Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for English

In few hours after releasing 1.20.93 it became obvious that I will need another testing release, because number of bug fixes grow too much. So here it comes. Schedule for 1.21.0 is Tuesday next week, so please report any problems you face with this testing version.

Full list of changes in 1.20.94:

• Automatically switch to nodtr connection if DTR/RTS setting fails.
• More verbose debug messages in API.
• Free phone data after testing model to avoid memory leaks.
• Properly handle if IMEI is too long (bug #709).
• Try to handle situation when CMGL does not list all messages.
• Fix typo in MySQL file (bug #716).
• Better parsing of USSD replies (bug #718).
• Properly restore caller groups on Nokia 2630 (bug #706).
• Fix listing of used calendar locations on Nokia (bug #710).
• Properly encode class and coding to SMS (bug #714).
• SMSD for MySQL no longer fails when sending message (bug #715).
• SMSD stores signal and battery state in PostgreSQL.
• Properly handle multiline firmware information.

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/, Debian users will find packages in experimental soon.

I finally managed to process all my mails and it's not time to push Gammu towards stable release. If everything goes without problems, the just born 1.20.93 will be followed by 1.21.0.

Version 1.20.93 fixes several crashes with parsing strange data from phones and changes a bit initialization of FBUS protocols. If you are using this connection type, please test this new code whether it behaves better or worse than older version.

Full list of changes:

• Fix crash when decoding EMS pictures (bug #549).
• Motorola phones sometimes reply in UCS2 instead of HEX (bug #712).
• Use native functions sleep/usleep if available.
• Improve FBUS initialization sequence.
• Fixed reading for ringtones from Nokia 5510 (bug #529).
• Do not crash if ringtone name is too long (bug #529).
• Fix possible crash while reading of messages using AT.
• Increase timeout when writing SMS message (bug #596).
• Cleaned up issues with reading from Bluez (bug #670).

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/, Debian users will find packages in experimental soon.

New testing version of Gammu was just born. It brings quite a lot of fixes. Also the Windows binary should be again a bit more stable.

Full list of changes:

• Fixed Windows binary (define properly MSVCRT to use) (bug #683).
• Fixed compilation with CURL on Windows.
• Windows binary now has only MySQL and CURL support (bug #683).
• Fill in timezone information (bug #696).
• Detect reserver message type (bug #691).
• Increase timeout for switching to OBEX (bug #690).
• Disable postal address for Nokia 2600 (bug #659).
• Encode phone number only with phones which need it (bug #654).
• Increase timeout for writing memory entry (bug #654).
• Handle properly when phoned does not tell SMSC (bug #616).
• Initial support for waiting calls in AT engine (bug #551).
• Fixed dialing on some AT phones (bug #471).
• Support for skipping location when reading (bug #467).
• Improved detection of serial port Bluetooth channel.
• SMSD reconnects to MySQL (thanks to Wouter D'Haeseleer).
• SMSD stores signal and battery state in MySQL (thanks to Wouter D'Haeseleer).
• Initial support for reading messages in simple text mode.
• Report if monitor failed because of an error.
• Handle not found errors on OBEX connect (bug #705).

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/, Debian users will find packages in experimental soon.

PS: I still have about 50 unread mails about Gammu, so please be patient.

New testing version of Gammu was just born. It brings quite a lot of fixes - I simply release it because changelog got too big :-).

Full list of changes:

• Report more verbosely that some feature has been disabled on compile time.
• Add ID for Nokia 5200 (thanks to Andreas Metzler).
• Add two IDs for Nokia 2600 (bug #659).
• Add ID for lot's of Sony Ericsson phones.
• Use AT parser for AT+CPBS? reply.
• Use all possible ways to get memory status (bug #687).
• Detect more error codes from Nokia phones (bug #659).
• Fix decoding of text using iconv (bug #687).
• Fix linker flags check, caused failures on MacOS X.
• Add second ID for Nokia 2610 (thanks to Nicolas Forget).
• Add ID for Nokia 6060.
• Try to use OPP and PBAP Bluetooth profiles also (not tested!).
• DumpMessage is not printing last char (bug #692).
• Support for favorite messaging number (bug #693).
• Add ID for Nokia 2630 (bug #693).
• First attempt for Bluetooth support on OS X.
• Do not open debug file for second time when using global debug.
• Fix DC memory name printing (bug #698).
• Add API function GSM_MemoryTypeToString.
• Report correct size of DC/RC/MC memory on DCT4 phones (bug #699).
• Store favorite messaging as phone number, not only as ID (bug #693).
• Avoid empty line at beginning of vCard backup (bug #701).
• Add ID for Nokia 2760.
• Catch not acceptable errors in OBEX (bug #702).
• Operation not allowed is not an unknown problem (bug #678).
• Add ID for Nokia 5000 (bug #677).
• Increase limit of files for DCT4 and check array size (bug #676).
• Allow to enter PIN code from stdin (bug #633).
• Handle HEX reply instead of UCS-2 from Motorola (bug #697).
• Avoid decoding of @ in email address (bug #697).

