code.kissu.org

Happy New Year! It’s a little late, but I thought I’d wish whoever’s reading this in any case.

It’s the new year, and already I’m busy. I’ve got work commitments that are approaching their deadlines, which I can’t discuss it as it would result in a breach of contract.

I’m also in the process of building a BLOBStreaming enabled MySQL driver for PHP, working once again with guys from PrimeBase Technologies. I’ll post up both a download and a repository link when there’s something to show. Not to forget my Final Year Project, which is due in a little over two months.

It’s going to be rather hectic all the way past April - can’t wait until I graduate so I can have some free time.

More updates when I have them. Once again, happy new year and peace out

It’s been very long since my last update, mostly due to an overly swamped schedule (work, assignments, etc) and  sadly, sheer laziness. For all this I apologize.

Things have been going great thus far. Marc has given me commit access to the phpMyAdmin repository (woohoo!). BLOBStreaming is now available in the development release of phpMyAdmin 3.1 onwards. Check out the official phpMyAdmin site to download it.

I’ve given two presentations ever since. One with regards to my project at BarCamp Malaysia in KL on the 26th of July, and the other with regards to Google’s Summer of Code at the first FOSS.MY. Images and videos posted up on both sites, do check them out

My GSoC project has been getting press coverage recently, twice in fact. Check out NST’s initial interview with me here. A pity they failed to mention phpMyAdmin, PBXT or MySQL for that matter. No worries though - the followup press release on the Malaysian GSoC 2008 Students should fix this up.

The followup interview was interesting considering it was the first time I met fellow GSoCers in person. The interview was on a much larger scale this time round, with reporters from various news agencies: the likes of NST, the Star and Sin Chew - to name a few. Both Devtar and Khai Fong deserve props for their contributions to OSS and their definitive response during the interview. A big thanks to Jana and Rene from the Hoffman Agency as well for coordinating this event - you guys rock!

More on Devtar, Khai Fong, their projects, etc in the next post. I’ll link the followup interview when it becomes available.

Till next time, Raj out

The Google Summer of Code 2008 is finally over! I don’t know whether to express happiness and relief over its completion (and satisfactory payment no less :)) or to express grief in the conclusion of a wonderful journey - one that had much to offer me, in terms of knowledge and experience.

In any case, I am glad to say that the project has met the initial requirements I have set out for it. I will continue to work on this project to implement additional features that were beyond the scope of the GSoC timeline. Might I also add that I’ve been given the privilege of joining the phpMyAdmin team. Yes my friends, commit access right there!

Well folks, that’s all for now. You’ll be hearing from me soon, sometime in the next few months with more updates. I wonder if this is even necessary considering I don’t know if anyone else even reads this blog. E-mail me if you actually do

WEEKLY REPORT - WEEK 12

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS LAST WEEK

• Finished code comments using PhpDocumentor
• Submitted a diff file for merging of code into phpMyAdmin-dev
• Completed basic requirements for GSoC project

KEY TASKS THAT STALLED LAST WEEK

• Implementing multipart/form-data handling. This has been postponed week after week, due to other bug fixes and additional implementations. As I will continue to work on this after GSoC, I will be working on multipart/form-data handling then

KEY CONCERNS

• None

TASKS IN THE UPCOMING WEEK

• None, because this is the last week!

WEEKLY REPORT - WEEK 11

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS LAST WEEK

• New feature added - users can now specify a custom MIME type for files in the BLOB repository
• Learnt and implemented mootools v1.11 (already available in PMA trunk) in custom MIME type specification feature (refer to above)
• Added comments for above implementation (in relevant .php and .js files)
• New .php added for above feature - bs_change_mime_type.php

KEY TASKS THAT STALLED LAST WEEK

• None

KEY CONCERNS

• None

TASKS IN THE UPCOMING WEEK

• Complete documentation and code comments for current code

WEEKLY REPORT - WEEK 10

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS LAST WEEK

• Reduced query overhead when retrieving content-type for valid BLOB references
• Added BLOBStreaming parameter configuration (mybs_garbage_threshold, mybs_temp_blob_timeout, etc) in PMA’s automated setup script
• Support for PECL’s fileinfo library is now available for detecting MIME types of files uploaded to the BLOB repository via PMA’s uploadDir mechanism

