Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for SUSE

I've spent second day of Hackweek 6 on more different tasks.

First I tried to add some improvements to Series60 applet. First things to fix were crashes on requesting non existing contact or calendar entry. After that I started to improve user experience a bit, for example by making the menu work and contain some useful things. After that I've added new functionality to capture screenshots of the device. So you can see how the applet actually looks like:

On the Gammu side, I've implemented reading of contacts and todos. No write support yet, that will be done tomorrow. And of course counterpart for the screenshot function.

I've also spent some time on writing documentation, so now there is some documentation on setting up the S60 connection or the new gammu screenshot command.

All code is is available in our Git repository.

First day of Hackweek 6 is almost over and my progress is quite good so far. The first step wat to make Gammu connect to the Series60 applet and retrieve basic information:

$ ./gammu/gammu identify
Device               : 5C:57:C8:xx:xx:xx
Manufacturer         : Nokia
Model                : E52 (RM-469)
Firmware             : 3.0
IMEI                 : 359000000000000

That was pretty easy. If you want to try it, you need to install Series60 applet into phone (manually for now, but autoinstallation is planned for future) and configure gammu to talk to it:

[gammu]
connection = blues60
device = 5C:57:C8:xx:xx:xx

Second thing I choose to implement was manipulation with contacts. There are some oddities in the applet (like it simply crashes when giving it wrong contact ID to retrieve), which I will try to fix in future, but for now I stick with existing applet and code functionality only in Gammu. And it works:

$ ./gammu/gammu getmemory ME 215
Memory ME, Location 215
Last name            : "Gammu"
First name           : "Test"
Mobile number        : "123456"
General number       : [home]"654321"
Email address 1      : "gammu-users@lists.sourceforge.net"

0 entries empty, 1 entries filled

Tomorrow I should be able to implement calendar, let's see how will it go.

PS: All code is is available in our Git repository

Last year I did not have much time to spend on non work related projects in Hackweek, because we took the opportunity and replaced some internal systems, when people were not using them. It will be different this year and I've decided to spend some time on Gammu.

The plan is to implement support for Symbian phones. It is one of frequently requested features and thanks to Series60-remote I can as well see way how to implement it. Current plan is to add support for their applet, with possible extending it in future and adding some features which it lacks.

You can comment this feature in openFATE or Gammu bug tracker.

PS: Introduction video can be found on blip.tv.

It looks like I will make it again to visit FOSDEM this year. This time it won't be meeting of whole phpMyAdmin team, but just few members but I hope to meet other people in person as well.

If you have something you would like to discuss with me in person there, it's best time to let me know so that we can schedule it.

PS: It looks like it might be good timing for Debian release party as well :-).

Surprisingly, my Monday blog post has received much more attention than I did expect and was source for at least one article full of speculations (in Czech). Hey, there was no new information in the post, nor some secret information leak (not that I know something what is not known publicly).

Anyway meanwhile public announcement about UNIX copyrights has been made. I don't think it changes much, but it seems to be one if things people wanted to know.

What I find more interesting (and hard to read and understand) is explanation of the currently publicly available bits from a transactional lawyer at The Standards Blog. At least it gave me basic idea why some things are so complex in this deal and just confirmed that I want to avoid need for contact with lawyers language as much as possible :-).

Today was quite strange day for me - at the morning I felt quite bad so I took sick day to rest a bit. During afternoon I turned on the computer to see announcement that Novell agrees to be bought in $2.2b deal. As this is company where I work, it of course has attracted my attention.

Novell was bought by Attachmate, a company with one quarter of our employees, and over a third of our revenue, what sounds strange. And this is the first time I hear of this company...

The information is now very scarce (we as employees were not really given more information than is available publicly), so all what remains to people is to speculate. What does it mean for openSUSE? What is the "certain intellectual property" transferred to CPTN Holdings LLC (owned by Microsoft Corp.)? And some people just comment on current situation of Novell and some of it's products :-).

Když jsem před třemi a půl lety opouštěl SUSE, myslel jsem si, že je to definitivní a osud už mě zavane někam jinam. Práce v nové firmě mi připadala zajímavá a příležitosti něco se tam naučit bohaté.

Nicméně po pár letech mě už práce u nového zaměstnavatele přestala bavit a motivovat a bylo na čase udělat změnu. První rozhodnutí bylo jednoduché - koncem května jsem podal výpověď a naplánoval si prázdniny. Idea byla taková, že během výpovědní lhůty se poohlédnu po jiném místě a od září zase začnu dělat.

Idea to byla pěkná, ale během těch dvou měsíců jsem se nějak nebyl schopný rozhodnout kam jít. Tak jsem to dočasně uložil k ledu a užíval si volna. Odpočinek od počítačů se skvělá věc, ale když je člověk trochu aktivní v pár projektech, nepřejte si vidět to množství mailů, které se nahromadí. Já se posledními nahromaděnými prokousal až včera.

Jak se blížil začátek září a tím termín, kdy jsem chtěl začít pracovat, do práce se mi chtělo čím dál tím méně. No tak co, práce mi nikam neuteče, udělám si volno ještě v září :-). V té době už v mém hledáčku zůstaly jen dvě nabídky - vývoj na Xenomai pro firmu Inova a L3 support v SUSE . Obojí mělo své výhody, ale nakonec převážila možnost práce na mých projektech v pracovní době v SUSE a tak se tedy po třech a půl letech vracím na místo činu. Uvidíme jak dlouho tam vydržím tentokrát :-).

PS: Debian právě dosáhl významného milníku - byla nahlášena chyba číslo 500000 .

Tak nám na živě zrecenzovali SUSE Linux 9.3 . Kromě toho že ještě nezaregistrovali změnu velikosti u v názvu se mi zalíbilo shrnutí na závěr:

Jediný zásadní problém na SuSE Linuxu 9.3 spočívá v instalaci nového software. Jako běžný uživatel nenainstalujete téměř nic, věčné spouštění YASTU (grafický správce systému) v režimu superuživatele a vypisování hesla není uživatelsky příjemné.

Asi pro uživatelskou přívětivost kompletně zrušíme jakékoliv přihlašování, ono to je přece nepohodlné :-).