Nijel's weblog | blog.cihar.com

Finally this testing series is stabilizing and there are no known regressions. The latest big regression with encoding PDU data has been just fixed. Full list of changes:

• Fixed wrong PDU encoding (bug #412).
• Provide API for cleaning SMS backup structure.
• Added testing of SMS PDU encoding.

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/

I hope this will be really the last one before 1.14.0.

I just released new version of Gammu. I expected to have stable release at this time, but some important bugs appeared which forced me to change API. And while I did break this, I also did other API changes which I had longer in my mind. Besides there are lot of fixes in OBEX/IrMC code. Full list of changes:

• Fixes OBEX crash (Debian bug #446923).
• Correctly check various return values (bug #409).
• Fixed several bugs in vCard decoder.
• Removed UCS decoding heuristics, it can not work in all cases.
• Provide at least some basic information from dumb AT phones.
• SMSD now logs also error descriptions.
• SMSD can be configured not to check for security status.
• Correctly handle hard deletes on IrMC (bug #414).
• GSM_ReadConfig now returns GSM_Error instead of just bool.
• Many functions now use size_t for passing size values.
• Backups API now rather accepts format than guessing by filename.
• Increased soname due to API/ABI changes

Some day, this thing stopped to work for me. I was not aware of doing anything what could break it, even any related package was not updated. Time went on and I still did not find time to learn how to debug this udev/hal/dbus/gnome-volume-manager machinery.

Today, after some googling I found short debugging guide on Ubuntu wiki, which quickly revealed me that "volume.ignore set to true on /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/volume_uuid_4717_5407, not mounting". Well I didn't configure anything to be ignored, so let's dig deeper in this.

As I had no idea where this thing could be set, I again started to google and /etc/hal and /usr/share/hal seem to be the right place where to start grep. Nothing related in /etc, but too much entries in /usr. However most of them were selective for some special USB disks or partitions. But there was one which did this unconditionally - it was file /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/gparted-disable-automount.fdi, what crap from gparted. Now I remember that I used this for formatting and partitioning something on USB and after doing all job, it crashed. So it left this piece of HAL hack inside /usr/share/hal and it was cause of anything not mounting.

Seems to be worth of reporting as a bug... Wait a moment, it's already known and some patch for it exists. Hopefully we will see this soon in unstable.

Being in Japan has also one great feature - even if you are in same DVD region as in EU, you are still unable to play your DVDs, maybe because of PAL/SECAM issue, I don't know. I think it must have been intentionally designed this way.

The hardware player I have here at my room just tells me: Disc Error, Playback feature may not be available on this Disc. I have no idea what this error actually means, but I somehow expected I'll be able to play my region 2 DVDs in region 2 DVD player. Good luck that I still have my laptop with illegal dvdcss library, where I can play whatever DVD I put into it.

I know this is not real DRM at all, but this has also started as a technology to limit copying or whatever....

Well I somehow expected it will happen to me when I started to use Debian experimental distribution, but now it really happened. I noticed that last Gammu upload went to unstable instead of experimental just when today updating my other development machine and I was surprised that Gammu is going to be updated. Well the version is not that bad, but it is far from being stable.

Anyway it is good for something - unstable users will do much more testing than experimental ones ;-).

I just released new version of Gammu. It just adds compatibility with some Motorola phones (but still not enough to fully support them) and fixes some bugs. Full list of changes:

• Fixed crash in wrong config handling (Debian bug #446781).
• Initial support for Motorola SMS implementation (bug #408).

I expect this to be last release before next stable one - 1.14.0, so please give it some testing so that we can have a good release.

Wammu just got one of long wanted features - notification on incoming calls. It uses D-Bus and Desktop Notifications, so you are probably lost without some modern Linux desktop. The implementation was quite easy, if I would know that using notifications is so easy, I would have written this sooner :-).

So if you have phone connected to Wammu and somebody calls you, notification pops up and allows you to accept or reject the call. I doubt anybody needs more than this :-).

The next step will be SMS notifications, but those will be a bit more complicated.

New version of simple todo manager called Ukolovnik has been just released. Version 0.8 comes with following changes:

• Locales switched to gettext based system.
• Fixed some installation issues.

