Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for English

I've just set up another database to phpMyAdmin demo server - Drizzle. At first attempt phpMyAdmin did not work at all, but after few fixes (basically disabling all charsets/collation handling we do on connect), we're at least able to connect and show the interface with some databases and tables.

However there is much more things to fix (for example phpMyAdmin does not see all tables for some reason) and definitely more to test. However the question is if we want to officially support Drizzle and put some effort into it.

You can try phpMyAdmin with Drizzle here: http://demo.phpmyadmin.net/master-config/?server=3

I've just finished another step for new Gammu manual - it includes also documentation for gammu utility. It includes all content from the man page, reformatted and improved in some sections. So now the documentation does cover all important parts and can contain correct cross references.

The only problematic thing was to handle non dash starting commands in Sphinx. Unfortunately it does not seem to like this idea, so I had to invent some ugly hacks, which workaround that (just changing the regexps which sphinx.domains.std uses).

The man page will be from now on generated from this source as well.

More than year ago, I've generated mysel new PGP key (4096 bit RSA), with intention to migrate to it sooner or later. Being little pushed by Bits from keyring-maint, I've decided the right time is about now.

As I was giving the key for signing in past more than year, it already has quite a lot of signatures (actually more than the old key). You might notice that the old key has signed far more keys. This is mostly caused by simple fact that I did use both keys for signing, while only giving new one to be signed.

So if you're among these people who signed the old one (0x36E75604), please check the transition document and consider signing my new key (0x42B7511D).

Thanks to contributions of other people, I can now announce new release of Ukolovnik. It brings theme updates and en_GB translation.

Full list of changes:

• Explicitely mention that we do not provide authentication (bug #993).
• Updated Oxygen theme.
• Added en_GB translation.

I had this topic in mind for quite a long time, but it got more recently more attention because of discussions on gammu-users mailing list. Gammu should use some library for do basic stuff like strings or date manipulations, logging and so on.

The reason is that having own implementation of all that is not really useful and just source of another amount of bugs. Currently mi intention is to use GLib, simply because I don't know any C alternative (though there are probably lot of C++ cross platform libraries).

Of course the biggest question is how to make the change, because it will be obviously intrusive and making such big changes will probably lead to several months of work without really making another release. Even if it will be done on separate branch (what would be most likely the case), developers will spend most of time on this issue and not much time will be spent on bug fixes (and backporting them).

Today I decided to ask for adopter of GPointingDeviceSettings. The single reason is that I no longer have hardware (touchpad) needed to diagnose most of bugs which appear within it.

So if you want to get a(nother) Debian package to maintain, go ahead for it.

The sources are in collab-maint svn and currently use svn-buildpackage:

svn://svn.debian.org/collab-maint/deb-maint/gpointing-device-settings/trunk/

Should the new maintainer need package sponsoring, I'm definitely available.

I decided to upgrade my notebook to SSD disk. The disk replacement went easy, installed fresh Debian on it and now comes the tricky part how to properly tune system to use as much as SSD can provide.

The first obvious thing for me is changing IO scheduler. But which one to choose? Most of howtos seem to suggest noop or deadline, without stating benefits of each. For now I've chosen deadline, without string coninfidence, that I'm doing the right thing.

The next major part of tips includes removing filesystem journalling. Well I think journalling exists for good reason and disabling it won't help me much (no, I really don't want to wait for fsck after each crash).

The last tweak seems to be using tmpfs for any temporary data (/tmp) or even for logs. For /tmp it might make sense, on cost of loosing available memory (or swapping it out, what really does not help the SSD anyway). However I definitely don't want to loose my logs on every reboot.

Maybe I'm missing some bit, but the only important thing seems to be the IO scheduler.

After being noticed in blog comment about another theme for phpMyAdmin, I started to look for other hidden contributions for phpMyAdmin and I was surprised how many people did not even try to submit their code upstream. Have you ever considered trying to contact upstream?

Quick search on SourceForge.net revealed:

VisualMCD for phpMyAdmin

An Add-on for phpMyAdmin which enables user to create PDF Schema and Relation with a simple click and mouse moves. No more fastidious typing of table coords needed to create the PDF Schema.

Even though the SF.net history says it was released 440 days ago, it is actually dated back to 2003 and it obviously is not compatible with current code base. Also we have similar feature for few years now, so it was just duplicated effort.

phpMyAdmin theme: Paradice

Paradice is a Theme for the popular web-based database administration tool phpMyAdmin. You will find the development version here. All official releases will be made by the phpMyAdmin project.

This theme is just developed externally, but you can get it from our themes page

phpMyAdmin persian project

phpMyAdmin persian project

Something what seems to be dead from beginning. Anyway if you want to translate, please use our translation server.

MySQL Form Generator pour PHPMyAdmin

C'est un outil pour crr un site autour d'une base. Un gnrateur de formulaire. Sur base d'une DB Mysql.Projet prvu pour tre intgr PhpMyAdmin.mysql -> formulaire HTML+javascript avec le code PHP pour trater les soumissions de donnes.

Something we still don't have in phpMyAdmin, however the project is inactive for more than year.

pmahomme

Clean, modern and easy to use phpMyAdmin theme.

Theme which started this search, however it seems to fail for me right now.

phpMyDesigner

Plugin for phpMyAdmin. PhpMyDesigner is a tool written in PHP and Ajax. This CASE with WEB interface. ( MySQL )

This actually does not fit into this blog, because it is one of projects that got merged and are now part of our code base.

phpMySchema

phpMySchema is a tool written in PHP for generating an ERD or otherwise graphical view of your MySQL databse over the web. It is being developed to be used as a standalone script and as a module for phpMyAdmin.

Generally it looks like an interesting addition, however we can quite well compete with this after this year's GSoC, which added ability to export schema in various formats.

Around three years ago I've migrated my stuff to Subversion from GNU Arch. Last year I migrated most important/alive things to Git. Unfortunately not all, so I still needed to host SVN server on my own.

I think it's now time to get rid of it :-). In past weeks I've moved most Debian packaging stuff to some team/collab-maint repositories (being it Git or Subversion), because I really don't see need for hosting that stuff on my own.

The remaining repositories are mostly historical (with single exception of StarDict dictionaries conversion tools) and nobody will probably care if they are gone. Ah and there are some dead projects as well which were never finished and will never be :-).

Anyway svn.cihar.com is going to disappear soon and nobody will miss it.

For quite some time, I wanted to use subkeys for signing at some places where I do not want to have my certification key stored, however I trust this location enough to have signing key available. I knew it should be possible with subkeys, however I never found time to look at it.

First I needed to add new subkey which will be used for signing:

gpg --edit-key 42B7511D
> addkey

Now choose 4 (RSA for signing) and wait until new key is created.

The only remaining step is to transfer subkeys to the other location:

gpg --export-secret-subkeys 42B7511D > /tmp/key-sub.gpg
scp /tmp/key-sub.gpg other.place:

Import them there and deleting any unwanted (eg. encryption) subkeys:

gpg --import key-sub.gpg
gpg --edit 42B7511D
> key 1
> delkey

And it's done ... much easier than I expected :-).