can put them to your website to show current state of the translation and attract new ones to simple introduction page.

Right now, there is only one widget, but I hope to add more in future. However I'm far from being good in graphics, so if anybody could come up with some templates, I'd gladly use them :-).

Anyway the current widget for Weblate itself looks like this:

As Weblate 1.1 is out, it's time to schedule next release. This release will bring some small improvements to the workflow, especially it will allow to tune it to different use cases than I originally had in mind.

I've already started tagging bugs and feature requests to be fixed in 1.2 in [issue tracker][4]. Basically no big features on the list, just smaller things like notifications and locking. And of course dozen of bugfixes as the bugs will appear :-).

As you can see there as well, 1.2 should be ready about month from now. This will be possible only thanks to Hackweek VIII (the wiki is still showing last one), which will happen from July 23rd to July 27th. The rest is time for testing the features and polishing the features.

Anyway I might have time for some other features as well, so 1.2 might bring more things than I currently plan. But that depends on how fast I will be in implementing planned stuff.

Pretty much on schedule, Weblate 1.1 has been released today. It comes with translation updates, bug fixes, improvements in working with Git repositories and brings support for offloading indexing.

Full list of changes for 1.1:

• Improved several translations.
• Better validation while creating subproject.
• Added support for shared git repositories across subprojects.
• Do not necessary commit on every attempt to pull remote repo.
• Added support for offloading indexing.

You can find more information about Weblate on it's website, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Ready to run appliances can be found in SUSE Studio Gallery.

Weblate is also being used https://l10n.cihar.com/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and others.

If you are free software project which would like to use Weblate, I'm happy to help you with set up or even host Weblate for you (this will be decided case by case as my hosting space is limited).

Update: Weblate appliace has now also been updated to 1.1.

When I wrote Weblate I expected that major use cases will be free software projects, which will use it for public translating service. At least this was my intention for it.

But I seem to be wrong, at least for now. Most of people who contact me regarding Weblate are doing private installations and I already know few places where it was massively used. Unfortunately most of them rejected to be publicly mentioned, so I can't tell you the names. But they do exist :-).

Anyway I hope for some free software projects to adopt Weblate as well, otherwise I should have written it as commercial software :-)

Starting next week, I'll start at new job. I will still stay at SUSE, so it's not that big change, but still it is new challenge for me.

I'll be moving out of L3 department, where I've spend almost four years. L3 is really a great team where man can learn basically anything, simply because you can meet there anything from broken swap on S390 up to wrong icons in LibreOffice :-).

The new position is inside Security team, still I'll be mostly focused on writing some internal tools, rather than doing security work (at least for first year or so). The current plan is base on work I've done for L3 tools and use Django for the web interface, but that's just a plan for now and might change in the future.

Anyway looking forward to new challenges at new job.

Upcoming Weblate 1.1 is now installed on both http://demo.weblate.org and http://l10n.cihar.com. There release is almost ready (I plan to add only one minor feature) and this setup was done to get more testing in real life setup before making actual release.

As you can see from list of changes, there are no big changes from user point of view. In case indexing offloading is enabled (what is the case for l10n.cihar.com), the interface should respond more quickly while translating (and not produce errors in some setups). The rest of changes are even more hidden, like smarter handling of merges and commits (still there is place for improvements here) or better validation of admin forms.

Anyway I hope to complete missing features and do possible bug fixes in first two week of July and you can expect 1.1 to be released around Friday 13th.

Today, I wondered how much translations were done using Weblate since it was born. Of course I can give only numbers for services I maintain, the biggest one being translation server for phpMyAdmin, Gammu and Weblate.

Looking at the logs, the server l10n.cihar.com helped to contribute over 20000 (actually little bit more as tracked are only changes after releasing Weblate 0.8), what is quite impressive number. Of course biggest amount of contributions came in time of preparing phpMyAdmin 3.5.0 release, where I gave it huge amount of publicity (AKA spamming my blog), but number of people accessing the website still grows since then (still number of submitted translations is slightly lower).

Now as 1.0 release proved to be quite stable, it's time to focus on 1.1 development, which will bring offloading of fulltext indexing (it was proven to be unreliable to update index online for bigger sites). Almost all issues targeted for 1.1 are already fixed and all what needs to be done is testing in real life situations.

I seem to have spend too much time online and used too much of blogging engines. Yesterday, I've completed yet another import of content to this blog, to have all my content available in single place.

Looking at the import scripts I already have four of them - Movabletype, Nanoblogger, Wordpress and recent addition was Drupal.

For Drupal, I had to install Node export module to have some sensible way to get the content. Then it was just matter of parsing XML and fixing up links. Quite challenging was rendering of Texy! markup in Python as there seem to no native solution available. Fortunately there is a XML-RPC service available, what made that part quite easy.

Po dlouhé době váhání jsem se rozhodl ukončit provoz webu phpmyadmin.cz ve stávající podobě. Sám nejsem schopen najít čas na jeho udržování a nikdo další se o jeho provoz nezajímal. Ve stávající mrtvé podobě nemá žádný smysl ho udržovat a návštěvnost je stejně minimální.

Všechny články byly naimportovány do tohoto blogu, kde je můžete nalézt v kategorii phpMyAdmin, kam je také v současné době doména phpmyadmin.cz přesměrována.