Michal Čihař - Archive for Jan. 1, 2006

Yesterday I tested µswsusp for first time and everything suprisingly worked well on my desktop computer. I can suspend to disk and RAM and resume without any problems. Now it only needs my board to be whitelisted so that I don't have to force it. But for some reason ASUS have chosen to fill in total crap in DMI, probably to make identification harder:

Handle 0x0001, DMI type 1, 25 bytes
System Information
        Manufacturer: System manufacturer
        Product Name: System Product Name
        Version: System Version
        Serial Number: System Serial Number
        UUID: 94C96C90-74FE-D511-A6B9-13393877187A
        Wake-up Type: PCI PME#

Handle 0x0002, DMI type 2, 8 bytes
Base Board Information
        Manufacturer: ASUSTeK Computer INC.
        Product Name: P5LD2-VM
        Version: Rev 1.xx
        Serial Number: MB-1234567890

So the patch for whitelist would look a bit funny:

{ "System manufacturer", "System Product Name", "System Version", "0406    ", 0},

Yes it's too much work to fill in this information if you call your product "The Best Intel All in One Solution with Dual Core CPU Support"…

It looks like Wammu for Windows was deployed quite good. Three days after annoncement and no major complains were reported so far to bug tracker (only one minor which I managed to find just after release). And people are downloading big installer as frequently as source codes (and I hope they actually use this tool :-)).

But if you have a problem, don't affraid of reporting, I will do my best to fix it.

While looking at webserver statistics, I noticed that people often write URLs wrongly. But the computer is here to fix it :-).

So you can now safely use gamu insted of gammu, wamu instead of wammu and even pyhon instead of python (this one was the most frequent).

PS: I also added missing graphs to Pack Test site.

For upcoming Wammu-ng I have to resolve again same question that I solved for many times - what version control to use?

I know I want something distributed. I know I want to go away from arch/bazaar as they are not maintained anymore. However where to go? Mercurial? Bzr? Darcs? All of them seem to be good candidates, but I don't see much difference. I'd like to use something in Python as it's something what I can fix in case of problems (well I don't want to fix that, but who knows …).

I like bzr, but it's still quite moving target. Anyway it has some interesting ideas and it's probably what I will use at the end.

Well almost :-). But this is just a reminder for anybody trying to write 100th clone of Total Commander or any "great" software as seen on other platform. Another example might be SiDict which has been recently announced. It has nothing more than StarDict, but it was written from scratch…

As you might have noted in Wammu 0.14 announcement, I made Wammu for Windows reality. At the end there is more support for that than I expected :-). All you need it to download full installer and everything will be done automatically including start menu entry.

Wammu on Windows looks almost identically as GTK version on Linux, there is really no big difference as you can see from screenshot.

It revived my memories about creating native Windows application years ago as I used same tool for creating instalator (Inno Setup). It works still same way and is very easy to use even when I didn't remember anything from time I created installator for CodeConv.

While looking for modem driver for Alcatel One Touch 535 for Windows (thanks Alcatel for removing support for old phones!), I found the mobile phone directory website. There are nice reviews of phones and I quickly decided to add it to linked content in phone database. So enjoy more information about phones!

BTW: does anybody have that stupid inf file for OT535?

Wammu 0.14 has been just released. New features:

• Automatically append backup extension.
• PuBluez is now default for bluetooth devices lookup.
• Fixed mail export for non english locales.
• Fixed installation on Windows.
• Added support for py2exe for distributing Windows executable.
• Added script for creating Wammu installer on Windows (using Inno Setup).

There is imortant change in this release - we finally have Windows support! On download pakge you will find Windows installer which includes all needed (thanks to py2exe and Inno Setup). Please share experiences, as I'm definitely not experienced in this area :-).

There wasn't much progress on Wammu in past months. Partly it has been caused by changes in real life, but major reason was that I want to go away from wxPython and this step is quite large to happen over night :-).

Meanwhile I didn't do much in current Wammu codebase, but few bugfixes were applied. I will fix few more bugs during weekend and release new version. Don't expect much of it, I will only try to test it a bit on Windows and fix some recently reported bugs. So most changes are already in and you can see them in arch repository.

It will be most likely latest which is using wxPython and I will start writing completely (well this it not true, most code will be reused) new Wammu which will use PyGTK. It will be highly modullar and should provide all those heavilly missing features as remembering of read data and support for multiple phones.

I don't have any timeframe when new version will be ready, but I'd like to make preview available somewhere in September. But life can bring completely different worries, so everything might be completely different :-).

I used quite long time rdiff-backup for creating server backups. But I had to move away from it because it requires same program to run on the other end where backups are stored. And there was no chance that I can get it into 4Mib memory of my Asus router with OpenWrt which will now act as bacup server.

So I googled a bit and after reading several articles I decided to try duplicity. This decision was heavily inspired by article on Debian Administration website.

The setup with encryption and signing was very quickly and even restoring seems to work :-).