Michael's Tech Blog

I’ve used GooSync to sync my Google Calendar with calendar on my Nokia E65 for couple years. It covers all my unassuming needs. But recently I received a notification from GooSync that they discontinue free version of their service. As an option for all free users they offer version Lite for €7 per year. Well it isn’t so big money to help the good and useful service improve its quality or just survive.

Good news for all ebook and Kindle fans who live outside US. Amazon decided to sell its Kindle for the rest world. Its price is very attractive – $279 (about €190) plus shipping. Personally I like Kindle. In my opinion its design is perfect. The rest ebook readers look not so nice but they provide more wide functionality such support Russian language or FB2 book format.

In any case, the possibility to buy Kindle officially outside US sounds very good. Will wait a bit till it’ll support Russian language and then will buy it.

I spent a few day with patching LinuxMCE database connection to pass UTF8 option to the server. But without luck. However I found a way to configure mysql server to skip client’s request about charset and send all data in the defined one. To do that just add following lines in the my.cnf file under mysqld section:

The option init_connect replaces setting ‘SET NAMES utf8′ from the client and skip-character-set-client-handshake tells to server to ignore charset sent by client and use it default one instead.

I tested this approach with LinuxMCE and it works. The Russian text is displayed on the Orbiter correctly. I tested it with Perl as well and found that Perl script still should set option mysql_enable_utf8 to true.

[via Saiweb]

Russian company Yandex which offers a lot of useful services and has Google’s vision of the web business (IMHO) recently announced Moscow map map with traffic jams and live cameras view! That’s really cool service and I didn’t see anything similar before. Additionally there are panoramic views. Similar as Google has.

I’m waiting when the live cameras will be added for St. Petersburg. Or at least panoramic views. Sometimes I’m missing it.

Recently I finished with Russian translation of LinuxMCE UI. But as I know now it was the easiest part. After addition Russian descriptions in the database I faced with problem of displaying them. I made a research and found following. To have UTF8 data in the mysql database a few steps should be done:

• default charset for server should be set to utf8 in the /etc/mysql/my.cnf:
  [mysqld]
  default-character-set=utf8
• default charset for client should be set to utf8 in the /etc/mysql/my.cnf:
  [client]
  default-character-set=utf8

  After that the charset for mysql shell will be UTF8 but not latin1 as in the stock version.

• default charset for desired database should be set to utf8:
  1. ALTER DATABASE pluto_main charset=utf8;
• default charset for desire table should be set to utf8:
  1. ALTER TABLE Text_LS charset=utf8;
• default charset for all text fields in the table should be also set to utf8:
  1. ALTER TABLE Text_LS MODIFY COLUMN `Description` longtext CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci

the client application should pass UTF8 flag to tell mysql about charset for connection. Here is a Perl example:

1. my $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:mysql:pluto_main;host=localhost", "root") or die "Cannot connect to database: $DBI::err!";
2. $dbh->{‘mysql_enable_utf8′} = 1;
3. $dbh->do(‘SET NAMES utf8′);

To display UTF8 text in the Perl script just set UTF8 charset for STDOUT:

But with LinuxMCE the situation is more complicate. Its UI is developed on C++. So, After a googling I found the way to set UTF8 for connection. There is a function mysql_options() in the Mysql C API. It should be called after mysql_init() but before mysql_connect() or mysql_real_connect() and allows to set desire charset:

and run some SQL statement when connecting to the MySQL server:

But it didn’t help. The Russian text is still displayed as question mark. So, have to dig LinuxMCE code to solve that. Otherwise the Russian translation won’t be added.

I just released a new version of IMDB::Film – 0.42. Following changes were done since previous version:

• added retrieving of plot keywords for the film;
• fixed issue with retrieving of movie’s plot contained links;
• fixed issue with displaying special HTML symbols;
• added test for the plot keywords;
• fixed POD documentation.

To implement correct displaying of special HTML symbols two new modules were added into dependencies list – use Text::Unidecode and HTML::Entities.

You can send bugs or ideas to improve the module via CPAN RT.