Michal Čihař - Archive for Jan. 1, 2006

Users always request support for their latest shiny new phone. But how to manage such support in environment where you can not buy each new phone to implement support for it?

You can try write driver only by using documentation for manufacturers who provide it (like Sony-Ericsson), but there will most likely be bugs which need hardware to be debugged.

For phones where is no documentation available (eg. Nokia), it is almost impossible to support them without having access to actual device (at least through user who has enough interest in improving support).

I'd like to implement full support for Sony-Ericsson to achieve comparable feature set to FMA. However I still have more important expenses than buying phone from them, so this task stuck for long time in my queue. In fact it also holds Wammu development as I'd like to start with more complex feature set than my current phone supports and it's impossible to implement it without phone.

So what now? Maybe is here somebody who would be interested enough in improved tools and will help me buying such phone. But I don't believe this will happen, at least my current experiences tell so…

I finally made local copy of my articles which I made for Linux software server. They were sitting for long time on my disk to be published somewhere under my website, but till now I didn't manage to do that.

You can find original article listing on Linux software and it's mirror is at my server: http://cihar.com/publications/linuxsoft/.

As a special bonus you get there file which is missing in articles on Linux software :-).

As I messed previous upload and half of binaries were built against old gammu, I just sent new upload to my sponsor to fix bug #376486. I'm sorry for inconvenience…

Most of railways in Czechia are operated by Czech Railways. However there are few places where private companies exists such as Railways Desná. When you need to use only one of them, everything works fine, but travelling with both looks sometimes like a big trouble.

You have no problems when starting on private one, they sell you ticket for whatever you need. But Czech Railways only tell you, that there is private railway and you need another ticket. They don't bother to tell that you can buy the ticket by them. So you travel with Czech Railways, switch to private with no time for buying another ticket because Czech Railways are allways delayed and now you have to pay penalty because you don't have your ticket. Funny, isn't it?

When I today first saw this, I really liked that. I saw various useless USB toys, but this one is the best of them. And it even works fine from Linux!

I'm talking about USB Misille Launcher. You can control it using keyboard or even combine it with webcam and use motion together with small script to automatically aim it (no auto fire yet :-)).

After more than week ignoring computers I'm back online. It's horrible to see those hundreds of unread mails, but I promise I will manage them soon, just be patient :-).

Anyway vacation was great, we had nice wheather and Jeseníky is wonderful place. Yesterday we were lucky that we're on correct side of mountains. otherwise we would be in the middle of floods.

And once more I got impression that travelling with Czech Railways is horrible experience. First train had outage and we went with replacement bus. I rued those few who took their bike with them. Next train was of course full of people, nowhere to sit, but it was only three hours way…

It is finally out :-). Only minor changes in docs and build system to fix win32 build.

Some time ago, I switched python-gammu and Wammu RSS from Mantis generated to my weblog. However there are still many people using old locations which are redirected to new place. The redirection won't stay there forever, please subscribe to actual locations, you can find them on project pages or direcly on blog pages in all RSS and Atom variants.

As it turned out that my previous blog post is first returned by Google while searching for this company, I got some feedback about them. They seems to send spam, attempt to steal site keywords to get before them and do other simmilar silly things. If you want to know more, just try more Googling or read discussion.

If you want to fight them, either block them by iptables:

iptables -A INPUT -s 208.66.195.0/28 -j DROP

Or deny access to webserver (this example is for lighttpd I use):

$HTTP["remoteip"] == "208.66.195.0/28" {
    url.access-deny = ( "" )
}

Yes I know there is gammu 1.07.00 which should be packaged, yes I know there is python transition ongoing which needs changes on my python packages, yes I know that there is new libbluetooth2 in archives which need gammu rebuild. Please be patient I will return back to packaging work as soon as I will have internet connection at home.

By that time you can also expect new python-gammu release which will be just minor update to fix some urgent things.