Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for Life

This was feature which I always hate - phone made strange sound when taking photo. Fortunately I'm not alone who hates this and there are several howtos on net which should guide you to do this.

The only way which worked for me at the end was replacing sounds in phone filesystem, so that it plays silent sounds. For Sony-Ericsson K750i with CID 49 BROWN you need specially hacked FAR from SE-tuning.cz and just replace files in filesystem (/tpa/preset/system/sound). Now phone magically makes no sounds when taking photos :-).

I just looked on server statistics and I was shocked by amount of spam and viruses rejected during last three days. Is there some new virus for Windows which tries random email addresses on all servers it can reach? I didn't analyse those messages, as they are rejected at RCPT time, because sender tries random addresses which do not work on my server. For now I try to reduce them by blacklisting in iptables, but this doesn't seem to help much as IP addresses change too often.

I think that graph shows best what big change has happened:

Update: It seems to be new Sober variant causing this mess.

After returning from Easter vacation, I was afraid of my full mailbox. This was quite correct, but fortunately some people also were not working, so it is not that bad. Anyway I didn't read it all so far, so don't be afraid if reaction on your mail (especially about Gammu and Wammu) will take longer.

The worst thing which happened was, that somebody managed to fuck up MySQL server serving phpMyAdmin demo in some very unusual way, which was not detected by my scripts, which are checking whether demo server is still alive. This lead to almost day outage, because I had to restore MySQL manually this morning. Anyway this case should be now also caught and the script for checking is getting more and more complex. Maybe I should better use Monit (or other monitoring software) for this instead of home made shell script. But shell script seems to do good job in most cases :-).

Off topic PS: Thanks to everybody who helped to release Debian 4.0!

While translating CouchSurfing to Czech, I again noticed funny mistake which often repeats in Czech translations of web mails or similar applications.

In English there is "File into folder". Some translators tend to translate this as "File in folder", which changes meaning a bit :-).

I have no idea why this is so popular, but I saw this for first time in Sieve plug-in for Squirellmail and several times since this time.

For most of winter, we had troubles because there is no snow. Right now there is trouble because there is too much snow. And it is still falling. This happens just few days after Kyrill has caused quite a lot of damage, maybe the Earth wants to get rid of people who destoy its environment ;-).

In most places in Czechia 15 to 30 centimenters of new snow occured over night. Many people can not drive their car safely in these conditions and this causes lots of traffic problems. Maybe they should think before going out and use public transport instead, but it is not as comfortable as driving damn slow, because they still have summer tires…

It's funny how big are differences in authors of open source programs and their bug handling. Yesterday I finally managed to report problem in gtkthml plugin for Claws mail which caused some HTML mails to be displayed in wrong encoding. I got instantly reply and in few minutes it has been fixed in CVS. Thanks a lot Colin Leroy!

Exactly opposite situation is with Klear. I wrote bug report with patch more than a year ago and it is still without reply from developers. Funny is that somebody else was brave enough to port this patch to curent version. Looking at their bug tracker, I can see that my report is not alone, let's call it black hole…

Maybe I'm a bit late, but happy new year! I was quite silent in last days as I was having rest from computer and enjoyed real life.

What will this year bring? I will hopefully become Debian Developer, as only required step right now is account creation. This is good news for Gammu users who run Debian, as I would like to upload testing versions to experimental (as well as appropriate python-gammu builds).

What else? Some new releases of my projects :-). I'm still working on Wammu and configuration wizard. There is a bit more work than I expected, but it should be ready during January. I don't expect much new features in python-gammu, it will be just kept in sync with gammu.

The only remaining project is Ukolovnik, which is in perfect state for me, however other users request more features and I should sometimes get at least to patch merging :-).

24th December has started few minutes ago and the Christmas crazyness is going to end soon. No more carols whenewen man enters shop, no more fantastic Christmas offers wherever you look (well they will be replaced with New Year, Valentine's day, etc. offers, but they are usually not that aggressive.

I'm just finishing packing of presents for my family and only thing that keeps me up and running is Radio Beat on high volume … This is only style of music I can accept whole year ;-).

Anyway happy Christmas to all blog readers and I hope you got lot of presents from whoever gives presents in your country.

This is easiest way how to contribute, if you know some foreign language (well most time English is required). Recently after announcement of translating interface for IEs4Linux, I completed Czech translation :-).

BTW: Wammu has also on-line translation system, use it!

I upgraded to Iceweasel 2.0 on most places during this week. And this convinced me to start looking for another browser. I didn't like Firefox in past much, but I was too lazy to look and start using alternatives. But this new release convinced me. It haz crazy new look. Why it doesn't look like regullar Gtk application? I'd prefer that over special custom tab bar it is currently using.

And why the hell does not Ctrl+W close window when closing last tab? Maybe it was too confusing for some users to have window closed…

PS: Oh now I see: I have to use Ctrl+Shift+W to make it close last window. Why is it not standard Ctrl+Q? And it looks like I'm not alone who complains on new Firefox :-).