Michal Čihař - Archive for 7/2009

It has been really nice week in here, but it's time to leave. Last night, wake up in the morning and leave by train (in my case to explore Barcelona).

Thanks to all people who organised DebConf 9, from my POV everything went really smoothly and I enjoyed time here. I finally met people I meet daily on the mailing lists and now I can finally imagine people behind those email addresses.

Now it's time to pack my things and finally have some sleep, otherwise I will not be able to wake up tomorrow and I will miss my hardly booked train.

While being on DebConf 9 I managed to do some work on Gammu, the famous tool for getting access to data in cell phones. The greatest feature of this release is reducing memory consumption by 800 MiB. Other code changes are much smaller, but there is also another important change - I now use Git for development, you can git clone git://gitorious.org/gammu/mainline.git.

Full list of changes:

• Fixed getting firmware revision on AT phones (bug #951).
• Added support for home/work mobile number (bug #952).
• Fixed handling of error response for security status in AT.
• Fixed segfault on systems with very low memory limits.
• Development now goes on in Git repository, please check README.
• 6510 driver now dynamically allocates memory for file caches, what reduces Gammu memory usage by 800 MiB.
• Added testcases for AT+CNMI replies.
• Fixed range parsing in AT engine.
• Added reconnect support in PostgreSQL driver in SMSD.
• Gammu debug level no longer can be controlled separately in SMSD.
• Fix loop when Nokia phone does not allow to access files (bug #954).

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.

After losing some data from svn, because I just did not have the latest backup and I only had data in local copy, I decided to finally migrate to Git.

For now the repositories are hosted on gitorious:

• Gammu
• Wammu
• Ukolovnik

The svn server will stay there for some time, but I want to get rid of it in future.

PS: Translations from Pootle are now directly commited to separate Git repository under user data which he used to register in Pootle. I'll merge this repository time to time to mainlines.

It looks like some things will be changing in Debian in next months. The most known thing which is already widespread know is switching to time based freeze cycles, what should make us synchronised with Ubuntu LTS release cycles. This gives advantage of sharing work done on security support, because both distribution will be quite similar code base.

The other thing which we saw today is new website proposal. From what I could see in the audience, it has been accepted quite positively, so maybe Debian will finally have nice looking website in (near?) future. The discussion showed up that also somebody else is working on that, so we will have even two competing proposals. I just hope it will not end up in some huge flamewar :-).

Well I really love these automatic test and "rewards". Today, Wammu has just received the "Windows 7 Compatible" award on ForteDownloads.com. Wow.

But as far as I know, it has some problems on Windows Vista with permissions and I doubt it will be better on Windows 7. Is anybody actually using these systems? I don't.

This is just a small rant about issue which did hit me today. One of MyISAM tables on my database server has been crashed. Well you can expect that kind of thing after a hardware failure. I did start REPAIR TABLE and nothing happened for quite a long time.

Finally I managed to look into the logs and found this jewel:

[ERROR] /usr/sbin/mysqld: Disk is full writing '/tmp/STwW9hIc' (Errcode: 28). Waiting for someone to free space... Retry in 60 secs

Well MySQL, nobody else is not using this vserver and the /tmp is a ram filesystem. So if you filled it up, nobody is going to make space for you there and you will wait for ages.

Maybe continuous waiting is not the right idea...

I never thought I will have such big trouble to buy train tickets online. Some hints for anybody who has not managed it so far:

• Do not even try to register in English, it will fail for some obscure reason.
• Once the thing has failed, it has so broken javascript that you have to reload it.
• Relax your spam filters, otherwise you will not get any mail from them.
• If you have only one credit card, you might be lost. Mine did not work and I had to use another one.
• Be patient, when your third payment attempt ended nowhere.
• If you are not sure whether you booked or not, you can find existing bookings under Mis viajes / Impresión.

But finally I have the tickets from Caceres to Barcelona. I'm going to manage rest on the way.

As the mid term evaluation is close, our students should have something working. And why not to share their results with all our users?

So I hacked up their current state of work on our demo server, feel free to try them:

• phpMyAdmin Import Improvements project by Derek Schaefer which adds automatic table creation from XML/ODS documents.
• Database synchronisation project by Zahra Naeem which should allow you to synchronise databases between independent servers.

Please note that messages are present only in English language for now, so you might get some errors if using another language.

It looks like Gammu has just got new nice user - Kalkun. It is simple web based application built on top of SMSD tables (in MySQL mode) and looking at screenshots, it looks really nice. So we finally got nice user interface for SMSD!

So now it comes. Students are supposed to show what they managed to do so far and we should evaluate their projects and recommend Google (not) to send first part of money to them.

As far as I can see, most projects are quite in a good shape, even though we were afraid a bit about the progress several weeks ago.

However not all my students are active. One OpenSUSE project (Synchronization with Mobile Devices by Peter Somlo) did not actually start because student found time to look at it this week. A bit different case is Alexander Rutkowski with Tracking mechanism for phpMyAdmin, because he completely failed to reply to any of my mails.

I hope other students will complete their projects successfully and phpMyAdmin will greatly benefit from their work in future.