Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for English

GSoC 2009 - no more import please

Looking at student proposals for phpMyAdmin, we have at least five for improving import functionality in same way. It's good to have a choice, but if you are thinking about filing another proposal for import, I have to say it is really not a good idea, because we simply have too much of them already.

PS: Student checklist can help you to increase your chance being the chosen one ;-).

Gammu test version 1.23.92

I decided to change a bit short term plans for Gammu releases and I'm now approaching to 1.24.0 which will be mostly bug fixing and documentation release without any major changes, because it turned out that there is lot of things to fix ;-).

This time there are no really major changes since 1.23.91, only some small fixes in AT code, messages and translation cleanup and better logging from SMSD in some cases.

Full list of changes follows:

  • LUID reading requires IrMC profile.
  • Locations for GlobeTrotter 3G+ start at 0 (bug #847).
  • More verbose logging of delivery reports (bug #824).
  • Increase default DeliveryReportDelay (bug #824).
  • Fixed handling of SMS locations (bug #853).

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.

URL change for phpMyAdmin demo and wiki

Today we finally got to setup official URLs for phpMyAdmin wiki - http://wiki.phpmyadmin.net/ and demo server - http://demo.phpmyadmin.net/. Now I should find time to match demo server look and feel with rest of phpmyadmin.net website, just make people feel they are still on our official pages.

Update: http://demo.phpmyadmin.net/ layout now matches http://www.phpmyadmin.net/!

Microblogging?

When some Debian developers set up microblogging for whole Debian project, I decided it's really time to at least try it ;-). So if you are interested in reading my rants, you can follow them on identi.ca or twitter. I'm not really sure how long I will actually use it, but for now it seems to be good way to dump thoughts which are really not worth anything more.

Summer of Code with phpMyAdmin

Do you have free time in summer? Are you student? It's great chance to improve some free software through Google Summer of Code! This year (same as year ago), phpMyAdmin is not direct participant, however nice folks at MySQL offered us cooperation. That means that you can submit our ideas to a MySQL project and we will pick up few of them. So go ahead and submit your applications, you have time till 3rd April!

Gammu test version 1.23.91

Welcome back on weekly schedule of Gammu releases. The biggest change in this release is in SMSD and RunOnReceive scripting support, which has been improved and now can contain any arbitrary command. Besides that support for vNote format has been added for backups/restores and some minor bugs were fixed.

Full list of changes follows:

  • PostgreSQL backend now supports IDs for RunOnReceive.
  • RunOnReceive is started through shell not directly.
  • Fixed reading of empty phonebook entries from Samsung (bug #809).
  • Reread messages if CMGL shows them corrupted (bug #691).
  • Added support for vNote files.
  • Properly detect Nokia 6220 Classic (bug #840).
  • Fix writing of phonebook on Motorola V8 (bug #827).
  • Detect daemon on FreeBSD.
  • Ignore charset errors on AT init as some phones might need PIN.
  • Optionally use MT for phone phonebook for AT phones.
  • Added support for quick dial numbers on AT phones.

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.

Expert Python Programming

The book Expert Python Programming comes with subtitle Best practices for designing, coding, and distributing your Python software. Well this seems to be quite broad area to be covered by a single book, but the book really tries to cover all topics at least in some form of overview and pointing user to other documentation sources.

Expert Python Programming

In first chapter you can find information about installing Python on various platforms. As the book seems to be targeted to more experienced users, this chapter seems to be a bit useless, but author decided to give a chance also to users, who do not know the basics.

Next chapters describe best practices for writing Python code, which was the most interesting part for me. I use Python several years, but I never really found time time to properly look at using decorators, generators and other "recently" introduced language features. Second chapter nicely covers these and I really appreciated that I got idea for what decorators can be used.

Third chapter into class level and describes how to use metaclasses, attributes, constructors and other things you can face on class level. Fourth moves the topic to even more abstract way and in short summarises PEP 8 best coding practices.

Here we leave solid ground of writing code and we move to more abstract areas of managing projects, testing, documenting and distributing software. It begins with description of distutils and setuptools in chapters five and six, where you will find basic information about distributing your software. Seventh chapter covers zc.buildout, which can help you with setting up and deploying applications in way Zope and Plone do.

Next chapter is not really related to Python, it just describes advantages of version control. The most Python related part is using Mercurial VCS, which is written in Python, but you can of course use it for managing any project.

Next tree chapters are devoted to project development in general, describing management of the project, generating documentation for project using Sphinx (what actually made me into starting documentation for python-gammu in it) and test-driven development practices.

Now comes again two more interesting chapters describing optimization of Python code, giving the best advice not to optimize unless you are sure it is needed ;-). But it also goes more deeper and describes benchmarking procedures, how to debug memory usage and some basic tips for general things which might improve performance.

Last chapter is some kind of extra in the book and to me it looks it was added just to use buzzwords design patters, but well it is there and it covers few design patterns which might be useful in Python like singleton or more advanced version of it called borg.

In general this book covers quite wide range of topics, what can be seen as biggest advantage and disadvantage. You will get basic overview of creating Python project using modern methods (test driven development, design patters, best practices for Python code), but you can not expect it will go into much deep details.

The book can extend your knowledge of development in Python, but you should carefully check examples with errata, because otherwise several of them will fail. I'm not that good at spotting problems in written English (as you can probably see in this post), but I spotted several errors in code and I think more careful editor work on the book would improve my feelings a bit. Also I personally would prefer much deeper look into some topics and skipping the others, but one book can not fit all ;-).

New chance for S60 3rd Edition

While debugging some problems one user reported with Nokia 6220 Classic, I noticed that recently introduced fbususb connection type somehow works with recent Symbian Nokia phones. This might be interesting way to go (instead of porting gnapplet), I never thought of possibility that Nokia has implemented something really backward compatible in their Symbian phones, let's see whether it can actually be used for something useful.

Gammu test version 1.23.90

It looks like I'm definitely losing Monday release schedule, but it does not matter that much, new release is here anyway. I wanted to push some bigger changes into first testing release after 1.23, but instead of that I did bunch of bug fixes, documentation and test improvements.

Full list of changes follows:

  • Fixed decoding of Samsung memory entries.
  • Properly handle corrupted messages from Nokia phones (bug #811).
  • Fix parsing of calls from Alcatel C701 (bug #831).
  • Fixed handling of error states with -len and -autolen parameters.
  • Fixed possible crash in DBI engine.
  • PostgreSQL engine properly uses sequences instead of reinventing.
  • MySQL engine properly uses auto increments instead of reinventing.
  • Fix escaping of field name in PostgreSQL engine.
  • Better SMSD files logging.
  • Added testing of SMSD files engine.
  • Increase timeout for AT settings SIM card SMS storage.
  • Fixed date formatting in PostgreSQL SMSD service.
  • Add option to install without documentation.
  • Add -textutf8 option for TEXT sms.
  • Fix crash when some lines in config are too long.
  • Make smsdrc example better looking by removing obsolete docs.
  • Make dku2 connection types work on Linux (alias to fbususb).
  • Better calculation of signal percent.
  • Fixed getting of memory status for some Nokias (bug #836).

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.