Nijel's weblog | blog.cihar.com

This month for first time number of unique visitors on both phpMyAdmin demo and phpMyAdmin wiki has grown over 10000. It looks like phpMyAdmin attracts more and more people as demo server unique visitos constantly grows since time it has been launched.

BTW: If you like this service, you're welcome to send donation to halp paying costs of running.

You might have notice that this server had outage for whole night. I was affraid of some hardware issues, but the reason was much simpler - my init script hang and because of that server can not start. Next time I will write init script, I will definitely check whether it works correctly ;-).

Gammu stable release release by Marcin. This entry is here just to make automated checkers happy.

I just finished first (and most complicated) part of new phone configuration wizard for Gammu/Wammu. You can now go through few questions which will result in configuration for Gammu/Wammu.

Yes I'm talking about united configuration, as I will probably switch to using Gammu configuration in next Wammu release. Separate configuration caused too much confusion and united configuration will help other tools like gMobileBrowser to work easily (maybe even using my wizard).

If you want to test it, just donwload Wammu snapshot from Wammu page and run ./wammu-configure.py from it. You won't yet get configuration out of it, configuration will be printed to standard output.

And searching and manual configuration parts are not yet implemented, I will do them later, but they are much less coding than guided configuration…

I did another part of configuration wizard for Gammu/Wammu, so if you are interested how it will look like, you cat try current Wammu snapshot and tell me how you like the wizard. It doesn't do any real action so far, only provides most of pages it will provide once it is fully functional :-).

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 :-).

Yesterday I visited concert of Prague hard rock band Clyde. It was first time I've heard them live and I wasn't really happy with sound in this concert. It sounded overexcited and it was probably caused by sound mixer crew. Anyway the music itself is pretty good and I like it, you can download some MP3s on their website.

You can find some photos from concert on my sister's pages. There are only pictures of the band, because there was almost no audience (something around 20 people). This was quite strange experience, as I've never been on so empty rock concert :-).

This morning I enabled new Designer feature in phpMyAdmin demo (currently available only in trunk). It's embeded version of phpMyDesigner which was originally developed as separate product.

Please give it some testing as there might be some problems in integration.

I was just shocked by recent order of our minister of culture - fees for empty media will be increased from current minimal ammount (around 0.20 CZK) to 5 CZK (0.2 €) for DVD. Now it will be quite important part of price of empty DVD medium. It's strange for people like me, who use such mediums mostly for backup purposes. Looking for country where such crazy fees do not exist!

I'm looking for somebody with experiences on drawing graphics. Next Wammu will come with some nice features which would require some images. For now I'm sure there will be two new wizards:

• Phone configuration wizard - to ease configuration of phone. Either by embeding current search ability or by guiding user through manual configuration.
• Migration wizard - migrate data between phones. You know this situation - you bring brand new phone and want to migrate your existing data from old one to it as quick as possible. Side effect of this will be also backup/restore wizard only by using backup files instead of source or target phone.

I want them to look good, so a bit of graphic would help. Is there somebody willing to help?

During my sickness last week and half, my mailbox was slowly filling with various messages. Mostly feedback about Gammu, Wammu or phpMyAdmin, but also various other issues. Now I finally managed to get through all of them and I have zero unread mail. Hooray. Well I don't think it will keep on this state long, but it's good to cleanup old issues sometimes :-).

I decided to do finally some work oh phpMyAdmin today. I went through security announcements we (or I directly) received and tried to reproduce and fix them. Now everything seems to be fixed in Subversion and we're going to 2.9.1.1 release today. So if you have time, please test MAINT_2_9_1 branch, to awoid some major breakage :-).

PS: You can also download snapshot.

Today I tried for first time software for Sony-Ericsson K750i on Windows. The supplied Sony-Ericsson suite offers only sync, when I try to browse files, it says phone is not connected. Okay, usual manufacturer software quality, I didn't expect more :-).

