Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for English

Good new everyone, new version of Photo uploader has been just born. 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:

• It is possible to get session ID from API.
• Added support for opening in user defined browser.
• Now parses ~/.photo-upload and uses it as defaults.
• Support for uploading to imageshack.us.

On request I just added three new incarnations of dictionary snapshots. So if you're using display not capable of utf-8, you can use ascii variant, for those using non-Debian sdcv, notags variant has been created (but I anyway recommend you to apply patch to add Pango markup support). And finally there is combined super-crippled ascii-notags version :-).

I just released version 0.23 of Wammu. This is again mostly bug fix release, which fixes various bugs reported by users.

• Fixed phone number prefix settings.
• Customisable format for displaying name.
• Fixed crash when reporting information to phone database.

There is still no binary for Windows. I don't have time and environment for debugging crashes that happen there. Volunteers are welcome!

I just released new version of Gammu. This is simply bug fixing release, no major new features. Full list of changes:

• Fixed handling of errors when saving SMS (bug #396).
• Fixed number type detection.
• Added support for Nokia 6070, thanks to Lúcio Corrêa.
• Added flag -nopower to connection to handle cables with different handling of DTR/RTS signals.

Man never realizes how much customised distribution he has until he has to reinstall it. Last week hard disk in my notebook died, so I had to reinstall system and reconfigure everything. I fortunately have backups of almost everything (at least I didn't notice that anything would be missing), but I anyway spend two evenings in installing, configuring and restoring from backups and I'm still not done with it, but the system is at least usable for normal work.

However there are also some positive things on this: I get more space and faster disk. I finally set up encrypted file system on my notebook. I dropped several old crap that lived (or better was buried) somewhere in my system and which I already forgot why it was there. And I also got rid of very bad partitioning scheme, which was there from times I used together Debian and Windows and wanted to have another partition to test SUSE installation while I worked there. Now there is only Debian to rule them all ;-).

Looking at the web stats, I noticed, that quite a lot of people find something relevant to "environmental" on my pages. As I was not aware of anything related here, I tried that in Google. To my surprise all results are in demo for Ukolovnik.

Well I do not want to add any anti spam technique to this simple tool as it will be usually password protected. And this is exactly what I did with demo for now. So if you want to use it, you need to login with user demo and password demo. I hope this will prevent spammers from using this demo, otherwise I would probably have to close it.

What does cryptic shortcut for different cables for different Nokia phones mean? This was always a bit confusing to me. Now I finally found some document which writes quite clearly, what all they do. Unfortunately for most readers of this blog, it is only in Czech language - Ovládání mobilního telefonu jednočipovým mikroprocesorem. However here is quick summary if somebody is interested:

MBUS

Single wire (+ ground) connection, usually used for servicing phone, but sometimes also exposes some functionality. Fixed baud rate at 9600. DTR and RTS usually used as power source, DTR should be low and RTS high.

FBUS

Two wire (+ ground) connection, used for user data. Variable baud rate (but usually 115200). DTR and RTS usually used as power source, DTR should be low and RTS high.

DAU-9 / DLR-3

Cables for both FBUS and MBUS, switching is usually done by toggling RTS or DTR signals (for DAU-9) or special AT command (for DLR-3). DLR-3 also additionally supports AT commands over FBUS lines.

DKU-5

This is basically DLR-3 cable with USB/RS232 converter, so it is first step of getting USB into phones.

DKU-2

This is for recent phones which directly support USB, it contains no logic, just wires for USB.

I just released new version of Gammu. This is simply bug fixing release, no major new features. Full list of changes:

• Fixed reading of empty calendar/todo/contacts/notes over OBEX (thanks to Gianni Ceccarelli).
• Fixed overwriting of Java applications in Nokia phones (thanks to Martin Thierer, bug 382).
• Fixed compilation with older PostgreSQL libraries.
• Handle correcly internal phone errors in OBEX module.
• Fixed crash on invalid config file (Debian bug #444046).
• Better report errors when using default configuration.
• Fix several buffer overflows in 6510 (thanks to Tobias Sunderdiek for debugging this).
• Fixed crash on decoding messages with special numbering plans with long numbers (bug 281).
• Command nokiaaddfile can now either keep or delete user data on uploading new application (thanks to Martin Thierer, bug 385).

My patch has been merged during my night, yay! And it even was merged in nice revision number 1234 :-). If you want to see example, you can check digiKam screenshot, which Gilles Caulier has quickly generated.

You can read following text on SCons homepage:

SCons is an Open Source software construction tool—that is, a next-generation build tool. Think of SCons as an improved, cross-platform substitute for the classic Make utility with integrated functionality similar to autoconf/automake and compiler caches such as ccache. In short, SCons is an easier, more reliable and faster way to build software.

Then they list tons of features. But why the hell it does not support DESTDIR like functionality out of the box? While googling for this I found that most projects add the same code to handle this feature that will be used by almost every Linux distribution. I think such feature should be built in into next-generation build tool.

PS: If you're asking what would I use, it is simple - for Python just use distutils, they do what you need, for rest I can recommend CMake.

PS2: I just need to express my disappointment after packaging pyexiv2 which uses scons.