Michal Čihař - Archive for Jan. 1, 2009

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.

Gammu 1.25.0 is out! It does not bring any new outstanding features, just lot of bugfixes, especially in SMS decoding.

Full list of changes:

• Retry on timeout of usb transfer (bug #940).
• Disable AT OBEX for Motorola PEBL U6 (bug #939).
• Disable AT OBEX for Samsung J700 (bug #948).
• Empty memory entry has length 0 (bug #947).
• Handle some more fields from Nokia phonebook (bug #946), thanks to Will Sowerbutts.
• Fix distutils build (bug #916).
• Detect when phone does not support ATE1 (bug #918).
• Do not use OBEX on Motorola L7 (bug #912).
• Reinclude full SMS text in comments in backup (bug #905).
• Disable AT OBEX for Samsung J750 and J700 (bug #856).
• Avoid shadowing C++ bool definition (bug #920).
• Do not disable CLIP for all SE phones.
• Add ID for Nokia 1209.
• Catch busy error from Nokia phones (bug #932, thanks to Walter Doekes).
• Fix code problems caught by GCC 4.5.
• Compile static libraries with -fPIC (they might be later linked into shared ones) (bug #909).
• Handle own number error code in 6510 driver (bug #910).
• Add ID for Nokia 5220 (bug #910).
• Handle SMSC error code in 6510 driver (bug #910).
• Disable gcc warnings about non literal format strings (bug #901).
• Add more fuzzy logic to detect bad encoding from phone (bug #874).
• Add ID for Nokia 7500 and Nokia 7210s.
• Improve searching for Bluetooth stack on OS X.
• Fix ctype compile time warnings on NetBSD (bug #908).
• Nokia 3110c has SMS on filesystem (bug #904).
• Add ID for Nokia 5130 (bug #911).
• Faster reading of Nokia filesystem.
• New PDU decoder which properly parses PDU data.
• AT driver uses new PDU decoder.
• 6510 driver uses new PDU decoder and understands most formats of filesystem Nokia SMS messages (bug #911).
• Fix checking for MPBR (bug #873).
• Fix reading of calls with wrong timestamp (bug #872).
• Increase timeout for IrDA phonet (bug #867).
• Better detect some weird phone states (bug #866).
• Fix handling of caller group in Python bindings (bug #870).
• Correctly detect empty entries from Motorola.
• Better error reporting from at-charset test.
• smsd-inject now shows ID of injected message.
• Fix decoding of date in Nokia phonebooks (bug #876).
• Fix detection of SMS message memories in AT (bug #875).
• Improve documentation for savefile (bug #893).
• Add stricter check for DBI version (bug #894).

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.

V letošních SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards opět phpMyAdmin postoupil do finále, tentokráte ve dvou kategoriích a to „Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins“ a „Best Tool or Utility for Developers“. Pokud chcete projekt podpořit, neváhejte a hlasujte !

If you run some public phpMyAdmin installation, it's time to check for latest security updates. As it looks like these vulnerabilities are being widely exploited by some worm.

If you did not use phpMyAdmin setup script, or if you strictly followed documented way for generating config file, you are on safe side. However there seem to be enough people, who left writable config directory even after configuring phpMyAdmin and it allows growth of such worm.

PS: See also proof of concept for the exploit.

Being busy with real life, it is quite hard for me to follow release early, release often principle. However today I found some time to bring you Gammu 1.24.92. This time only bug fixes are included, starting with C++ compatibility and ending with various fixes, especially for AT driver.

Full list of changes:

• Fix distutils build (bug #916).
• Detect when phone does not support ATE1 (bug #918).
• Do not use OBEX on Motorola L7 (bug #912).
• Reinclude full SMS text in comments in backup (bug #905).
• Disable AT OBEX for Samsung J750 and J700 (bug #856).
• Avoid shadowing C++ bool definition (bug #920).
• Do not disable CLIP for all SE phones.
• Add ID for Nokia 1209.
• Catch busy error from Nokia phones (bug #932, thanks to Walter Doekes).

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.

I finally managed myself to book the flights and ask for vacation, so yes, I'm going to DebConf 09. Will be there for whole DebConf and I will travel around Spain a bit before and after.

PS: I will come there also with new PGP keys to sign, see announcement.

Finally, planet phpMyAdmin has become more official and it now lives at http://planet.phpmyadmin.net/. Please update any bookmarks, I'm just updating links on our website.