Next I installed floAt's Mobile Agent. I read quite good reports about this software, so I had to see what competition does Wammu have on Windows :-).

After some troubles to configure phone connection, including some Windows restarts, I managed to download some data. I was very suprised that my contact names weren't correctly decoded (in vCard they're properly in UTF-8). Rest of support is on very simmilar level as in my Gammu branch, Wammu is still far behind, especially in GUI design.

After lot of coding, I can say that this phone is fully supported. All basic services should work in my Gammu branch and changes should be soon merged to official branch.

So what works?

• Phonebook with most of entries (no picture, voice commands and ringtones)
• Calendar
• Todo
• SMS
• Filesystem
• Various information, including detailed filesystem status and battery temperature ;-)

If you're using original Sony-Ericsson cable, try following configuration, and send me gammulog, if anything goes wrong:

[gammu]
connection = at
port = /dev/ttyACM0
logfile = gammulog
logformat = textall

Branch links are available at http://cihar.com/gammu/, you can directly download from http://dl.cihar.com/gammu/snapshot/.

Update: All needed changes had been merged in 1.09.00 release, so you don't have to care about development versions.

Today I hacked complete support for phonebook and calendar, so only big thing which is missing in my branch is todo support and support for some few AT*E commands, which I'd like to add. I expect to finish this tomorrow and push patches to Marcin.

Anyway as code is in quite good share right now, I'd welcome any testers, you can download snapshots and try at least downloading calendar and phonebook.

Yesterday, I finally managed to code something what could be taken as improvement for Sony-Ericsson phone owners. My Gammu branch can now read complete phonebook entries. The implementation is now far from being effective, but works good.

What needs to be improved is way for getting LUIDs, as reading complete phonebook just to get list of all LUIDs is big overhead and causes big slowdown when reading first entry. Parsing IrMC changelog might be a solution, but it would need removing of deleted entries, what is harder to implement. I will try to investigate this possibility later, as this is not required to be handled right now.

OpenUsability project has opened some projects to public. None of projects have been chosen as student work (I understand this, as I didn't put there much formal specification), but instead offered as open projects.

This is both good and bad news: Bad news because there is no sponsoring for the usability consultant, good news because the time frame is not restricted to January-April (they may start immediately ;-), and professionals can apply as well as students.

While looking at best way how to implement Sony-Ericsson support in Gammu, I found that I desperately need OBEX specification for that. After looking at IrDA website, where it has been designed. I was shocked by prices they request, so I start to look for other source.

Thanks to Jane, I found it! Well they should protect their content if they really want to charge some money...

Marcin, you want to know some problems I see in Gammu+. Okay, I finally found some time to look at it:

1. There is no design document, where can developer find how the code is organised and what is supposed to be API.
2. There is no definition of external API. Everything is mixed together in simmilar way as in Gammu.
3. I don't see reasong for passing pointers (and especially double pointers (eg. DebugInfo) instead of C++ references.
4. Why not using widestring constants instead of converting all using some function?
5. Why there are reimplemented lists in backup? All those GSM_Backup_*Entry IMHO can be replaced by list\.
6. There is too much malloc used (you should need it very rarely in C++).
7. Too much reimplementation of standard C library (eg. wcscasecmp vs. UnicodeCaseCmp).

Okay, I'm tired of reading that code. There is no documentation, the code follows no design, etc. I know Gammu code, so I can a bit understand Gammu+ code, but I expected some more open project, with at least some documentation. If you want to attract developers, you need to document your code.

Gammu+ looks to me like rewrite of C code into C++ while fixing some of design flaws of the old one, but introducing new ones. I know that nobody is perfect, but when starting new project, you should have spent some time on designing it's internals, writing them down and maybe receive some comments from others.

I know nobody is perfect, I also made several projects with wrong design before (well, Wammu is one of the examples).

