Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for English

I just released version 0.26 of Wammu. This release fixes various problems found by users. Full list of changes:

• Various attempts to make Windows version back to usable state, but it is not ready yet as there are quite random crashes in python-gammu on Windows. Anybody with knowledge of python modules on Windows who is willing to help is welcome.
• Dropped GNOME Bluetooth (btctl) support, it crashes too often.
• Fix icons size to be all 16x16.
• Fixed crash when D-Bus can not launch notification service.

There is still no working binary for Windows. I don't have time and environment for maintaining them. Volunteers are welcome!

One of reasons to setup my own Jabber server was to be able to store history on server while having data under my control. I use Jabber clients from several locations and having history on the server seems to be logical step.

Unfortunately implementations of XEP-0136 are a bit lacking. During install I enabled mod_archive, but it was not using up to date specification and there is no client which works with it, so there was no way to view data in it. Recently I found out that rewrite of this module exists - mod_archive_odbc. It is implementing current version of XEP-0136 and is using SQL database for storage (so at least writing SQL query to grab data is not that complicated as with Mnesia database used by original version).

Migrating of current history went quite good using wswutils, at least I did not notice any problems so far. The only problem is no support from clients. The only reliable way which works for now is Jabber archive web reader, but I'd really like to see integration in Gajim, any volunteers? :-)

New version of simple todo manager called Ukolovnik has been just released. There are no major changes in this release compared to 0.9, it mostly happened to indicate that this small piece of code has reached some level of stability and wanted level of features.

New Gammu testing version is out. This time release period is a bit longer than usual, mostly because my moving back to Prague. 1.18.91 again only fixes some bugs:

• Improve debug messages when connecting to phone (bug #508).
• Fixed handling of some charsets in AT engine (bug #525).
• Identify more Nokia phones (thanks to Iván Gabriel).
• Fixed regression with DKU2 cables on Windows (bug #533).

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

PS: Debian users can get packages from experimental.

For a long time I had problems on my work computers with Network manager still thinking that it is not connected. And I was really lazy to debug it. But as more and more application take online/offline settings from it, this became more and more annoying.

After some googling I found out that the problem might be in /etc/network/interfaces file, which is parsed by Network manager. Some "complex" things might confuse it. Well in my case the complex thing was calling of some script in post-up. Commenting this out magically fixes everything. Moving script to /etc/network/if-up.d/ also is not a big problem, but why the hell the Network manager thing does not tell where the problem is?

If you don't know much about things you do, work for a small company and want to look like a professional working for a big company, then the Japanese way to do this is to write following job name on your business card:

Embedded System Technical Division
Operating System Section
Chief Engineer

When I saw this for first time, I thought this business card is some kind of joke, but not, they're real.

By using my name in various web services I usually spot bad implementation of displaying name field in their website. I can see that over years the amount of servers which cripple my name to something like ÄŒihaÅ™ is getting lower, but there are still lots of them. When I find way how to report it, I usually do so and I always enjoy fields like "How to repeat". This time the guilty one is the MySQL bugtracker.

PS: Fortunately all Debian pages seem to catch up this year and my name is no longer crippled in NEW queue or Lintian pages :-).

New Gammu testing version is out. This is mostly bug fixing release, especially with lot of tweaks for Windows build and for AT driver. Full list of changes:

• Do not link with irprops.lib on Windows.
• Various MSVC compilation fixes.
• Improved AT model parsing and added tests.
• Fixed possible crash in reading SMS from AT phones (bug #515).
• Proper fall back to automatic model when user enters wrong one.
• Added identification of several phones.
• Fixed reading of messages from AT phones without ME memory.
• Improve charset detection on Motorola phones (bug #522).

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

PS: Debian users can get packages from experimental.

Good news everyone, first stable Gammu release in this year is out. Since 1.17.92 only few small fixes in SMS decoding and AT engine did happen, but there is quite big list of changes compared to 1.17.0:

• Fixed decoding of an empty SMS.
• Fixed some mistakes in API documentation.
• Fixed compilation under MS Visual C++ Express.
• Various small fixes if AT driver.
• Add simple shell script to generate JAD file from JAR.
• Added support for adding memory entries to 6510.
• Phone features now can be defined in configuration, so there is no need to modify common/gsmphones.c for testing different settings.
• Config file loading behaves more consistent in lookup. In some cases it can now find different configuration file.
• Fixed crash when there are too many messages (bug #466).
• Fixed crash when printing messages on Windows (bug #476).
• Do not ask phone for IMEI so often (bug #480).
• No need to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH for tests.
• Properly wait for SMSD child processes (bug #486).

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

As I use Drupal for Czech phpMyAdmin pages, it was only a matter of time till I will have (or want) to add some functionality. My first Drupal module is quite trivial, but anyway I already got positive feedback on it just after committing to Drupal CVS :-). Today I finished little cleanup which my initial version required and I decided to make a first release out of it.

And what I'm still talking about? It's a module for adding measuring code for various web auditing systems used in Czechia. I didn't wanted to hack this somehow into templates and module which will provide block with those looks as best solution to me. You can get it on Drupal pages.