Nijel's weblog | blog.cihar.com

I just released new version of Gammu, you can download it from download server. The biggest reason for this release is compatibility with 2.6.21 kernel. Other changes are:

• Doxygen documentation improvements.
• Fix USB serial devices with Linux kernel 2.6.21, we don't use ASYNC IO, so we should not set it.
• Tell user that he should enter text for SMS.
• Cleaned up transatable strings.
• Improve networks listing.
• Allow networks to be listed by country code.
• Add flag to SMS folders whether it is outbox.

I currently do not plan further testing release before next stable one, but in case some serious problem is found, this can change.

Since Linux kernel 2.6.21 entered higher release candidates, more people started to report that Gammu has problem on that with connecting over USB cable. First I thought it is some misconfiguration of kernel, but when several same reports appeared, I decided to take a look at it.

As great side effect of this, I found out that I can use snapshots of Debian kernel, where current version (2.6.21-rc7) is available as Debian package. This saved me lot of time, thanks guys!

After installing and booting new kernel, I quickly found out that the problem is not SIGSEGV as many people reported, but SIGIO. After quick look at code, it was obvious that setting file to asynchronous I/O causes this.

Well this is how asynchronous I/O is supposed to work and kernel people implemented it now for (some?) serial drivers. I have no idea why there was attempt to use it in Gammu. The code is not at all ready for this and makes no use of asynchronous I/O. So the fix was quite easy - just to remove this flag from file.

Fix now sits in SVN, impatient users who run kernel 2.6.21 can get SVN snapshot :-). Testing release will follow during next week.

I just released new version of Gammu, you can download it from download server. The only reason for this release is fixed Windows binary distribution, other changes are:

• Fix decoding of new style address records in Nokia phones. Thanks to Martin Strigl, see also bug #286.
• Reorganised documentation a bit.
• Use correct format strings for IrDA debug messages.
• Identify Alcatel One Touch 55x.
• Improve detection of OBEX support.
• Fixed Windows build.

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

• Work with AT phones which can not write SMS to ME (bug #282).
• Increse limits for SMS backups (this requires dynamic allocation).
• Development switched to Subversion, see README for details.
• Detect Motorola Bluetooth port (Daniel Gimpelevich).
• Fixup AT driver to work with Samsung SGH X160.
• Support for last modified field in vCalendar.
• Adjust vCalendar entries from SE phones on DST (bug #81).
• Fix updating of delivery report date in SMSD (thanks to Peter Stuge).
• Fix format strings for Win32 build.
• Fix crash when no config exists.
• Support for MinGW crosscompation with MySQL.
• Support for MinGW crosscompation with PostgreSQL.
• MakeTerminatedCall can be now called more times in batch mode.
• Support for MinGW crosscompation with Gettext.

As I can now build full featured Gammu binary for Windows, the download size increased a lot. If you thing it is too big, I can start to produce two sets of binaries.

As I have problem on getting useful reports from Gammu/Wammu crashes, I realised that having debug package for Gammu is good idea. However looking into official documentation didn't reveal how to achieve this. The wiki seems also miss information about this. Well then it must be something obvious. Fortunately I'm not only one who didn't find it on first attempt and dinosaur already wrote about this.

However I still wonder why this didn't get to some official documentation. For now I wrote down this to wiki, so it is easier to find for anybody else.

When migrating tags from Bazaar to Subversion, I generated lots of commits. When I did that, I didn't realise, that CIA will count all my tagging as commit and I will become most active author and Wammu will read 6th position among most active projects. Anyway this has just happened and maybe it will advertise Wammu a bit.

But don't expect that I or my projects will reappear there in near future ;-).

I just added my blog to http://planet.debian.org, hopefully my posts will not annoy anybody :-). Don't expect much personal things from me, most of blogging is about Gammu and Wammu.

Today last batch of Wammu and python-gammu has been converted to Subversion. It was almost painless, it only required lot of CPU time. All project pages should now link to Subversion repositories and snapshots. Also all projects now have publicly available statistics on http://www.ohloh.net and http://cia.vc.

Unfortunately for python-gammu and Wammu are statistics a bit messed up - for Wammu ohloh didn't find license header, which is in almost every file, in python-gammu, doc string comments are not counted as being comments, so without it project has obviously to low comments ratio.

Anyway I was quite impressed by code grow of Wammu in last half year, because I still thing I don't have enough time for Wammu. However if their stats are true, the code amount grows quite fast in last months.

I was always a bit afraid to try those complex tools, but now with switch to subversion, I decided to give it a try. And it payed off. Now package management is much easier and everything is recorded in VCS. Yes I could do it with previously used bazaar too, but VCS migration was the latest impulse which made me try it. Now I can only thank to people who invented these tools.

…and imported into subversion. Today I walked over some older stuff in my CVS repository, I decided to import them also to subversion.

The only major unpublished thing there is Wessie. It was supposed to be modular publishing system written in PHP. However I lost interest in improving this during time and it was used only on two real life projects - one is site about Alcatel phones, which is still alive, the other one was our semester project for software engineering, which is now dead.

Anyway maybe somebody will find the sources useful, so feel free to do with sources whatever GNU GPL permits :-).

