Michal Čihař - Archive for Jan. 1, 2011

First day of Hackweek 6 is almost over and my progress is quite good so far. The first step wat to make Gammu connect to the Series60 applet and retrieve basic information:

$ ./gammu/gammu identify
Device               : 5C:57:C8:xx:xx:xx
Manufacturer         : Nokia
Model                : E52 (RM-469)
Firmware             : 3.0
IMEI                 : 359000000000000

That was pretty easy. If you want to try it, you need to install Series60 applet into phone (manually for now, but autoinstallation is planned for future) and configure gammu to talk to it:

[gammu]
connection = blues60
device = 5C:57:C8:xx:xx:xx

Second thing I choose to implement was manipulation with contacts. There are some oddities in the applet (like it simply crashes when giving it wrong contact ID to retrieve), which I will try to fix in future, but for now I stick with existing applet and code functionality only in Gammu. And it works:

$ ./gammu/gammu getmemory ME 215
Memory ME, Location 215
Last name            : "Gammu"
First name           : "Test"
Mobile number        : "123456"
General number       : [home]"654321"
Email address 1      : "gammu-users@lists.sourceforge.net"

0 entries empty, 1 entries filled

Tomorrow I should be able to implement calendar, let's see how will it go.

PS: All code is is available in our Git repository

Third week and I still have picture to publish. It was taken at Continental cup in nordic combined at Harrachov.

I looked at list of themes submitted to phpMyAdmin theme contest (see my previous announcement) and surprisingly I found there is none. I expected that at least some existing themes will be submitted.

Okay, there is still plenty of time to submit themes, but we're looking forward to your contributions :-).

Last year I did not have much time to spend on non work related projects in Hackweek, because we took the opportunity and replaced some internal systems, when people were not using them. It will be different this year and I've decided to spend some time on Gammu.

The plan is to implement support for Symbian phones. It is one of frequently requested features and thanks to Series60-remote I can as well see way how to implement it. Current plan is to add support for their applet, with possible extending it in future and adding some features which it lacks.

You can comment this feature in openFATE or Gammu bug tracker.

PS: Introduction video can be found on blip.tv.

It looks like I will make it again to visit FOSDEM this year. This time it won't be meeting of whole phpMyAdmin team, but just few members but I hope to meet other people in person as well.

If you have something you would like to discuss with me in person there, it's best time to let me know so that we can schedule it.

PS: It looks like it might be good timing for Debian release party as well :-).

I've made cleanup in Gammu documentation and the only place where to look for it is now The Gammu Manual. Reason for this is simple - single documentation format allows easy cross-referencing and is easier to maintain than mixed sources we used to have before. Thanks to using Sphinx it is possible to generate various outputs, you can see the HTML version on the website, you can download PDF variants and the same source is being used for generating man pages.

PS: You can find more details on generating other formats in the documentation.

Every time I review some package for sponsoring, I usually end up suggesting to fix some of more picky things which lintian finds. It looks like everybody is using default set of checks and does not look at others. Indeed the defaults tell about things which are really errors or need override, but --pedantic and --display-info show also useful hints. However you need to take them more as a suggestions than as a errors.

What I usually find interesting is --pedantic, because it tells about several things, which might be good idea to have in your package. Missing Homepage in debian/control is one of them and I believe this should exist for every package which has a homepage.

The --display-info (or just -I) is also useful, for example it does spell checking of texts in binaries and man pages. Registration into doc-base is also useful integration into the system and you should definitely do it if the package provides documentation in HTML.

To run these checks every time, you can create alias in your ~/.bashrc:

alias lintian='lintian -I --pedantic'

The second week is ending and it's time to publish another photo for project 52.

Again one picture from Prague (though the lightboards say welcome to Brno), this time taken in night:

phpMyAdmin 3.4 is about to be released in something like two months (we want next beta to ship with brand new theme) and there is still plenty of translations to do.

You still have lot of time to translate, but there is also lot of work to do. And I'm pretty sure there are some Slovak, German or Italian speaking readers of this blog. So what are you waiting for? :-)

After previous series of posts about Gammu usage in proprietary software, finding culprit and getting the sources I got number of questions and suggestions. So what are the suggestions?

Lesson I've learned is that even though the website seems to be dead, the project itself does not have to be. This is what I thought about http://gpl-violations.org/ and I was proven wrong and these guys are now looking at my case.

Another option is Software Freedom Law Center - http://www.softwarefreedom.org/. I've contacted them from the very beginning (about year ago) and got some useful hints, though now my contact seems to be gone (or simply too busy).

FSF also provides information how to proceed in case of license violation.

Maybe these hints will be also useful for somebody else and I hope they will help me as well.