Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for Coding

Today I finally found some time to work on phpMyAdmin translations. First I started on localized documentation, where I improved our current score to 24% of strings (what is still far to few to generate translated document). Anybody willing to translate lot of documentation is welcome to join us (you can choose any other language if you do not know Czech).

Later I focused on user interface translations, where Czech recently was downgraded from premium class translation (almost every time at 100%) to somewhat lower quality (fight to keep over 90%). It's time to bring it back to premium quality and I hope I will help it a lot today.

PS: If you want to help with translating of phpMyAdmin into any language, just check our instructions for translators.

Yesterday I finally found some time to analyze all filesystem message dumps for Nokia phones. I always hated way Gammu used to decode these messages, because in most cases decoding was almost same function just with added some random offsets.

After some time looking into the dumps, I finally came out with description of the format. It it still not complete, but it allowed to simplify the code a lot while fixing bugs with some messages previous solution did not catch.

Now I hope I did not miss anything and new code will not introduce new regressions.

Dear students, the Community Bonding Period is almost over and I have not seen much activity from most of you. Maybe you really do not have any questions about the project or existing code base, but I really doubt it (well, the code documentation is always the weak point).

The summer is not that long as you might think and you will have lot of things to do during it!

PS: phpMyAdmin's GSoC 2009 Student Guide is still valid.

More a year from last release, I decided to push out version 0.7 of Photo uploader. If you don't know this tool yet, it is helper to upload photos (or images) over net. It was created when I became too lazy to upload hundreds of photos to digilab, but generally it can support any service which allows you uploading of whatever using HTML forms.

News in this release:

• Added support for happyfoto.cz.
• Added support for happyfoto.sk.

Joey, I really like rel-vcs proposal. On the other side it misses few good things which were already found for Vcs-* fields (there is already no XS- prefix for quite a long time).

First it misses information about branch. On git, you will automatically get a master, but for SVN, you need to point to some branch, otherwise you get really lot of stuff. And I think that practise should be same as for Vcs-Svn - to point the field to trunk URL.

The second thing which this proposal misses is Vcs-Browser. It would not be useful for tools like webcheckout, but it would be great to have support for it in browsers or in plugins such as Operator. How about using type="browser" for this?

Why the hell do I have to hit various obscure pieces of code today? Current winner is part of system-config-printer:

def monitor_session (*args):
    pass

try:
    bus = dbus.SessionBus()
    bus.add_signal_receiver (monitor_session)
except:
    print >> sys.stderr, "%s: failed to connect to session D-Bus" % \
          PROGRAM_NAME
    sys.exit (1)

If you don't know D-Bus or Python: It listens to all signals on session bus and does nothing with them. All this code causes is eating up memory and CPU cycles when there is some higher load on session bus.

PS: Maybe I miss some nice idea behind this code, please enlighten me.

Well not directly, but MySQL is and they will also accept our projects. So if you are student interested in getting some money for improving free software, you're welcome to contact us. We have written down our ideas to wiki, but feel free to come with your own thought. But don't forget that deadline is this Monday!

While talking about this improving phpMyAdmin, phpMyAdmin team would also like to take part in Hackontest, so vote and suggest there features for us! If you have no idea for phpMyAdmin, Debian is also taking part there ;-).

I handle bug reports and email communication as soon as possible, but it does not mean that it may take month or even more to get reply. I'm not working full time on my free software projects, I do it only in my free time. Besides this I have regular job and I also have a real life with another hobbies.

So if you wrote me something, just try to be patient, sending another emails to urge your issue won't help anybody. I will just have more unread mail to process until I get to real work.

Even though I don't feel really good due to personal life, I decided to relelase Photo uploader 0.6. If you don't know this tool yet, it is helper to upload photos (or images) over net. It was created when I became too lazy to upload hundreds of photos to digilab, but generally it can support any service which allows you uploading of whatever using HTML forms.

News in this release:

• Added support for iTesco.cz.

New version of simple todo manager called Ukolovnik has been just released. There are no major changes in this release compared to 0.9, it mostly happened to indicate that this small piece of code has reached some level of stability and wanted level of features.