Nijel's weblog | blog.cihar.com

I was unable to complete demo server setup today, so you will have to wait longer for demo server availability. I hope I will manage this during weekend.

I'm sorry for todays server outage, but it seems to be caused by some DOS attack. As a result of this I decided to temporary disable demo server, because it was target of this attack.

Demo will be back during tommorow, when I make some stricter restrictions on access to it.

I already do conversion of many dictionaries for StarDict and now my scripts are able to handle yet another dictionaries. Now you can also convert Dicts.info to StarDict format using my set of conversion scripts.

I can not provide prebuilt dictionaries as they do not allow redistribution.

Especiall if there is chance it will be used on something like OpenWRT. Yesterday I installed Munin on my OpenWRT router. Now I can see that sometimes statistics drop to zero, because it didn't manage to catch them.

I looked for most CPU hungry plugins and those are df_inode and processes. I rememeber that I already had to rewrite df_inode, because it was damn slow, so I only used that version (it should be also somewhere in their tracker, but I can not find it right now).

The processes plugin was also quite easy to optimise, compare old and new code:

 # time find /proc -type d | grep [0-9]$ | tr -d "/proc/" | grep ^[0-9]*$ | wc -l
 real    0m 0.77s
 user    0m 0.28s
 sys     0m 0.39s

 # time ls -d /proc/[1-9]* | wc -l
 real    0m 0.06s
 user    0m 0.04s
 sys     0m 0.00s

This time it is reality and not only using SNMP. Thanks god that I sometimes follow backlinks, otherwise I'd miss that some brave guy ported Munin to OpenWRT and other one wrote about it.

Now I have fully featured stats from my router. The only thing I had to tweak was df plugins, which were fooled by too long devfs path to USB disk.

Do you know some non-English language and English as well? Do you want to improve Gammu? You can do it right now, by translating Gammu to your language!

There are only six translations right now and most of them are in poor state. You can be brave hero which saves them! This time it also includes Czech translation, which I manage myself for Wammu, but I don't have time to do this also for Gammu, sorry.

If you want to add new language, just write me to michal@cihar.com, it will be added immediately. Maybe you will also want full control over some translation, this can be also done, but for now I prefer quick translating using open (well you need to register) system.

PS: I see new testing release with improved localisation support in near future. Gettext version is working fine right now and it only needs some cleanup from unused code right now.

Today I got finally enough fed up with Firefox^WIceweasel and started to look for alternative. Konqueror might be a solution, but I don't use anything from KDE, so it would be paintful. So only browsers which remained were Gecko based. Not that big improvement, but at least I will get rid of some stupid ideas which were implemented when Firefox 2.0 came out.

As first I tried Gnome default browser - Epiphany. I already thought about using it several times, but I was never able to customize it to my needs. But now I have all needed functions after installing few plugins and bookmarklets. I especially like Python plugins, this way it is quite easy to write/change a bit some plugin, which does what you need.

The only thing I currently miss is some bookmark synchronisation, because I use browser on several computers. But I will hopefully find something soon.

I played a bit with Gammu and my phone (Sony-Ericsson K750i) yesterday, and I found yet another firmware bug. Enabling call line identification over cable (or any connection) makes phone hang when you receive call. Don't know why it is not able to look up number, when it already shows it on the display…

When I talked last November about 10,000 visitors, I really didn't expect that in four months, wiki will double this value. Looks like it is useful source of information for users. Only thing a bit frightens me - there are only few contributors and almost none except developers and few well known users. This is wiki, feel free to edit it!

PS: Server with twice more memory serves pages much better, hopefully you also noticed this. Anyway further donations are welcome ;-).

I already announced that Gammu translations were converted to gettext. Reasons for conversion were written already some time ago. Now I'd like to write about some technical details on conversion.

First I thought the conversion will be simple. Just convert one text file format to other. Unfortunately there were lots of typos in old translations, which I had to fix, because gettext is much stricter about syntax. This itself would be also good reason to switch - old localisations had several types of errors, most frequently bad escaped quotes or messed format strings. This sometimes lead to Gammu crash, because it confuses printf like functions.

Another thing which was broken in old translation were duplicates of some strings. There were about 20 duplicate messages, which only added work to translators and were never used, because Gammu used first string which matched.

After I spot common mistakes, it was quite easy to write conversion script which would handle them. It is written in Python and uses its ConfigParser module to read old localisations. Using already done modules makes thinks a lot easier :-). After reading them, they are fixed to avoid syntax errors in gettext and written in gettext format to new file. All this in 123 lines of code (well, many of this are comments and string constants).

PS: You can download conversion script here, maybe it will be usable also for some other project.

I today managed to convert current translation data to gettext format. Thanks to conversion to gettext, we can now use many standard tools to translate Gammu. One of such tool which is already used for Wammu is Pootle.

I added Gammu po files to my installation and you can now translate online! Currently all languages are open, but if somebody want to manage some language on his own, feel free to write me. Also any requests for adding new language should go to my email.

I finally managed to make screenshots page on wammu.eu. Now you can see small thumbnails directly on first page and it really looks like screenshots page :-).

Meanwhile also Gammu Phone Database got some improvements, but you should not notice anything there (besides added BenQ manufacturer).

I finally managed to convert Gammu to use standard gettext for localisation. It was quite nice play with regular expressions, but I had to do only few manual edits afterwards.

Now the second part remains - converting of current translations to po files. Anybody has experiences with this?

As soon as conversion is done, you will be able to translate Gammu online at http://l10n.cihar.com.