KEY TASKS THAT STALLED LAST WEEK

• None

KEY CONCERNS

• None

TASKS IN THE UPCOMING WEEK

• Provide users the option to modify the MIME type of their files in the BLOB repository. This is convenient in the case of OpenOffice documents - their various extensions have their own MIME types, but fileinfo and Linux’s `file` command always return “application/x-zip” as the MIME type
• Complete documentation and code comments for current code
• If everything else is done, work on implementing multipart/form-data handling (this will probably be done after GSoC, considering the remaining time left before the deadline)

WEEKLY REPORT - WEEK 9

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS LAST WEEK

• Fixed issue with invalid content-type when displaying table records with BLOB references.
• uploadDir() mechanism now supports uploads to BLOB repository

KEY TASKS THAT STALLED LAST WEEK

• None

KEY CONCERNS

Determining the actual file MIME type is a problem. I’ve already emailed Marc and Paul on how to establish a proper workaround on this. Also, during BarCamp, someone brought this up and suggested that users should be able to modify the content-type themselves; this would be convenient in the case of OpenOffice documents, that normally give the MIME type of application/x-zip when queried using the Linux “file” command.

TASKS IN THE UPCOMING WEEK

• Add support to customise MyBS from the PMA config file
• If everything else is done, work on implementing multipart/form-data handling

WEEKLY REPORT - WEEK 8

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS LAST WEEK

• Commented code for BLOBStreaming implementation
• Began implementing BLOB file uploading via PMA’s uploadDir mechanism

KEY TASKS THAT STALLED LAST WEEK

• Implementation of file uploading via PMA’s uploadDir mechanism and fixing of a bug that retains the content type for subsequent file uploads to the BLOB repository (this bug is more of a display issue, the original content-types are retained in the repository tables). I have not been able to do much this past week primarily because of a problem with my final year project proposal, amongst other things. This has already been resolved though. These two pending tasks should be done by the next week.

KEY CONCERNS

None

TASKS IN THE UPCOMING WEEK

• Finish implementing file uploading via PMA’s uploadDir mechanism
• Resolve content-type bug
• If everything else is done, work on implementing multipart/form-data handling

WEEKLY REPORT - WEEK 7

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS LAST WEEK

• Fixed file uploading to the BLOB repository (testing still pending, but so far it works fine on my copy)
• Fixed some more bugs (still a few more to go)
• Added ability to stream files of certain content-types (still needs testing though)
• Code in compliance with PEAR standards

KEY TASKS THAT STALLED LAST WEEK

• I still have quite an amount of code left to write comments for. I’ve been busy with my new semester having started on Thursday in the past week, so I didn’t have much time to work on my project the last few days of the week

KEY CONCERNS

None

TASKS IN THE UPCOMING WEEK

• Implement file uploading via PMA’s uploadDir mechanism
• Comment remaining code
• If everything else is done, work on implementing multipart/form-data handling

WEEKLY REPORT - WEEK 6

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS LAST WEEK

• optimized code here and there
• moved plugin, CURL and MyBS table detection to libraries/common.inc.php
• removed self-made DBI functions (using PMA’s DBI as it is available in libraries/common.inc.php)
• fixed numerous bugs/errors
• added the option to remove a valid BLOB repository reference from an existing record (if the database has the BLOB repository enabled)

KEY TASKS THAT STALLED LAST WEEK

• Proper comments for the code. This has stalled because I’ve made significant changes here and there. Will handle this when I have time to spare.
• I’ve yet to implement multipart/form-data handling, for the same reason above.
• Determine the content-type of the file after it has been uploaded to the BLOB repository. Likely to be a problem with how I’m using PHP’s libcurl functions.

KEY CONCERNS

None

TASKS IN THE UPCOMING WEEK

• Fix file uploading to the BLOB repository.
• Properly comment code.
• Yet again, if everything else is done, get multipart/form-data handling implemented.