Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for English

New Gammu testing version is out. This time there are no exciting new features, I still continue in bug fixing mode and cleaning up things. Full list of changes:

• Increased maximal number of entries per contact.
• Fixed various compile time warnings.
• Improved MinGW crosscompilation.
• Localizations update.

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

If no big problems will occur, this is last release before 1.16.0, which should be unleashed next week together with python-gammu and Wammu.

HAL Sleep Quirks is definitely good site for people having problem with suspend/hibernation in Linux. However I would like to find there one very special quirk: how to stop Gnome Power Manager (or whoever is responsible for this) thing that my suspend failed! It works without problems (and worked since I have this notebook), but I always get the popup that it failed. I know I can disable the popup, but there must be way to force this beast understand that suspend works for me :-).

Good news everyone, new version of Photo uploader has been just released. If you don't know this tool yet, it is helper to upload photos (or images) over net. It was created when I became too lazy to upload hundreds of photos to digilab, but generally it can support any service which allows you uploading of whatever using HTML forms.

News in this release:

• Added generic helper for ILikePhoto service.
• Added some error checking.
• Fixed handling of wrong parameters passed (non files).

Finally happened the thing which I expected to happen since I left to Japan. My server (currently being few thousands kilometers away) crashed and exactly followed Murphy's law to break in time when it would caused largest possible downtime. Anyway it's now back and I hope all services are correctly running.

And no, I have no idea what caused power led to blink and make the computer unresponsive for anything except plugging it out of power and then pugging it back. Hopefully it will not repeat, at least not until I'll be back in Prague :-).

New Gammu testing versions is out. This time there are no exciting new features, I still continue in bug fixing mode and cleaning up things. Full list of changes:

• Fixed detection of first free memory location if memory is empty (bug #434).
• Fixed mysql.h include path (bug #441).
• Fixed decoding of one char SMS (bug #442).
• Detect Nokia 3109c (thanks to David Meier).
• Automatically find MinGW compiler and allow overrides (bug #438).
• Fixed parsing of some memory entries (bug #450).
• Fixed decoding of some corner case SMS (bug #447).
• Phones capable of switching to OBEX mode from AT have it now automatically enabled. Please report problems with this.

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

Matt, SMSD in Gammu has retries (but sure it has another bugs :-).

As I wrote before, I tried to use Ubuntu Personal Package Archive for distributing up to date Gammu, python-gammu and Wammu packages. For first time I failed because I expected it to behave more like OpenSUSE build service than like Debian archives, but I was wrong, so I have to upload different version to each Ubuntu suite.

Well that sounds like a work which should be automated. So I hacked a little shell script, which takes current version from unstable, updates changelog and injects it into my PPA. The hacky script is called deb2ppa. It requires dput to be configured for ppa same way as I have it and maybe has some other tricky dependencies which I do not realize right now.

Anyway you can now use current Wammu/Gammu versions even on older Ubuntu releases if you wish :-). (Well you have to wait till it is rebuild, but I hope it will not take much time.)

I just added all MySQL example databases to phpMyAdmin demo, so if you want to play with some more or less real data in phpMyAdmin, you now have great opportunity. Especially interesting is sakila database which exposes many new MySQL features.

All databases are automatically periodically restored, so you don't have to be afraid to play with it :-).

When Ubuntu announced public availability of Personal Package Archives, I thought it might be good to use it to provide up to date Gammu related packages. After successful registration I uploaded Gammu package and no reaction so far, so I'll wait.

However this memorised me that I wanted to use OpenSUSE Build Service for same purpose some time ago. I filled in registration and as I didn't receive any email about being accepted, I absolutely forgot about that. Now just tried to log in and it works. So you can now have access to latest Gammu, python-gammu and Wammu packages for most recent RPM distributions (Fedora 7, Fedora 8, Mandriva 2006, Mandriva 2007, openSUSE 10.2, openSUSE 10.3, openSUSE Factory, SLES 9 and SLE 10). I could not test them so any feedback is welcome :-). You can find all packages on overview page or directly in download folders.

Playing with spec files after long time was quite painful, but I got to it after I managed the hardest thing - how to make build dependencies which will work on all these distros.

I hope I will be able to announce similar service for Ubuntu users using PPA, but now I have to wait for some reaction on my source uploads.

My girlfriend has to use Windows, because university she studies does not give her another option. Now she got some crap on which she should do some statistics. This crap is being called SAS. I have not yet seen how does it look like, but I already enjoyed funny hours with it's installer. As I'm currently on the other side of world, I have to do all remotely...

The basic problem is simple: I do not have much space on C: drive and it does not provide option to install on another drive. First she tried to install it herself, the setup fucked up so much, that it deleted NTLDR and friends from root folder, so Windows didn't boot up again. Fortunately there is also Debian on that machine, so she booted to it, I installed ntfs-3g and restored needed files from Windows XP installation CD (the recovery console did not work, don't ask me why). So great, after about one hour we have back working Windows!

Now I still did not have idea what is the problem. However the failure appeared when the crap was trying to install some special JRE it has included. When I started the installer for this JRE manually, it showed that there is not enough space. Why the hell did not the original installer show this? Well I did some cleanup on the disk and I got 1GB of free space. Hope that it will be enough.

No. Somewhere near 58% installation is fucked up again with error -2147483648. Wow nice number! Looking at disk space, it's down to few kilobytes. So again the same problem! Okay, let's clean it up more and hopefully installer will resume. But I should not hope for anything good from this installer. The only option it now gives me is to reboot.

Reboot, start again installer and let's see what will break this time. Now it found out that some Microsofts runtime is missing. Why it was not missing last time? Okay, let's install it and (of course) we need another reboot. System started up, installer launched and it seems to go on quite well, only the last few percents are taking incredibly long, but the crap seems to finally installed and it even runs!

Few questions: Why they do not check for required space in installer? Why do they force me to disable anti virus during installation? Why does not remote desktop from Windows work? Why is there such mess in Windows, especially in Windows folder? Why are temporary files located all over the disk?

As last but not least thing I would like to thanks everybody who made ntfs-3g and VNC work, I would never fix this without these tools.