Yesterday I decided to register wammu.eu domain for Wammu. One of reasons was that almost all other wammu.* variants are already taken by speculants and this name sounds good enough. The other reason is to give Wammu better accessible website. The old URL was not bad, but domain name sounds better :-). Also separate domain will allow later to have different CMS and/or design of Wammu pages, what is something I'd like to see, but don't have skills for that.

So please use http://wammu.eu for linking to Wammu. The old URLs are redirected to new location and they will stay redirected for long.

If there are any problems on new website, please notify me.

After half year (well almost), I passed through all pitfalls of new maintainer process and I became Debian Developer. From all rumours I heard before starting this process, I thought it will take longer.

In fact only lengthy part was three months waiting for my account being created, but I expected it because of many people were busy when preparing stable release.

Thanks to everybody who helped me going through this process.

Maybe it's time to write down what I plan in Gammu in future. Please note that this is not short-term plan (it is unlikely that something of this will be in next stable release), it is just list of thinks I'd like to have in future.

• API improvements - Current ABI which changes whenever there is change in internal structure sucks. The current code will get wrappers Gammu_DoSomething(statemachine, params), which will allow to have ABI compatible as long as the function exists.
• Unicode storage - There were good reasons in past not to use wchar_t but I thing all them have gone. Switching to wchar_t would allow Gammu to easily communicate with rest of the world and Gammu won't have to contain duplicates of many functions from standard libc.
• Localisation - Gettext is much more flexible than current localisation system and well known format gives translators ability to use many tools.
• Drop autotools support - CMake build system looks much cleaner than anything I was able to achieve with autotools. Right now it still requires some stabilisation, but it is anyway equal replacement.
• Version control - I'd like to switch to Subversion, which is widely used and widely known. However I have not yet found way how to import my current revisions in Bazaar to Subversion, any conversion I tried so far crashed.

Anybody interested in these steps? Don't hesitate to tell me or write to gammu-users mailing list.

In time when I was working on Wammu 0.18, I realized, that making release not very often is bad thing. You usually get same reports over the development period and telling people that you have fixed it, but not yet in any released version, doesn't make them happy.

As you can see from past weeks, I switched to making releases as often as possible. I will try to add new features quickly after release and then give the code some time for stabilisation (well, this would need a bit more testers than I currently have). I'd like to avoid delay longer than month between releases, if there is something to release (I doubt there will be any major changes in python-gammu in near future).

This time the release is quickly after previous one and I hope it will be better quality than previous one (especially for Windows users). Wammu 0.19 has been just released, list of changes is:

• Improved SMS recipient list handling.
• Can save and load SMS recipient list.
• Fix crash on Windows when username contains non-ascii chars.
• Fix Windows binary crashes.
• Support for sending file to phone.
• Support for task bar icon (thanks to Rene Peters).
• Fixed debug log on Windows.
• Fixed error handler on Windows.

I just released new version of Gammu, you can download it from download server. There is quite a lot of changes:

• Fixed encoding of name for Nokia phones.
• Fixed connecting to PostgreSQL with empty password.
• Fixed infinite loop in --monitor (bug #75).
• Fixed behaviour on Bluetooth disconnect.
• Fixed handling of files with special chars on OBEX.
• OBEX driver correctly detects models.
• Native OBEX connections (blueobex and irdaobex) should work also with unknown models.
• Simplified searching of channels using Bluez stack.
• RF searching now better detects OBEX channels.
• Fix format strnings for 64-bit architectures (bug #77).
• Cleanup documentation structure.
• Moved locales out of documentation.
• Fixes locales and documentaion install in CMake (bug #76).
• Fixed retrieving messages with some phones who index them from zero like CG79 (bug #20).
• Ignore error when there is too much members in group in phone (bug #3).
• Compilation fixes for OpenBSD with libutf8 (bug #10).
• Handle another error while reading 6510 phonebook (bug #49).
• Fix international number handling in vCard (bug #71).

Today I decided to go through open Gammu bugs and try to fix some of them. There were trying many trivial bugs, which I'm now fixing, the harder ones will there stay for some other time or other volunteer (feel free to take some!).

There are still some issues remaining, but I will go through rest today and tomorrow and make testing release after that. So far ChangeLog length looks quite impressive :-).

Thanks to Rene Peters, next Wammu release will come with tray icon support. I was always too lazy to look how it should be implemented and it turns out to be only few lines of code :-).

Anyway if there is something else you miss in Wammu, don't afraid to ask for it, there is always a chance, that somebody will implement it.

As there were some problems with Wammu 0.18 on Windows, I'm going to release 0.19 this week. The only new major thing will be more comfortable editing of recipients of SMS with support for loading and saving.

If you have some time, please test curent snapshots and report any found problems, so that we can have perfect release this time :-).

I just added to Wammu support for SMS recipient lists. For now there is no interaction with possible lists in phone, but you can create and save your own lists.

Lists are saved in plain text files, one phone per line. I guess such list will be easy to create from any application.

PS: I hope this feature won't be used for SMS spamming :-).

Now I'm in state when I'm deciding what to put to next Wammu version. This is always hard, because I don't get any feedback from most of users. I sometimes find note in random forum, that user wants dock icon.

Anyway I'd really appreciate some feedback in bug tracking system. Write there features you would like to see or post comments to existing reports, that you want to see this feature.

This will help me to choose which one to implement in upcoming Wammu version. You can see what I've chosen for now in bug #252.