Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for English

After two weeks of testing, I'd like to announce Czech pages about phpMyAdmin - http://phpmyadmin.cz/. You will find there various tips and howtos for using phpMyAdmin as well as project and development news. I'd like to build there a community where people could find help about this tool in their native language, but I have no idea whether it has a chance to succeed. Anyway the domain name was cheap so I had to try to realize idea, which was sitting in my head for quite a long time.

Finally this testing series is stabilizing and there are no known regressions. The latest big regression with encoding PDU data has been just fixed. Full list of changes:

• Fixed wrong PDU encoding (bug #412).
• Provide API for cleaning SMS backup structure.
• Added testing of SMS PDU encoding.

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

I hope this will be really the last one before 1.14.0.

I just released new version of Gammu. I expected to have stable release at this time, but some important bugs appeared which forced me to change API. And while I did break this, I also did other API changes which I had longer in my mind. Besides there are lot of fixes in OBEX/IrMC code. Full list of changes:

• Fixes OBEX crash (Debian bug #446923).
• Correctly check various return values (bug #409).
• Fixed several bugs in vCard decoder.
• Removed UCS decoding heuristics, it can not work in all cases.
• Provide at least some basic information from dumb AT phones.
• SMSD now logs also error descriptions.
• SMSD can be configured not to check for security status.
• Correctly handle hard deletes on IrMC (bug #414).
• GSM_ReadConfig now returns GSM_Error instead of just bool.
• Many functions now use size_t for passing size values.
• Backups API now rather accepts format than guessing by filename.
• Increased soname due to API/ABI changes

Some day, this thing stopped to work for me. I was not aware of doing anything what could break it, even any related package was not updated. Time went on and I still did not find time to learn how to debug this udev/hal/dbus/gnome-volume-manager machinery.

Today, after some googling I found short debugging guide on Ubuntu wiki, which quickly revealed me that "volume.ignore set to true on /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/volume_uuid_4717_5407, not mounting". Well I didn't configure anything to be ignored, so let's dig deeper in this.

As I had no idea where this thing could be set, I again started to google and /etc/hal and /usr/share/hal seem to be the right place where to start grep. Nothing related in /etc, but too much entries in /usr. However most of them were selective for some special USB disks or partitions. But there was one which did this unconditionally - it was file /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/gparted-disable-automount.fdi, what crap from gparted. Now I remember that I used this for formatting and partitioning something on USB and after doing all job, it crashed. So it left this piece of HAL hack inside /usr/share/hal and it was cause of anything not mounting.

Seems to be worth of reporting as a bug... Wait a moment, it's already known and some patch for it exists. Hopefully we will see this soon in unstable.

Being in Japan has also one great feature - even if you are in same DVD region as in EU, you are still unable to play your DVDs, maybe because of PAL/SECAM issue, I don't know. I think it must have been intentionally designed this way.

The hardware player I have here at my room just tells me: Disc Error, Playback feature may not be available on this Disc. I have no idea what this error actually means, but I somehow expected I'll be able to play my region 2 DVDs in region 2 DVD player. Good luck that I still have my laptop with illegal dvdcss library, where I can play whatever DVD I put into it.

I know this is not real DRM at all, but this has also started as a technology to limit copying or whatever....

Well I somehow expected it will happen to me when I started to use Debian experimental distribution, but now it really happened. I noticed that last Gammu upload went to unstable instead of experimental just when today updating my other development machine and I was surprised that Gammu is going to be updated. Well the version is not that bad, but it is far from being stable.

Anyway it is good for something - unstable users will do much more testing than experimental ones ;-).

I just released new version of Gammu. It just adds compatibility with some Motorola phones (but still not enough to fully support them) and fixes some bugs. Full list of changes:

• Fixed crash in wrong config handling (Debian bug #446781).
• Initial support for Motorola SMS implementation (bug #408).

I expect this to be last release before next stable one - 1.14.0, so please give it some testing so that we can have a good release.

Wammu just got one of long wanted features - notification on incoming calls. It uses D-Bus and Desktop Notifications, so you are probably lost without some modern Linux desktop. The implementation was quite easy, if I would know that using notifications is so easy, I would have written this sooner :-).

So if you have phone connected to Wammu and somebody calls you, notification pops up and allows you to accept or reject the call. I doubt anybody needs more than this :-).

The next step will be SMS notifications, but those will be a bit more complicated.

New version of simple todo manager called Ukolovnik has been just released. Version 0.8 comes with following changes:

• Locales switched to gettext based system.
• Fixed some installation issues.

Switch to gettext means that you can translate it now using standard tools. One of them can be Pootle at l10n.cihar.com. If you want to add new language, just tell me.

I just released new version of Gammu. It just adds compatibility with more OBEX phones by providing fallback to AT commands and index based IrMC access. Full list of changes:

• Automatically fall back to AT commands when OBEX does not work.
• Initial support for IrMC index access.
• RunOnReceive is now also supported on Windows.
• Handle correctly case when memory is full (OBEX) (bug #404).

PS: I also created Jabber conference room for Gammu, see Wammu support page for details.