Michal Čihař - Archive for 1/2007

I already announced that development version of Wammu has new configuration wizard. Now it's time to show it and maybe gain attention of somebody who would be willing to create original artwork for it (current image is taken from KMobileTools).

So first you have to select how you want to configure your phone connection:

Searching will just find your phone (well at least it should), so it is not much interesting :-), so let's show guided configuration. As next step you select how you connect your phone. I hope every user will know how to answer this:

Next we need to know phone type to limit number of choices to show later:

As we're didn't know in previous step, now we have to select from all possible connection types:

Next step (final driver selection) is quite easy in this situation as we don't have much choices:

The only remaining step is selecting of device out of few listed (you can enter your own):

Now wizard will verify you configuration:

And you can name this phone configuration (phone name is filled in by default):

So that's it! The wizard has still some minor glitches, but I hope they will be polished till release and you will enjoy it!

If you are only interested in information about new releases, you can use new RSS feeds/categories I just created - python-gammu releases and Wammu releases. Those will be really low trafic feeds containing only information about new releases and no ideas or development progress as in regullar python-gammu or Wammu feeds/categories.

I'm really starting to consider this option. Nonody is willing to maintain Win32 build of python-gammu and it is now far behind current version, with many bugs which were already fixed in source code.

It would need quite a lot of effort from me, because I'm really not experienced with Windows (and I don't like that environment). I could setup cross compiling environment and build Windows version on Linux, but this is something what I'm a bit affraid and need some time.

So if nobody is really interested in creating python-gammu binary for Windows, I will probably do it myslef, but you can expect you will have to pay some small amount (eg. 10 €) for download.

It's funny how big are differences in authors of open source programs and their bug handling. Yesterday I finally managed to report problem in gtkthml plugin for Claws mail which caused some HTML mails to be displayed in wrong encoding. I got instantly reply and in few minutes it has been fixed in CVS. Thanks a lot Colin Leroy!

Exactly opposite situation is with Klear. I wrote bug report with patch more than a year ago and it is still without reply from developers. Funny is that somebody else was brave enough to port this patch to curent version. Looking at their bug tracker, I can see that my report is not alone, let's call it black hole…

As you might already know, my website is available in English and Czech languages. I decided to use gettext, because it is easy to manage (when compared to strings which are used eg. in phpMyAdmin. However I sometimes see PHP to crash on localised pages and it randomly sends page in English even when Czech should be sent. I don't know how to fix and even how to debug this as this happens in few situations, which I'm not able to reproduce. So I'm really sorry if you sometimes see site unavailable errors, or you get different translation than you expected. Reload mostly works in such cases.

Last big missing part of Wammu phone configuration wizard has been just implemented - wizard is finally integrated with phone searching and you can now use it to fully configure Gammu or any programs using it (eg. gMobileMedia).

Testing instructions were already in my yesterday blog and they are still valid. As the wizard should not receive any major changes right now, I appreciate any feedback from you.

Known issues, which will be fixed:

• Phone test and searching can not be stopped.
• Phone searching looks at all devices and ignores device type selected in first wizard step.

Today I finally implemented work with .gammurc, so now you can finally configura gammu with new configuration wizard. For now only manual configuration and guided configuration are working, but searching will follow soon, it is just matter of few wrapping classes. If you are brave enough to test development versions, just grab Wammu snapshot and launch wammu-configure.py. There are still lot of things to improve, but at least something is finally working.

I finally managed to merge long pending patch in tracker and here comes new release of Ukolovnik - 0.6:

• Detect concurrent editation.

Phone database now has additional field for Gammu version, so that you can write which version you tested. I introduced this field, because this is most often information listed in reporter comments.

What next might happen to phone database? I'd like to add talkback to Wammu that would automatically fill in values in phone database. It should popup some time after installation to make sure that user had enough time to test it. But what is enough time? Probably one month, but maybe I will change my decision when actually implementing this.

I just added RSS feed to Gammu phone database, so you can follow what phones has been recently added.

Well it's mostly feature for me to allow faster reviewing of recently added entries, but maybe you will also find use for that :-).