PS: I don't say that Gammu+ has no future. I only say that it is ulikely to attract more developers as lacks documentation in same way Gammu does. I tried to introduce some documentation it Gammu, but I alone can not document new code…

Ukolovnik 0.5 has been just released. New features:

• Fix upgrade error.
• Include Czech translation.

After playing with it a bit I found out: current Gammu support for this phone is not working at all. After some looking at sources I decided to do implementation same way as in Alcatel - overlay driver which will use AT functions if they can be used. If you're interested in testing, my code will grow in my arch repository (more information on http://cihar.com/gammu), I'm going to submit it to upstream once there will be completed some set of functionality.

I use this phone almost 1 day, so it is now time to write down firste experiences.

• I have Vodafone customisation, seeing their logo everywhere is not something I like.
• MP3 player and radio integrated in phone is great idea - you can listen to music and you don't miss any phone call or message as with regullar MP3 player.
• Camera is not perfect, but 2MPix is enough for making random photos with good light conditions.
• It is great that it has USB storage.
• I didn't find way to communicate with phone over IrDA except file transfer.
• Why the hell I could not upload whole calendar from my old Alcatel 535? It says something about low memory, but there is enough free space.
• I miss distinguishing from payed content and regullar phone menus. When do I enter Vodafone Live!? When do I download game data?

But generally it works much better than old phone, I only need to get used to some different functions.

Today evening I picked up my new phone on post office and as soon as I arrived home, I started to play with it. And well result for Gammu is poor, there is too much to implement. For now I only added identification, but I will work more on it.

Transfer of contacts was done by gammu --backup data.vcs on old phone and then tranfering to new phone using plain IrDA - ircp data.vcs. This is far from being perfect - I lost most of text in extended entries, half of names is also lost and I expect something might be missing. But I have at least something till I will write full support in Gammu :-).

After some complains that users can easilly confuse http://pma.cihar.com with http://cihar.com/phpMyAdmin, I decided to add navigation to top of these pages, so that you can easily switch between all phpMyuAdmin related content you can find on my pages. I only hope I didn't break anything while doing this change :-).

I had talk about Gammu and Wammu this weekend on LinuxAlt. Video should be online on conference website after some time, but my presentation and text is available right now. You can find it in new section talks. I will have to solve navigation later :-).

I'm using more and more version control systems and I'm more and more often mistaken which commands to use in which project. At work we still have CVS, for kernel it is git (or cogito), for phpMyAdmin we switched to subversion, for my old projects it is bazaar and for new projects I use bazaar-ng.

And not, my brain can not switch context fast enought to remember that in this repository I need svn up and in another one cg-update.

I doubt that I'm only one with such problem and hopefully somebody already wrote some meta version control interface, which would correctly detect which beast is current directory using, and invoke appripriate command for wanted action. However Googling didn't find anything like that, but hopefully I'm only using bad query. Anybody has seen such tool?

We have two releases today - one fixes security bug in stable branch (2.9.0.3) and one to fix several bugs (2.9.1-rc2). Final 2.9.1 should follow soon if no major problem appears.

I also added MAINT_2_9_1 branch to snapshots and demo server, feel free to use them.

New month has come and thus there is new upstream release of stardict-english-czech package. While preparing upload for my sponsor, I decided to go also through rest of my packages. Wammu is for quite long waiting for my sponsor, so I pinged him. nanoblogger has some open bugs, so I fixed them and sent package to sponsor. And last but not least I sent ping to debian-mentors about sponsoring sonata, which is really cool application and I'd love to see it in next Debian release. However this target seems to be quite far away as nobody was attracted by it up to now.

It happens too often in recent program releases - I do a release and few moments after it I notice some quite important bug. Today it is deadlock in upgrading in Ukolovnik. I should have seen it before (as I fixed simmilar problem for another part of config layer), but I haven't.

I'll wait for some time if something else appears and then make another new release. You can meanwhile apply patch from the bug manually or use daily snapshot.