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/, Debian users will find packages in experimental soon.

PS: I still have about 50 unread mails about Gammu, so please be patient.

Today, I wanted to finish something what looked like easy task from beginning. To bing IPv6 connectivity to my home using tunnel from Sixxs. As I have an OpenWRT, I expected it should not be harder than setting up same thing on my Debian notebook.

There exists several howtos on the net, we can take the one on Sixxs wiki as a good starting point. Just follow the instructions and you should get it working right? Unfortunately not. Aiccu connects, IPv6 addresses are assigned, subnet is correctly distributed over network using radvd, but IPv6 connectivity does not work.

Going deeper into this issue, I found out that some packets go out, but nothing comes back. When comparing results with Aiccu set up on my Debian notebook, I noticed that packets from OpenWRT router are few bytes larger, but I didn't though it could be a reason. Unfortunately it was -- OpenWRT contains wrongly compiled Aiccu, which does not strip ethernet headers from outgoing packets and gateway then throws them out.

This is a well known bug, but unfortunately nobody fixed it for White Russian. Anyway I'm not going to reinstall whole system to Kamikaze just to make the thing work, so I compiled the Aiccu package on my own and now the tunnel works fine. If you are interested, you can get the package here.

New Firefox is complaining about untrusted certificates in even more painful way and the time when CAcert certificates will be widely accepted seems to be far away, so I had to do something with bug tracker certificate. Otherwise I would receive too much of mails about broken certificate (which has been always valid, just signed by CAcert, which is usually not between trusted certificate authorities).

As a cheapest way to deal with this issue I found seems to be StartSSL. The problem is that their root certificate is not everywhere, but at least Firefox contains it. Anyway it is just an attempt to make things work better, if you have any problems with new certificate, just drop me an email.

When finishing series of articles about Debian packaging and writing about dbconfig-common, I just had to ask myself, why it is not used in phpMyAdmin package. I did not find any reason and as Thijs did not have any objections, I hacked it together this evening.

So what you will get? All fancy features where phpMyAdmin requires it's database to manage some additional features. For example you can create PDF pages with structure of your database, add additional comments to databases, notice relations between MyISAM tables, etc. Simply see wiki for more details.

Besides this, phpMyAdmin is now automatically configured to use database you choose using dbconfig-common, so you can also connect to remote MySQL server without manually configuring anything.

The only thing which scares me a bit is that we now increased a lot number of debconf questions user has to reply by this...

I had to do it once and now the time came. Floating around hundredths of unread mails for Gammu is not a way to go. I'm just middle of processing it, but most of you will get just generic reply, asking you to either file bug report to bug tracker or to write to mailing list. There is simply no reason why so much communication should be private between me and you. I think this is generally valid for any open source project, it usually does not make sense contact main developer directly when there are more appropriate ways to communicate.

If you find a bug or something does not work, simply report it! If you can search for duplicates before it is even better and you might be able to include some additional information, but even if you skip this step, it is much easier to track problems in bug tracker than in mailbox. Also in bug tracker the issue will not disappear until it is not fixed, in mailbox, it gets quickly out of focus and I will forget it.

Once more: If you've found a bug, report it!

If you have some question, you have much better chance to receive answer on mailing list. Simply there are more people hanging around and somebody might have already seen the problem. What is another good thing on mailing list is that they have archives, so that you can look whether somebody did not solve similar problem before. Also others will be then able to find your solution.

Summary again: If you have a question, ask on mailing list!

I just commited to phpMyAdmin trunk (will be released once as 3.1) few small patches, but the change is quite important - phpMyAdmin will now default to cookie authentication method and it will not allow to login as root user without password (unless it is explicitly enabled in configuration).

Reasons for both changes are simple - most people change default authentication to cookie in production environment anyway, so why not to make it default and giving remote access to freshly installed MySQL server has been always considered a bit security issue. Well it was an user problem, but why not to prevent such issues?

I was today just too lazy to do much actual work, but I spend time on playing with something new - this time it was Google Chart API or better Python Google Chart module. I wanted to have some visualisation of growth of data in Gammu phone database for a long time and this module seemed to be good way to achieve good charts.

After a bit of playing I got following chart:

What we can see from it? Number of garbage grows very fast. Mostly it is caused by Wammu, which asks user for feedback after some time of active usage and this sometimes leads to duplicate records (but it also brings information which phones are really being used).

The bad thing which is visible here is that mostly half of reports is about unsupported phones! I think we should do something about this as the reality is not really that bad and from my POV, most of failure reports are caused by wrong configuration being used. I know it is sometimes tricky to find working one especially when you use Nokia phone with cable, where exists simply too much possibilities. It's time to tweak up autodetection so that it can handle most of such cases (and recent HAL features to export capabilities of modem devices might also help in this area).