As continuation of migration to Subversion, Gammu now also uses Subversion as version control. This is now pretty standard version control system, so you can easily use latest development source.

Besides this, using Subversion brings us possibility to use various free services to work with this repository.

If you want to follow development, you can use RSS feeds on CIA.vc. For code statistics hungry people, there is Ohloh service, which directly analyses repository.

There might be also other useful tools, if you want some integration, just tell me.

I finally managed to migrate some things to Subversion from Bazaar. This does not yet include Gammu related things (Gammu, python-gammu and Wammu), because they are more tricky to migrate.

However all Debian packaging now can be handled using svn-buildpackage, which makes things a bit easier. Also smaller projects like Ukolovnik, polld and dictionary converter have been migrated.

You can see list of repositories at http://svn.cihar.com/, where is also link to web based browser.

Please note that repositories might change in future, because everything is not yet completely settled down.

I always wondered why there is no possiblity to create MP3 from Sound-Juicer. I expected it is some patent issue, but I have all lame stuff installed and expect things in GNOME to just work.

Unfortunately this is not the case, but Google works always and Jacob Emcken wrote down his configuration, so setup was quite easy. Thanks!

After more playing with Tailor, I managed to hack it enough to convert my Arch repositories to Subversion. Move from distributed to non distributed VCS migth look as step backwards, but I have pretty good reasons for this:

• Subversion is widely used and there is big chance that potential contributor will know how to use it. This lowers barrier for contributing (especially when compared to current Arch/Bazaar).
• Subversion sucks much less than CVS which is other well known VCS.
• If I want to work distributed I can still use Bazaar-NG with foreign branch features.

The conversion is currently on the way and will probably need some time (about half of Gammu revisions have been converted so far).

Today I noticed, that documentation for python-gammu is not up to date, because I completely forgot to update it since 0.13 release.

Well anything what has to be done manually sucks, so I scripted automatic generating of this documentation, so it should always be up to date with current development snapshot.

BTW: Anybody know how to document constructor of class implemented in C using EpyDoc? I didn't manage to find way for this.

After returning from Easter vacation, I was afraid of my full mailbox. This was quite correct, but fortunately some people also were not working, so it is not that bad. Anyway I didn't read it all so far, so don't be afraid if reaction on your mail (especially about Gammu and Wammu) will take longer.

The worst thing which happened was, that somebody managed to fuck up MySQL server serving phpMyAdmin demo in some very unusual way, which was not detected by my scripts, which are checking whether demo server is still alive. This lead to almost day outage, because I had to restore MySQL manually this morning. Anyway this case should be now also caught and the script for checking is getting more and more complex. Maybe I should better use Monit (or other monitoring software) for this instead of home made shell script. But shell script seems to do good job in most cases :-).

Off topic PS: Thanks to everybody who helped to release Debian 4.0!

I know that GNOME is trying to hide as much configuration as possible, but Epiphany today suprised me. I started to use is as default browser some time ago, but now I needed to print something for first time. Everything in my system is configured to use A4 paper, so I didn't expect any problem with this configuration.

Unforutanety Epiphany has separate configuration under separate menu item. I don't know why it is separated from print dialog, maybe to confuse users. Also I have no idea why it has default size Letter. Anyway you can set paper size under Print Setup...

This is really great step for usability.

I just updated bug tracker to latest version, which again fixes some security issues. I hope this won't break any existing functionality, but if it does, please write me at michal@cihar.com.

Hmm, maybe it's time to look for some BTS with less security problems? The only problem is that I don't follow others that hard, so I maybe only don't know about such issues…

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

• Fixed crash on LMB export/import (bug #261).
• Correct version in iCalendar export/import.
• Fixed devel files installation using CMake (bug #78).
• Fixed decoding of call date.
• Use gettext for translation.
• --clearall also attempts to delete calls.
• Fixed decoding of date from backup (bug #267).
• Backup saves and restores numbers as same type (bug #266).
• Support for call notifications on AT phones.
• Support for batch mode - you can script gammu (thanks to ace).
• Use standard libc functions for string comparsion if available.
• Gammu commands are now accepted also without leading --.
• Detect more Nokia phones (5300, 6300, 8800) (some by Peter Stuge).
• Allow compilation with MySQL and without PGSQL (thanks to Alin Năstac).
• Fixed format strings for size_t (thanks to Alin Năstac).
• New connection ark3116fbus for use with ark3116 module.

As you can see, largest change is switch to gettext. You can also use https://l10n.cihar.com for online translating.

It's probably time to give up. I tried to tweak tailor to make it able to convert my repositories to Subversion for several times, but without any success. It also fails to convert it to Bazaar-NG or Git. Those are list of all VCS I consider to use in future.

I'd prefer to switch to subversion, because it is widely used and most people will be willing to use it, but I have not find any way to convert current VCS data to it. Maybe I will start with empty repository and forget the history.

After few days of outage, demo server is back running. To avoid possible problems, I now run it under separate vserver. This should limit any impacts of demo server to rest of services running on this host as it provides much better separation than chroot used before.

There still might be some issues with new setup, please tell me about them.