Michal Čihař - Archive for 1/2007

Thanks to CMake, it's part CPack and a bit of my hacking, I can now easily produce installers for Gammu on Windows. I haven't much tested result, but it installs and uninstalls fine and Gammu seems to be working.

How it is done? Eveything on Linux. All you need is small patch on CPack to allow using NSIS also on Linux. If you have this one, just download Gammu, cross compile it and start CPack. Everything is so easy:

mkdir build-mingw
cd build-mingw
cmake .. -DCROSS_MINGW=ON
make
cpack

And you will get Gammu installer for Windows (please note that this is not even testing release, it's more some kind of snapshot of my development tree, so it does not have to be release quality).

Thanks again to CMake and NSIS to allow me to do such thing. This is way I can support Windows :-).

I just implemented in my Gammu tree support for cross compiling for Windows on Linux host using MinGW. The support of CMake for this is quite limited, but implementation was not that hard.

The only tricky part was to include compiler settings from Windows and force setting of library and executable prefixes and suffixes. Then only build time configuration had to be disabled. If you want to do this for other project, see changeset for changes needed for this.

Resulting binary works without problems on Windows, the only problem right now is disabled IrDA and Bluetooth support, but I hope I will resolve this soon.

While translating CouchSurfing to Czech, I again noticed funny mistake which often repeats in Czech translations of web mails or similar applications.

In English there is "File into folder". Some translators tend to translate this as "File in folder", which changes meaning a bit :-).

I have no idea why this is so popular, but I saw this for first time in Sieve plug-in for Squirellmail and several times since this time.

Restaurant Orlík is yet another restaurant in Prague center I will write about. It lays on waterfront just next to Šítek water tower (Czech only), few minutes of walk from National theatre.

You can select from many traditional meals, I guess everybody will find something what will attract him. Everything I tasted there so far was very good, so I can really recommend you this place to have a lunch or dinner.

You can drink Budweiser Beer here, it is not cheap, but also not expensive and it tastes good. They also offer variety of wines, which are good priced.

Orlík is yet another restaurant in Prague center, where you can go without affraiding that you will pay too much for food.

New version of Gammu I anounced few minutes ago brings among other changes support for building using CMake. So far it should be able to handle without problems situation on Linux hosts, but I don't have environment for testing Windows and MacOS build. So I'd like to receive some feedback, if it will be possible to completely get rid of autoconf in future.

I just released new version of Gammu, you can download it from download server. There is quite a lot of changes:

• First release by Michal Cihar, this changes some URLS, see readme.txt.
• Experimental CMake build support, so far not completely working (Michal Cihar).
• Improved vCard RRULE parsing (me, Rene Peters).
• Added support for location of alarm (Peter Ondraska).
• Fixed Slovak operator names (Peter Ondraska).
• Improved battery reporting for SE phones (Michal Cihar).
• Fixed small c-cedilla decoding (Samuel Adam) (bug #64).
• Fix memory leak in dll (Petr Stasa - Gord).
• Add some functions to dll (Petr Stasa - Gord).
• PostreSQL support for SMSD (Andrea Riciputi).
• Build fixes for Darwin (Andrea Riciputi).
• Identify M341i over IrDA (Michal Cihar, flewww, bug #65).
• Callback functions now take pointer to state machine to allow full identification of used state machine (Michal Cihar, bug #66).
• Fixed LAC and CID reading for AT phones (Michal Cihar).
• Update operator list (Michal Cihar).
• Updated README.
• Added installation instructions.
• Change RSS URL to my weblog, where will be posted release announcements.

Today it was quite busy day, but I managed to push Gammu sources closer to weekend release. I merged various fixed that I collected in last few days. Mostly they are just small fixes, but they could make using Gammu harder.

Besides that I played a lot with cMake and the build system is in very good shape. There is still some parts missing (some header/function detection and installation phase), but these should be pretty easy, the only trouble is to find time to write them :-).

It looks like next release will have quite a lot of new features thanks to contributed patches. Probably largest improvement will be PostgreSQL support in SMSD. This was many times required feature and Gammu will now finally have it thanks to Andrea Riciputi.

Another important change is completely rewritten vCalendar RRULE parsing, which should be able to handle all standard fields. The only part which is questionable right now is how to decode YD repeating. As I read specification, I think that it should be by day of year (eg. 32 for 1st February), but from real world (and especially Siemens phones) it looks like it is used for date repeating (which means same as YM). Anyway as real difference between both is only on leap years, I will probably switch to date repeating to be compatible with Siemens.

Last small change I want to mention is CMake build support. I'm going to bring it to usable state before release, so that it can be tested in wide set of environments. Then we will see whether it is worth of changing build system.

PS: You can expect testing release this weekend.

For most of winter, we had troubles because there is no snow. Right now there is trouble because there is too much snow. And it is still falling. This happens just few days after Kyrill has caused quite a lot of damage, maybe the Earth wants to get rid of people who destoy its environment ;-).

In most places in Czechia 15 to 30 centimenters of new snow occured over night. Many people can not drive their car safely in these conditions and this causes lots of traffic problems. Maybe they should think before going out and use public transport instead, but it is not as comfortable as driving damn slow, because they still have summer tires…

I probably made something not popular, but I decided to add (minimal) advertisement on all demo pages (using config.footer.inc.php). You can dislike this step, but if number of visits for demo server will grow this way, it will soon need hardware upgrade and I'm not willing to pay it from my money.

If you want me to remove ads, the only way to do it is to donate some amount which might be used for hardware upgrade. In really near future server will probably need more memory.