Personal report for 2018
You can find the personal report for 2017 here.
Generally, it feels like this year was a frustration — I planned to do much more than I managed to. I expected it to become a leap, but instead it resembles more just a slow turn. Still, this turn was made in the right direction. The problem is that it looks like I need much more time to get to the destination.
Redmine plugin implementing flexible version list
If you use Redmine versions intensively, eventually you will want to have a flexible global versions overview, where you’ll be able to: list upcoming versions of all your projects, evaluate their status and progress, check their due dates in order to plan the release schedule, and so on. Unfortunately, the pure Redmine comes only with a simple per-project version list, which cannot even be sorted or filtered, or customized in any other way. Obviously, this functionality is too limited for many advanced use cases.
Tizen development nightmare (part 1)
(3 comments) 
I need to have a specific tool on my smartphone for my personal needs. As I did not find any such existing tool, I decided to develop it. My smartphone, an old Samsung Z1, is based on Tizen OS (it’s, actually, the very first Tizen smartphone), so I downloaded Tizen Studio 2.4 and started the journey.
Why Tizen? I hate Apple and Microsoft for their attempts to kill Linux and I just don’t like Java as a programming language. If Tizen dies, I’ll move to SailfishOS or PureOS — iOS, Android and Windows Phone are not options for me.
Redmine plugin showing logs for outgoing emails
(1 comment) Sometimes it’s important to know, if the user should have received the email notification generated by Redmine. Especially, if usage of Redmine in your organization relies on email integration (for example, if it’s configured to receive user comments, such as issue notes and message replies, via email). In such cases, some users may use Redmine user interface very rarely as all the communication can be made through emails.
Until now it was impossible to determine using Redmine, if the particular email notification was sent to the particular user. For this, you would need to dig into the logs of the message transfer agent (MTA) (if you had access to those logs, of course). Even so, it was not easy to link records in such logs to certain email notifications.
4-byte UTF-8 problem in Redmine and how to fix it
(4 comments) I’ll start with explaining the cause of the problem. If you don’t need this, you can skip the padded paragraphs.
You have probably already heard about issues with weird symbols in iPhones, that led to freeze or reboot? Something like these can also be experienced on Redmine instances, that were installed some time ago. iPhones crash because they fail to render the weird symbols and such Redmine instances give errors because they fail to save corresponding symbols to the database. Yes, the problem is actually in the underlying MySQL database, not in Redmine. In iPhones this happens with some unusual 4-byte unicode symbols and in Redmine/MySQL this can happen with any 4-byte symbol. Thus, you can experience this issue in Redmine with emoji, some Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters.
CD-Index: My media cataloging solution
I have a huge media collection, that I created many years ago. Eventually, in some time I got need to find several files by their names. After unsuccessful checking tens of my CDs I realized, that it was too complicated to do that simple task as my media collection was just too big. In this way, I came to the conclusion, that I needed a media cataloging tool.
I tried many ready solutions, but none of them appeared to be good enough for me to use. The biggest problem with them was the search – it was just damn too slow. And, it was so slow becauses they used plain text files, e.g., in XML format, to store the file structure information. It looked like they loaded those big text files, parsed them and then made the search. And they did that for each media. So eventually, I realized, that I had to implement my own solution.
Adding GitHub mirror for SVN repository
I store code of my projects in Subversion repositories on this server (on which this website is hosted). I thought about switching to GitHub, but I don’t like the idea, that the main code repository of my project would be stored on a third-party server. Not sure why. Also, I didn’t want to lose the ability to count downloads and checkouts (I use these data to determine popularity of projects), but I have already lost this, as many my projects got forks. Anyway, the reason is not such important for this article, as you can have own reasons for the same.
GitHub is the most popular project hosting service nowadays. Due to this many developers, who want to make some changes to my projects, upload their forks to this service. Actually, these projects include not only my code – if someone submits a patch, which fixes some issue or implements some feature and which is good enough (in my opinion), I usually merge it (making a note in CREDITS file). Forks on GitHub can have such changes too, but, because they are not linked to the original projects in any way, I often do not know about their existence. So, to include such changes I need to search for forks (what I did recently). Needless to say, that this would be much easier – in particular due to GitHub’s social networking capabilities – if these forks were linked to my projects. But for this, I would need to host my code repositories on GitHub.