Michal Čihař - Archive for 2/2009

Recently, I made available information about Gammu and Wammu in machine readable formats (currently DOAP and PAD). In order to fully use advantage of PAD, I decided to push both Gammu and Wammu to some PAD enabled sites I found. At least it should give it a bit more visibility in Windows world.

When I started looking for these sites, I was surprised that there is so much of them. Yes it is quite easy to setup such site as ASP provides PHP scripts to make such site, but I expected that people would be a bit sane and would not start 1001th software catalogue. But anyway, let's submit my software there to spread the world a bit ;-).

The important site (at least as far as I remember them from times when I was using Windows) like Tucows or cnet downloads, have some lengthy review process, what is okay for me. But more funny are random small sites, where you immediately get 5/5 stars or sticker 100% Vista Compatible. Who cares, let's see if it will really attract some users.

I really do not get, while people rather email somebody to ask question, which Google can answer in few seconds.

Today I got question that some body was not able to find phpMyAdmin demo:

Hello, I ran your phpMyAdmin demo from some link, but I unfortunately do not know where it was. Could you please send me link to this demo.

Is it really that hard to find it? Typing phpMyAdmin demo into Google, does give correct result on first place to me...

PS: I got to reading this email after five days, so that guy definitely did not save much time.

After two months of heavy development, new Gammu stable release is out. There are quite a lot of changes and I'm not really convinced it makes sense to include full list of almost 150 lines from ChangeLog, so here are the most important changes (I'm sure I missed something, but I think the list is already too big):

• Lot of SMSD related changes.
  • New DBI backend which handles nicely many databases.
  • SMSD and inject tool are now separate binaries.
  • New monitoring tool for SMSD.
  • SMSD can now run as a Windows service.
  • SMSD behaves nicely as a daemon on Linux (syslog support, SIGHUP handling, proper daemonizing, etc.).
• Merger of python-gammu.
  • Python bindings are no longer separate projects, they are now part of Gammu release.
• Better support for Nokia USB cables on Linux.
  • Gammu now has libusb-1.0 based support for Nokia USB cables.
  • This gives us performance boost and support for DKU-2 cables.
• Much more tests.
  • About 1/3 of code is now covered by test cases.
  • Dummy phone backend to allow testing without connected phone.
• General code cleanup.
  • Fixed tons of problems found by test cases, valgrind and cppcheck.
  • Reorganised code structure a bit to make clear what parts are supported.
• Documentation.
  • Several new man pages have been added, most important is documentation for SMSD and all it's features.

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/,

Debian users will find packages in unstable soon, SUSE, Fedora and Mandriva users can check repository in OpenSuse Build Service and Ubuntu in my PPA.

Okay, again delay :-). I wanted to push this version out yesterday, but real life has caught me and I did not manage to do it. So this time Gammu is released on Tuesday, but I want to get back to Monday releases next week.

If all things go without problems, this is last testing release before 1.23.0. Besides changing files structure a lot (I hope current one better matches current state of code), there are only some minor fixes and cleanups.

Full list of changes follows:

• Reorganize directory structure to match current state of things.
• Completely switch DBI driver to utf-8.
• Fixed date off by 1900 error in some cases.
• Cleanup a bit phonet driver.
• Handle properly requests for network code (bug #819).
• Allow to enter more security codes through SMSD (bug #819).
• Fixed restoring to specific folder on AT (bug #815).

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/,

Debian users will find packages in experimental soon, SUSE, Fedora and Mandriva users can check experimental repository in OpenSuse Build Service.

Today is Monday, what means it is time for Gammu release. Main improvements are this time in DBI driver and dummy phone driver. This allowed increasing number of test cases and they revealed number of bugs in code, which were fixed. The good thing is that we now have covered 30% of code by testcases. There is still place to improve, but I think this is good milestone, because most of untested code lies in drivers for different phones, which are hard to test automatically without having real phone connected to test server.

Other thing I would like to highlight is DBI backend in SMSD. It is still new, but you should consider using it instead of old MYSQL or PGSQL backends, because it behaves much more nicely to your database and won't ruin system performance that easily (though there are still things to improve). Unfortunately it is not available on Windows right now, but I hope this will change in future.

Full list of changes follows:

• Fix some memory leaks found by cppcheck.
• Implemented reconnecting/retrying in DBI driver.
• Fix memory leaks in SMSD found by valgrind.
• Fix decoding of another Nokia message type.
• Support for passing received message ID in DBI.
• Dummy phone now supports phonebook, calendar, todo, filesystem.
• Experimental SMSD monitor support on Windows.
• Added ID for Nokia 2680 (bug #813).
• Number of retries of message send in SMSD can be configured.
• Updated SQL files to new version (mostly added useful indexes).
• Dropped own logic for generating IDs for SMS and rely on SQL server (only in DBI driver for now).

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/,

Debian users will find packages in experimental soon, SUSE, Fedora and Mandriva users can check experimental repository in OpenSuse Build Service.

It took again one week and here comes new Gammu testing version. Again number of changes is quite impressive, to name the most important - new DBI backend for SMSD, which allows to easily support wide range of databases, SMSD now exports some information in shared memory segment, what allows monitoring of its state, python-gammu bindings now support some basic SMSD operations, libusb-1.0 based driver for Nokia cables (especially DKU-2) and last but not least, Gammu finally has fake phone driver, which can be used for testing and writing applications and performs all operations in selected directory on filesystem.

Full list of changes:

• Fixed privileges dropping in SMSD.
• SMSD inject now properly uses PhoneID.
• Improve SMSD documentation.
• Translations improvements.
• Add ID for Nokia 7373.
• Do not try to use filesystem OBEX if IrMC access was forced.
• Fix possible crash in LMB decoder.
• Avoid string length overflow in Nokia phonebook encoder.
• Introduced backward compatibility of gammu.StateMachine.SetConfig.
• Experimental dku-2 userspace driver using libusb-1.0 (fbususb).
• python-gammu can now inject messages into SMSD (gammu.SMSD object).
• SMSD stores summary counts of sent/received messages in database.
• Added gammu-smsd-monitor program to monitor state of SMSD.
• python-gammu can now monitor SMSD state.
• Do not try to use OBEX 1.0 it's too old (bug #807).
• Better parse ATI replies from Samsung (bug #806).
• Better parse CSQ replies from Samsung (bug #806).
• Add small delays to SMS sending/saving (bug #794).
• SMSD monitor can now run for configured number of loops.
• Added DBI backend for SMSD, so we now support wide range of databases.
• SMSD does not delete SMS from phone when it's saving has failed.
• Added SQL structure for sqlite, which can be used through DBI.
• python-gammu can run and stop SMSD.
• Initial implementation of dummy phone driver for testing.
• Allow to configure path to config from command line.
• SMSD monitor allows output in CSV.

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/,

Debian users will find packages in experimental soon.