Switch to gettext means that you can translate it now using standard tools. One of them can be Pootle at l10n.cihar.com. If you want to add new language, just tell me.

I just released new version of Gammu. It just adds compatibility with more OBEX phones by providing fallback to AT commands and index based IrMC access. Full list of changes:

• Automatically fall back to AT commands when OBEX does not work.
• Initial support for IrMC index access.
• RunOnReceive is now also supported on Windows.
• Handle correctly case when memory is full (OBEX) (bug #404).

PS: I also created Jabber conference room for Gammu, see Wammu support page for details.

Good new everyone, new version of Photo uploader has been just born. If you don't know this tool yet, it is helper to upload photos (or images) over net. It was created when I became too lazy to upload hundreds of photos to digilab, but generally it can support any service which allows you uploading of whatever using HTML forms.

News in this release:

• It is possible to get session ID from API.
• Added support for opening in user defined browser.
• Now parses ~/.photo-upload and uses it as defaults.
• Support for uploading to imageshack.us.

On request I just added three new incarnations of dictionary snapshots. So if you're using display not capable of utf-8, you can use ascii variant, for those using non-Debian sdcv, notags variant has been created (but I anyway recommend you to apply patch to add Pango markup support). And finally there is combined super-crippled ascii-notags version :-).

I just released version 0.23 of Wammu. This is again mostly bug fix release, which fixes various bugs reported by users.

• Fixed phone number prefix settings.
• Customisable format for displaying name.
• Fixed crash when reporting information to phone database.

There is still no binary for Windows. I don't have time and environment for debugging crashes that happen there. Volunteers are welcome!

I just released new version of Gammu. This is simply bug fixing release, no major new features. Full list of changes:

• Fixed handling of errors when saving SMS (bug #396).
• Fixed number type detection.
• Added support for Nokia 6070, thanks to Lúcio Corrêa.
• Added flag -nopower to connection to handle cables with different handling of DTR/RTS signals.

Man never realizes how much customised distribution he has until he has to reinstall it. Last week hard disk in my notebook died, so I had to reinstall system and reconfigure everything. I fortunately have backups of almost everything (at least I didn't notice that anything would be missing), but I anyway spend two evenings in installing, configuring and restoring from backups and I'm still not done with it, but the system is at least usable for normal work.

However there are also some positive things on this: I get more space and faster disk. I finally set up encrypted file system on my notebook. I dropped several old crap that lived (or better was buried) somewhere in my system and which I already forgot why it was there. And I also got rid of very bad partitioning scheme, which was there from times I used together Debian and Windows and wanted to have another partition to test SUSE installation while I worked there. Now there is only Debian to rule them all ;-).

Looking at the web stats, I noticed, that quite a lot of people find something relevant to "environmental" on my pages. As I was not aware of anything related here, I tried that in Google. To my surprise all results are in demo for Ukolovnik.

Well I do not want to add any anti spam technique to this simple tool as it will be usually password protected. And this is exactly what I did with demo for now. So if you want to use it, you need to login with user demo and password demo. I hope this will prevent spammers from using this demo, otherwise I would probably have to close it.

What does cryptic shortcut for different cables for different Nokia phones mean? This was always a bit confusing to me. Now I finally found some document which writes quite clearly, what all they do. Unfortunately for most readers of this blog, it is only in Czech language - Ovládání mobilního telefonu jednočipovým mikroprocesorem. However here is quick summary if somebody is interested:

MBUS

Single wire (+ ground) connection, usually used for servicing phone, but sometimes also exposes some functionality. Fixed baud rate at 9600. DTR and RTS usually used as power source, DTR should be low and RTS high.

FBUS

Two wire (+ ground) connection, used for user data. Variable baud rate (but usually 115200). DTR and RTS usually used as power source, DTR should be low and RTS high.

DAU-9 / DLR-3

Cables for both FBUS and MBUS, switching is usually done by toggling RTS or DTR signals (for DAU-9) or special AT command (for DLR-3). DLR-3 also additionally supports AT commands over FBUS lines.

DKU-5

This is basically DLR-3 cable with USB/RS232 converter, so it is first step of getting USB into phones.

DKU-2

This is for recent phones which directly support USB, it contains no logic, just wires for USB.