Michal Čihař - Archive for Jan. 1, 2013

For quite some time, I'm contributing to OpenStreetMap. Mostly covering areas where I live or I know well, but sometime I randomly update areas where I travel as well. The one important bit was always missing for me - nice frontend to render many of hidden features.

Now this space seems to be slowly filled in by map1.eu. This quite new project (first announcement has been two weeks ago) renders quite nice maps for Europe. The map is primarily intended for hiking or cycling, so it includes things like hiking routes or cycle routes. In Czech republic we have quite great maps on mapy.cz, but I don't know anything what covers whole Europe.

The project still has some issues, but is progressing nicely as you can see in today's announcement of 0.2 release (in Czech). Of course you can help, either by code or by money, which is needed to run rendering servers.

Weblate recently got another new feature - charting of translation project activity.

It counts and charts daily contributions in last month and weekly contributions in last year and draws nicely looking charts out of that:

Originally I wanted to use some existing charting library and first implementation was actually done using PyCha, but in the end I ended up rendering charts using completely custom code, what allowed me to draw better graphs.

As you have probably already noticed, Google Summer of Code 2013 has been officially announced. As usual, we want to participate with phpMyAdmin.

We really want good students to participate, so our selection process will be again slightly stricter than in last years. So if you want to participate as a student on phpMyAdmin, please check our applicant guide. The most important thing is that we expect you to show knowledge of the code before being accepted and fixing some bug for upcoming 4.0 release is great opportunity to start with that!

Also student themselves usually don't bring new ideas, so it's pretty much on the organization to come with projects it would like to see. We are currently collecting these on our wiki. We will most likely add some new ones to the list as well, so feel free to get in touch if you have some brilliant idea. Also voting on feature requests might help us to choose what users see as most important improvements.

Next round of phpMyAdmin 4.0 translation status report is coming.

So let's look at which translations are at 100% right now (some changes this week due to new strings to translate):

• Czech
• Dutch
• English (United Kingdom)
• French
• Greek
• Russian
• Spanish
• Turkish

There are also several languages which need just few strings to be complete:

• Danish
• Estonian
• Galician
• German
• Japanese
• Polish
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Slovenian
• Swedish

As you can see, there is still lot of languages missing, this might be your opportunity to contribute to phpMyAdmin. Also you are welcome to translate phpMyAdmin 4.0 using translation server.

If your language is already fully translated and you want to help as well, you can translate our documentation as well.

V rámci Společných aktivit jsme si potřebovali něco vyjasnit a pro tento účel si zarezervovali salónek v sousedském pivovaru Bašta. A přestože jsem si myslel, že personál českých restaurací mě nemůže ničím překvapit (výhrůžky že nám rozbijí hubu za stěžování si na podmíráky v Restauraci Antal nasadily laťku hodně vysoko), odešel jsem odsud opět o zážitek bohatší.

Jedná se o nekuřácký podnik s vlastním pivem a malou nabídkou jídel k pivu, která nám vždy chutnala, takže jsme očekávali, že i tentokrát budeme spokojeni. Po příchodu jsme se zeptali, jestli můžeme přesunout stoly a obsluha nám zapůjčila prodlužku na připojení notebooku a při konzumaci jídla a piva jsme začali diskutovat.

Najednou rozrazil dveře (pravděpodobně podnapilý) pan majitel, co že tu děláme, jestli jsme zaplatili pronájem salónku a vůbec, že mu tu blokujeme spoustu míst. Na naši odpověď, že jsme takto rezervaci domluvili zareagoval jen dalšími výpady. Výstup zakončil tím, že nám do salónku pošle dalších deset lidí (v tu chvíli jsme tam měli tak 3 volné židle). Ať si je k nám klidně pošle, stejně jsme tu po takovémto chování naposled. Následovala odpověď ve smyslu, že takhle podniká už deset let a lidí mu tam chodí dost, tak ať si klidně nechodíme.

Dojem už nemohlo vylepšit to, že se nám personál při odchodu omlouval za jeho chování. Takže jen přidávám své doporučení - tomuto místu se vyhněte, majitel o vás nestojí.

Today, Weblate got new website. It should better promote it's unique features and give users better idea what it is about.

I was pretty much convinced by few Weblate users at FOSDEM to do something like this, so I hope the new website will serve good it's purpose. Same as previous version, the code is hosted on GitHub, so feel free to make improvements and open pull requests :-). Also the new website misses some translations, your help is especially welcome in this area.

Together with launching this website, I've decided to make more visible that there is option to get your free software project hosted for free on my server. This is now being called Hosted Weblate and your project will be hosted at http://hosted.weblate.org/.

Currently there is already first user of this service - Freeplane, but you are welcome to ask for inclusion.

Next round of phpMyAdmin 4.0 translation status report is coming.

