Michal Čihař - Archive for Jan. 1, 2007

O víkendu jsme se vydali na horu Fuji. Předpověď počasí neslibovala nic pěkného, ale byl to byl poslední víkend, kdy ještě byly otevřené alespoň nějaké chaty po cestě, takže jsme moc na výběr neměli. Autobusem jsme dorazili do Kawaguchiko a odtud dalším autobusem na pátou stanici. Během cesty je už jasné, že nás čeká nehezké počasí a občas se divíme, jak řidič ví, kam jede. Pak již jen stoupáme nahoru a střídavě svlékáme a oblékáme pláštěnky, podle aktuálních rozmarů přírody. Nakonec se dostáváme až do výšky 3470m.n.m., kde v hotelu Fujisan přespáváme a doufáme ve změnu deště ve slunce.

To se bohužel ráno nekoná, ale přesto se vydáváme brzy ráno na cestu s nadějí, že třeba uvidíme východ slunce. Na vrcholu není ale vidět vůbec nic kromě mlhy a deště. Tak se po chvíli čekání a mrznutí rozhodujeme jít zpět dolů. Tam se bohužel ocitáme příliš brzy, takže zbytek dne strávíme čekáním na autobusy (od 8 do 11:30 na páté stanici, poté do 17:30 v Kawaguchiko).

Jak jsme se shodli s americkými spolulezci, tak sice jsme horu neviděli, ale vylezli jsme na ni :-).

Fotky ze soboty a neděle najdete u mě ve fotogalerii.

Looking at the web stats, I noticed, that quite a lot of people find something relevant to "environmental" on my pages. As I was not aware of anything related here, I tried that in Google. To my surprise all results are in demo for Ukolovnik.

Well I do not want to add any anti spam technique to this simple tool as it will be usually password protected. And this is exactly what I did with demo for now. So if you want to use it, you need to login with user demo and password demo. I hope this will prevent spammers from using this demo, otherwise I would probably have to close it.

What does cryptic shortcut for different cables for different Nokia phones mean? This was always a bit confusing to me. Now I finally found some document which writes quite clearly, what all they do. Unfortunately for most readers of this blog, it is only in Czech language - Ovládání mobilního telefonu jednočipovým mikroprocesorem. However here is quick summary if somebody is interested:

MBUS

Single wire (+ ground) connection, usually used for servicing phone, but sometimes also exposes some functionality. Fixed baud rate at 9600. DTR and RTS usually used as power source, DTR should be low and RTS high.

FBUS

Two wire (+ ground) connection, used for user data. Variable baud rate (but usually 115200). DTR and RTS usually used as power source, DTR should be low and RTS high.

DAU-9 / DLR-3

Cables for both FBUS and MBUS, switching is usually done by toggling RTS or DTR signals (for DAU-9) or special AT command (for DLR-3). DLR-3 also additionally supports AT commands over FBUS lines.

DKU-5

This is basically DLR-3 cable with USB/RS232 converter, so it is first step of getting USB into phones.

DKU-2

This is for recent phones which directly support USB, it contains no logic, just wires for USB.

I just released new version of Gammu. This is simply bug fixing release, no major new features. Full list of changes:

• Fixed reading of empty calendar/todo/contacts/notes over OBEX (thanks to Gianni Ceccarelli).
• Fixed overwriting of Java applications in Nokia phones (thanks to Martin Thierer, bug 382).
• Fixed compilation with older PostgreSQL libraries.
• Handle correcly internal phone errors in OBEX module.
• Fixed crash on invalid config file (Debian bug #444046).
• Better report errors when using default configuration.
• Fix several buffer overflows in 6510 (thanks to Tobias Sunderdiek for debugging this).
• Fixed crash on decoding messages with special numbering plans with long numbers (bug 281).
• Command nokiaaddfile can now either keep or delete user data on uploading new application (thanks to Martin Thierer, bug 385).

My patch has been merged during my night, yay! And it even was merged in nice revision number 1234 :-). If you want to see example, you can check digiKam screenshot, which Gilles Caulier has quickly generated.

You can read following text on SCons homepage:

SCons is an Open Source software construction tool—that is, a next-generation build tool. Think of SCons as an improved, cross-platform substitute for the classic Make utility with integrated functionality similar to autoconf/automake and compiler caches such as ccache. In short, SCons is an easier, more reliable and faster way to build software.

Then they list tons of features. But why the hell it does not support DESTDIR like functionality out of the box? While googling for this I found that most projects add the same code to handle this feature that will be used by almost every Linux distribution. I think such feature should be built in into next-generation build tool.

PS: If you're asking what would I use, it is simple - for Python just use distutils, they do what you need, for rest I can recommend CMake.

PS2: I just need to express my disappointment after packaging pyexiv2 which uses scons.

As I have Pentax camera, I wanted to be able to extract information from maker notes it stores to EXIF. As only tool which seems to be capable of this is ExifTool and it is a Perl beast which I really don't want to use from Python, I need to add support for it to some existing library.

I found two which could be used - libexif and Exiv2. Because of availability of Python bindings I choose Exiv2. The reason why I also prefer this is upcoming XMP support for which I was looking recently. The only disadvantage I can see is that libexif is more widely used by applications. Why the hell couldn't be just one library doing this?

Anyway if you're interested in Pentax maker note support for Exiv2, you can find it in their bug tracker and it will hopefully appear soon in their svn ;-).

Today I did really big stress testing of Photo uploader - I needed to upload 400 photos (total size somewhere near 600 MiB). And it worked without problems! I could not imagine that I would have to upload so much files using web forms or some damn slow Windows application.

Also since last announcement uploader development went on. It now supports 4 services (all in Czechia for now), I added some documentation and man page. Also version 0.1 has been released yesterday (but it does not yet contain mentioned updates), with plan to release 0.2 somewhere next week.

And as I got quite a lot of requests for GUI - I do not plan to write one myself (or at least not soon). So if you want one, please write it. As all hard work is done by phoupl module, it can be easily embedded into some simple image viewer written in Python.

I was looking for some easier solution than using web forms, but no minilab seems to support Linux here. Windows applications I tried so far does not seem to work in Wine, so this is also not an option. Only thing that seems to work is Picassa, but it is quite big tool to make just uploading photos and it is anyway some beast using Wine.

So the only option was to write something myself. Using cURL from Python is quite easy so I hacked simple script to upload photos to minilab using PycURL. It currently supports only Droxi, but it might be later extended to support others. The code is also now a bit fragile as it does almost none error checking, but I was able to upload first set of photos to minilab and continue order in browser.

You can download my proof of concept code at Photo uploader page, but don't expect anything clever from it, but it should basically work :-).

As I produce quite a lot of photos and want to manage them in some reasonable way, I started to look for some tools which can do commenting/tagging/whatever of taken photos. I really don't want these meta data stored outside picture itself, so most of photo managers currently available are not acceptable. When reading Gnome 2.20, I noticed support for XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) in eog.

Well I didn't know this standard up to now, but it looks interesting. Especially when open source tools can easily adopt library open sourced by Adobe. I would like to add support for this to Lazygal, but I didn't find any reasonable Python module to work with XMP. There is simple extractor, but nothing what would allow me to easily grab meta data out of file. In fact one solution seems to exist, but it costs almost $300 and is not free software in any way.

Or did I just miss something when using Google and some such Python library exists?