Michal Čihař - Archive for 5/2007

Thing I longer wanted to happen is now becoming reality - Gammu is getting new public API. Man reasons for the change are:

• ABI stability. - Till now almost every change in internals of any driver lead to ABI change. If we would correctly increase so name on each ABI change, we would be somewhere near 200, what is not something we could be proud of.

• Centralisation of variables cleanup. - Currently all phone drivers have to do some common things in each function. New API allows to centralise those operations in one place.

• Exposing of internals. - Old API exposed too much of Gammu internals, what could be misused by programmers and could lead to unexpected behaviour when some internals are changed.

The work is not yet still complete, but the API is getting final shapes right now, so you still have chance to change something. While doing such big change, I decided also to complete documentation of all public functions. This is also currently work in progress, but arising API documentation is already available.

If you are developer using Gammu library, you will have to change some things in your code. To document these changes, new Porting guide has been created. I suggest you not to start with this right now as the API is really not complete and might change a lot during next days.

For long time I use few Python scripts to manage mails on IMAP account. On Tuesday I decided to put them under version control and improve them a bit, because I didn't want to have login information hardcoded in every script.

I made several improvements, added support for distutils and then I decided that I could also release this to public. I've named them IMAP utils, I made announcement to freshmeat.net and Python Cheese Shop (thanks to ./setup.py register) and now I wonder that these simple scripts have over hundred downloads and eight subscribers. Maybe it is not that useless as I thought :-).

You might have noticed that current Wammu is not available for Windows. The reason is simple - I was not able to produce working binary in reasonable time. Python-gammu itself seems to work, but when I run Wammu, it crashes quite soon. I tried to debug it for few evenings, but I was not successful.

Therefore I again ask for somebody who would be willing to maintain Windows build. Somebody with Windows experiences will be probably able to resolve problems much faster and will help creating application that will behave good on Windows. I am not able to achieve this as I do not know Windows much and do not use it at all.

I just released version 0.20 of Wammu. This is mostly bugfix release, which fixes various bugs reported by users.

• Improve locales behaviour (and require wxPython with Unicode).
• Show time in call listings.
• Fixed infinite loop in searching.
• Fixed displaying of messages with special chars.
• Fixed locale detection on system without configured locales.
• Use different approach for detecting home directory on Windows.
• Now requires PyWin32 on Windows.

While working on Gammu, I still wonder why people who want to connect their phone to computer buy phones from vendors who use own proprietary protocol or do not share any documentation. Then they come to Gammu mailing list and/or bug tracker and want Gammu to support their phone. Sometimes the fix is easy, but usually it is quite lot of work to debug unknown protocol.

I know this situation quite good from past. I had Alcatel phone, which was using proprietary protocol for access to in phone contacts and events. Fortunately Alcatel released synchronisation software for these phones (it of course runs only on Windows) which had enabled debugging and it was quite easy to understand protocol thanks to logs it could produce. But as newer phones with some extensions appeared, maintaining this became harder and harder.

When I looked for new phone, I decided to buy Sony-Ericcsson K750i phone. Writing support for most of functionality (well in fact all I need) was just matter of few days. The reason why it was so fast was that this phones is using open standards (e.g. OBEX, IrMC) and vendor specific AT commands are documented in freely available documents.

It's your choice how good will your phone interoperate with computer. If you buy well documented piece of hardware, chance to have it fully supported is much higher.

python-gammu 0.20 has been just released. New features:

• Fixed call information conversion.
• Support for last modified field.
• Support for latest Gammu version.
• Added python wrapper around C module, C module is now gammu.Core.
• Moved some generic data from Wammu.
• Added asynchronous wrapper around StateMachine.
• Added example for async operations, see examples/worker.py.
• Main library is now gammu.Core, but gammu.* still works.
• Support for service numbers.
• New example for service numbers, see examples/service-numbers.py.

I just released new version of Gammu, you can download it from download server. Changes to latest testing version are relatively small:

• Do not use asynchronous I/O on Windows.
• Make USSD work with AT phones.
• Fix setting date on Siemens MC75 (Rudolf Cejka).
• Config file on Windows is now searched in Application Data folder.
• Avoid corrupting vCard when some fields are empty.
• Properly handle OBEX error codes (bug #298).

Stay tuned, release evening will continue ;-).

python-gammu now supports service numbers dialogue. How it is useful for you depends on services your network provides. For example with Vodafone in Czech republic, you can use it to configure various services:

$ ./service-numbers.py 
This example shows interaction with network using service codes
Enter code (empty string to end): *111#
Talking to network...
Network reply:
Status: ActionNeeded
Vitejte v Kapesni Samoobsluze!
1 Muj ucet
2 Me sluzby
3 Nastaveni telefonu
4 Info a zabava
5 Oblibene

Enter code (empty string to end): 1
Talking to network...
Network reply:
Status: ActionNeeded
Muj ucet
1 Vyuct. a platby
2 Vydaje pod kontrolou
3 Osobni udaje
4 PIN a PUK kod
------
0 Zpet
00 Uvod

Enter code (empty string to end):

Python code which can be used for this is available as example. It will be probably one time integrated to Wammu, but it needs a bit more time than hacking this simple script :-).

If you want to follow SVN commits on some of my SVN repositories, you can subscribe to appropriate maling list, which gets notification on each SVN commit. I hope I set up mailman correctly and everything will work as I expect :-).

This list is also automatically forwared to packages.qa.debian.org, so you can also subscribe there for Debian package changes.

As phpMyAdmin themes for trunk are not compatible with 2.10.x releases, there was created 2.10 branch for themes compatible with those releases.

Today I added 2.10 themes to demo server and they are also available as subversion snapshots. I hope this will help fixing possible issues with them.