Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for English

python-gammu now supports service numbers dialogue. How it is useful for you depends on services your network provides. For example with Vodafone in Czech republic, you can use it to configure various services:

$ ./service-numbers.py 
This example shows interaction with network using service codes
Enter code (empty string to end): *111#
Talking to network...
Network reply:
Status: ActionNeeded
Vitejte v Kapesni Samoobsluze!
1 Muj ucet
2 Me sluzby
3 Nastaveni telefonu
4 Info a zabava
5 Oblibene

Enter code (empty string to end): 1
Talking to network...
Network reply:
Status: ActionNeeded
Muj ucet
1 Vyuct. a platby
2 Vydaje pod kontrolou
3 Osobni udaje
4 PIN a PUK kod
------
0 Zpet
00 Uvod

Enter code (empty string to end):

Python code which can be used for this is available as example. It will be probably one time integrated to Wammu, but it needs a bit more time than hacking this simple script :-).

If you want to follow SVN commits on some of my SVN repositories, you can subscribe to appropriate maling list, which gets notification on each SVN commit. I hope I set up mailman correctly and everything will work as I expect :-).

This list is also automatically forwared to packages.qa.debian.org, so you can also subscribe there for Debian package changes.

As phpMyAdmin themes for trunk are not compatible with 2.10.x releases, there was created 2.10 branch for themes compatible with those releases.

Today I added 2.10 themes to demo server and they are also available as subversion snapshots. I hope this will help fixing possible issues with them.

Yesterday I hacked asynchronous wrapper for python-gammu. It is start of progress to make Wammu behave better while talking to phone. My plan is that all operations will go through this asynchronous wrapper and will be completely non blocking to Wammu. This means no progress bar will pop up to front, but entries will appear in window as they are being read. Progress will be of course still shown, but only in status bar.

The current code is only first step, next thing which has to be implemented in python-gammu are virtual commands. Those will be used for things like getting all calendar events from phone, so all you will have to do for getting all is enqueue GetAllCalendar event and worker will do all for you including progress reporting.

If you want to write own application using this new wrapper, you can look at example which is in sources. It shows all current possibilities, but it will be enhanced in future.

I just spent some time on improving my website. Well I'm not graphic designer, so the site won't ever be according to latest trends and won't look sexy.

Anyway I tried to improve visibility of some things a bit. The main page now includes small screenshots of some programs I want to point out, small screenshots on application page are clickable and there is more visible download link on some pages as users complained they have problems finding this. While working with stylesheets, I also added maximal width of main content. This probably does not work with all browsers, but I don't care, the text is still visible.

Other thing I updated is information about last year talk about Gammu, which now contains links to videos. I haven't seen them yet, but they might contain interesting information for Czech speaking people :-).

Current Gammu versioning scheme confuses people a lot. For some time 1.x.0 versions are stable and 1.x.y are testing. However when somebody sees 1.10.5, he things this is updated version of Gammu 1.10.0. So it's probably time to move to something more obvious starting from next development cycle.

To stay as much compatible as possible with current scheme, I thing about minor change - so start testing releases on something like 1.11.90. I thing this is also quite often used (I've seen such versions in PyGTK in past) and nobody will confuse it with patch releases. Or should I switch to something completely different? I currently do not consider 1.11.0-rc1 as I'd like to keep version only numeric.

I just released new version of Gammu, you can download it from download server. The biggest change is improved gnappled and it's support in Gammu. It also had to became incompatible with previous versions, so you have to upgrade it in your phone. Full list of changes:

• Backup file uses ; instead of # (bug #85, patch by Marcin).
• Updated shell script gammu-config to generate configuration.
• Install gammu-config script to ease generating configuration.
• Correctly encode text in iCalendar (bug #262).
• Correctly encode recurrance in iCalendar (bug #262).
• Read last modified field from vCalendar.
• Support for last modified field from vCard.
• Use unsigned char to avoid trimming at 60 chars (bug #274).
• Properly handle vCard style continuation (bug #268).
• Detect Motorola specific error while reading SMSes (bug #288).
• Fix OBEX listing to behave according to specs (bug #290).
• Fix crash on invalid SMS reply from phone (bug #293).
• Improved gnapplet and support for it (Matthias Lechner).

I currently do not plan further testing release before next stable one, but in case some serious problem is found, this can change. This time really :-).

This was feature which I always hate - phone made strange sound when taking photo. Fortunately I'm not alone who hates this and there are several howtos on net which should guide you to do this.

The only way which worked for me at the end was replacing sounds in phone filesystem, so that it plays silent sounds. For Sony-Ericsson K750i with CID 49 BROWN you need specially hacked FAR from SE-tuning.cz and just replace files in filesystem (/tpa/preset/system/sound). Now phone magically makes no sounds when taking photos :-).

When introducing gettext to Gammu, I hoped that next release will be completely translated to Czech. Unfortunately there is too much to translate and too few free time. After hard work on translating, I got to 27%. That's not much.

Anyway it helped a lot in proofreading some texts and I hope I cleaned up a bit language used in Gammu. Also I introduced several calls to ngettext, what means that plurals in different languages should be now better. But this will only help, if somebody will be interested in translating Gammu. If you have free time, go ahead and improve translation to your language!

I just looked on server statistics and I was shocked by amount of spam and viruses rejected during last three days. Is there some new virus for Windows which tries random email addresses on all servers it can reach? I didn't analyse those messages, as they are rejected at RCPT time, because sender tries random addresses which do not work on my server. For now I try to reduce them by blacklisting in iptables, but this doesn't seem to help much as IP addresses change too often.

I think that graph shows best what big change has happened:

Update: It seems to be new Sober variant causing this mess.