So let's look at which translations are at 100% right now (no change this week):

• Czech
• Dutch
• English (United Kingdom)
• Galician
• Greek
• Russian
• Spanish
• Turkish

There are also several languages which need just few strings to be complete:

• Danish
• Estonian
• French
• German
• Japanese
• Polish
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Slovenian
• Swedish

As you can see, there is still lot of languages missing, this might be your opportunity to contribute to phpMyAdmin. Also you are welcome to translate phpMyAdmin 4.0 using translation server.

If your language is already fully translated and you want to help as well, you can translate our documentation as well.

FOSDEM 2013 is over and it's time to look what interesting I have seen there on Sunday.

Sunday was supposed to start for me with L20N, but it was postponed to 13:00 as the presenters weren't on time. I could have used one more hour of sleep, but at least I spent some time on coding.

Detect merge conflicts in realtime was quite interesting talk, though I was pretty surprised that the conflict detecting does not at all care about underlying version control system, but does purely file based guesses.

The Hardening MySQL talk pretty much described why security in MySQL sucks and what you should do to make it secure. Quite good introduction to the topic, but not much new information for me.

Introduction of Firefox OS, was quite nice demo showing they have something working, though it had some problems with flaky network on FOSDEM. Looking forward to see phone being sold, though it will probably not be something I'd buy.

To add some fun, I've stayed on systemd, Two Years Later presentation, which gave some summary of what is currently in systemd and where it wants to go. Still it did not move systemd from category of "I don't care as long as it works".

Now followed delayed L20N talk - it showed new Mozilla's effort for localization. Which is quite powerful and has nice features, on the other side it put's quite more load to translators - now they would have to understand some basics of programming as well to be able to use the new features (or not so new ones as plurals). Their motivation is to remove localization effort from developers, but I'm not really convinced it will work nicely.

After some meetings and lunch, I went to LibreOffice: cleaning and re-factoring a giant code-base, which showed some challenges LibreOffice has to take and how they dealt with that. I think it's pretty great job done and I'm looking forward to new releases.

Being GNOME user, I could not skip Has the GNOME community gone crazy?. It of course tried to tell that they did not :-).

Last, but not least my friend Dieter from phpMyAdmin had talk Present and future of phpMyAdmin. He listed some of the new features, demoed 3.5 and 4.0 version (of course the demo of 4.0 version broke due to some caching). Even when the talk had quite unpleasant timing, it has attracted some people and they even asked few questions.

This years FOSDEM was again great and looking forward to be there next year.

FOSDEM 2013 is over and it's time to look what interesting I have seen there on Saturday.

First of all the most important for me is to meet people. As usual, I came with SUSE folks, but it's not that unusual to meet people from company where you work :-). I've met some current and former phpMyAdmin developers and surprisingly I've met few Weblate users or people who consider using it on their project. This gave me some important feedback and one of first thing you will see in near future is remade Weblate website to give more information about some of it's unique features. As for the talks, I think I've managed to visit quite lot of them.

How we made the Jenkins community explained some ways Jenkins has used to build good community - mostly focused on extensibility of the code and having everything as an extension, but with some focus on social things as well (and important thing that with Git people are not that motivated to join the team).

Better software through user research was about various way to gather information of what your users hate on the software. It was pretty interesting, though many of that can not easily be used on small scale free software product.

OSS code goes in and never comes out talk focused about licensing issues of various software as a service platforms. As I've never used Amazon cloud or such, it was quite surprising how these behave in relation to GPL and actually made me thing more about AGPL and attend related panel discussion later.

An Integrated Localization Environment is Mozilla approach to online translation, quite different than anything we have before, but mostly for reasons which were explained later on Sunday talk on l20n. Maybe reverse ordering of these would make it easier to understand the motivation.

Scale your Jenkins build pipeline automatically to minimize test time was not that useful as I thought - increasing test speed by buying EC2 instances and pushing part of the work to them is not something what will help me in near future.

Trends in Open Source Security explained what is going on in distributions security, mostly focused on Redhat (but touching Debian as well). It has some interesting thoughts about sharing the information between vendors, so let's see if it will really work in future.

QML’s many faces showed some other ways to use QML besides using QtQuick. Some uses were quite interesting, though I'm not really fan of creating yet another buildsystem based on it.

Panel Discussion: GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 was last thing I've visited on Sunday and it was really interesting to listen all that opinions on AGPL. Still I was not confirmed to consider switching to this license.

Next round of phpMyAdmin 4.0 translation status report is coming.

So let's look at which translations are at 100% right now:

• Czech
• Dutch
• English (United Kingdom)
• Galician
• Greek
• Russian
• Spanish
• Turkish

There are also several languages which need just few strings to be complete:

• Danish
• Estonian
• French
• German
• Japanese
• Polish
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Slovenian
• Swedish

As you can see, there is still lot of languages missing, this might be your opportunity to contribute to phpMyAdmin. Also you are welcome to translate phpMyAdmin 4.0 using translation server.

If your language is already fully translated and you want to help as well, you can translate our documentation as well.