Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for English

Continuing in photo blog posts, here is our last vacation - in the beginning of September we've traveled around Slovenia, mostly for hiking, but we've enjoyed other things as well.

Our first short hike was around lake Bled, which is nice lake placed in between mountains:

Afternoon we had some time left, so we've walked around Peričnik waterfall, which was close to Mojstrana where we were accommodated (if you will be looking for accommodation there, check River Cottage):

Then it came time for some serious hiking and we went up to the mountains, in the end we did not make it to Triglav because of weather, but we've gone on Cmir:

After that we had to relax a bit and visited Ljubljana and ended up near Škocjan Caves which we've visited on next day:

After relaxing evening in Saksida winery, it was time to go back to mountains. We've started visiting Tolmin gorges, which is nice natural area worth short detour:

Last days we've spent near Bovec and hiked around a bit, one of the things we've enjoyed most is trip to Krnsko lake:

This was definitely not our last trip to Slovenia as there are still some places we want to visit :-).

After I was at DebConf 13, we took opportunity and made short trip through Switzerland.

Even the DebConf itself brought some nice opportunities to take pictures, especially in the morning:

Then there was a day trip to Creux du Van, which is a wonderful location:

After DebConf, we've traveled to visit our friend and made some trips. The one I really enjoyed was around Luzerne and to mount Pilatus:

An while being in north of Switzerland, we simply had to see Rheinfall:

Enca 1.15 has been just released. It does not bring any new features, just a little of cleanup and officially moves it's code to GitHub.

If you don't know Enca, it is an Extremely Naive Charset Analyser. It detects character set and encoding of text files and can also convert them to other encodings using either a built-in converter or external libraries and tools like libiconv, librecode, or cstocs.

Full list of changes for 1.15 release:

• Documentation improvement
• Development moved to GitHub
• Do not use deprecated autoconf macros

Still enca is in maintenance mode only and I have no intentions to write new features. However there is no limitation to other contributors :-).

You can download from http://cihar.com/software/enca/.

After quite some delay, I got to selecting some photos for my gallery. In spring, we've spend few days in Bohemian-Moravian Highlands with Pentax Friends.

On the program there was of course taking some pictures and drinking beer or wine :-).

You can find some small but nice waterfalls:

In villages, there live wild animals:

As the weather was not really nice, we had nice opportunity to shoot some pictures in fog:

And last but not least, we've spent almost whole day taking pictures in Pilgrimage Church of Saint John of Nepomuk:

The trip was really nice, though we could use better weather as most of the morning there were really no nice conditions for taking pictures.

The amount of projects using Hosted Weblate grows every month so it seems like there is quite interest in that. This growth will however bring some challenges in the future.

Currently everything is managed by myself and that really does not scale well. There should be some automation in the process of adding new projects and there should be more control given to project admins, so that they can change some things on them own. This is quite some coding, but there is another Hackweek on the way, so my plan is to implement at least something in this area as well.

Other side is unsurprisingly money - even though I just got new hardware to run this service (which will be hopefully deployed in a month or so), in the long term it might need other investments as well. That's why I've rewritten the donation page for Weblate and added some more options.

Most importantly the goal is now to get some regular income which would allow sustainable development of both Weblate and free hosting service. I think Gittip is great service for such goal, so let's see how it works.

As usual with our phpMyAdmin team meetings, quite a lot things get decided there and it was no difference this year, when we've met at DebConf 13.

We've discussed quite a lot of topics and some had quite interesting outcome.

One of already changes is that we're going to consolidate our support efforts on Stack Overflow. We've provided various support channels so far (IRC, mailing list, web forums and support tracker), which have overlapped quite a lot and we simply lack manpower to do all of that properly.

So users on IRC mostly get bored and left before somebody got to them. The mailing list received just few mails in a month, so they were almost not used. The web forums worked quite well for answering questions, but nobody was able to find answers there (the forums on SourceForge are quite hard to get properly indexed by Google), so the questions got repeated quite a lot. In the end we've decide to use Stack Overflow as it was anyway already used by lot of our users and concentrating our effort on single channel will even improve this.

Yesterday, we've spent nice day on a day trip of DebConf. I took the long hike, which ended up at Creux du Van, what is wonderful rocky place.

The way up was through nice nature and we've met quite a lot of cows on the way:

They we've finally arrived to Creux du Van:

Of course we could not miss an opportunity to take a group photo:

After wandering around the rocks, we took a lunch and headed to Neuchâtel, where some music festival was going on:

The whole day was nicely finished on a boat with a dinner.

PS: More DebConf photos are available in my gallery.

Yesterday evening I've arrived at DebConf 13. I was quite tired after traveling so I just had few beers and went to bed.

The travel went quite well besides somebody else broke wine and my suitcase was all wet from it. Fortunately almost nothing got inside so I have some clean clothes for next week :-).

As I went to bed quite early, I woke up early as well so I went to short walk to see what is nearby:

Weblate 1.6 is already two weeks out without any regressions, so now it's time to think about features for 1.7.

I definitely want to improve support for monolingual translation formats as they currently suffer by various metadata issues (eg. checks not working correctly). This requires quite big change in underlying database, but I think it's quite manageable.

When talking about checks, I want to make them configurable per project as global configuration is quite limiting for shared sites like hosted Weblate.

I will definitely need to touch registration and authentication, either by supporting latest django-registration API or to move some other solution with support for federated login. Which of these approaches will be used depends on my time, what is always the most limiting factor.

This might sound as too few features, but I'd like to make releases more often, so that should fit into this plan. However if you want to push for some feature, you still have two days to fund something on Catincan!

Finally, Weblate 1.6 is available as ready to use appliance in SUSE Studio.

This took quite long as openSUSE 12.3 does not work as expected inside SUSE Studio and I was too lazy to find all necessary tweaks earlier. The same problem actually prevented from Weblate 1.5 being there at all.

The biggest obstacle was MySQL setup - after enabling "Set up MySQL" in studio, you end up with MySQL database with empty mysql.users table, which obviously can not authenticate anybody. As I've found out, the only way around is manual setup.

Once this was figured out, the appliance only needed minor tweaking and is now ready to use in SUSE Gallery in all formats used for virtualization.