Rockman 

As i'm currently very busy with university in these days, and also i've to code both kde3 and kde4 branches, i was wondering if someone is willing to contribute with a not-too-complex application to be rewritten. The application is kserialdeviceemulator in kmobiletools/tests (kde3).. i tried to use it to solve a (damn) bug with PDU encoding, and i noticed that the emulator itself is more and more buggy than kmobiletools :P So that's what i had in mind: Read More

(versione italiana) Finally after some troubles i could finish LiveMobileTools 0.5.0-beta3. There are no major release hilights, just the ones in the KMobileTools 0.5.0-beta3 release.. plus the addition of KDEBluetooth 1.0-beta3 which should make the Live CD work better. Enjoy it :) Read More

Well it's a long time since my last blog entry, but i was almost busy. In my personal life, there were no big changes, so it's almost annoying blogging about it. In the meantime KMobileTools had a great speedup, helped also by the joining of Matthias Lechner, who almost finished the gammu engine. So KMobileTools 0.5.0-beta3 was just released, bringing us very close to the final version. We also moved to extragear, since it's nearly stable code. Also i've started the port to KDE4. Actually it's almost completed, but it still rely on QT3 Support. But it's enough for the moment, so now KMobileTools is part of KDEPim, thanks also to Pinotree who helped a lot in the porting process, and to Allen Winter, the PIM coordinator :) Development now was just a bit slow down, due also to exams incoming, but it's still active, i just committed some code to fix some bugs, and to improve compatibility with more phones. Read More

Since many of you already noticed the lack of subversion updates, and also of the homepage too, i guess i should write it here too. Yes, development is currently suspended (again). I've some university exams until 15/02/2007, so probably there will be no more updates until then. I must anyway tell you i'm quite disappointed. After all these years, kmobiletools still is a one-man project. It's shameful in my point of view that if someone is busy, for study, work, real life, or (why not) a girlfriend, the entire project freezes. Even if i'm studying, i'm still here to encourage and give some references to a brave developer, so there's no point in totally stopping development. Also some time ago i received some mobile phones kindly donated (look here), so there's also this resource available. It's open source: no secret development, no private servers.. everything is on the public kde svn, so why not keeping an eye on it? So this is the point: i'll be back soon, but in the meantime, try thinking on helping this project too. Read More

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, KMobileTools Homepage was enraged by enemy Referrer Spy of the evil Spam Empire. Using the bright side of the Force, our heroes were able to destroy this terrible enemy weapons by banning several referrer keywords. But the Spam Empire was far away from being destroyed. A new weapon, secretly developed was ready to strike: spam usernames. Do you really think that "free xxx wife story" is a "real" user name? At this time, our heroes tried to stop the Empire by banning IP address. Will this stop these evil plans? Soon other details coming... Update: Since i got yet other subscriptions from spammers, i added the captcha module to the homepage. However, it's NOT based on image captcha, but instead on math expressions, so it's even higly accessible. Read More

After a long waiting, KDEBluetooth 1.0 beta2 got released! Release hilights include compilation fixes, and now works with lastest versions of bluez and openobex Including also some stability fixes, and header exporting to allow other application to use kdebluetooth libraries. KMobileTools 0.5 will use them. Release notes Download files Read More

After being a bit disappointed that Bluez-utils 3.x simply doesn't accept old pin-helpers, like kbluepin from kdebluetooth, i thought about the best solution for this. Of course, we should develop a new pin helper, which can communicate with bluez over dbus.. and with kde4 supporting dbus it will be very easy.. but in the meantime, you can enjoy this patch. It modify the standard pin agent, so that, instead of giving it the pin as argument, you can give it the path of the pin-helper to execute. I'm using it in the new version of the live cd of kmobiletools. Hope you like it! Read More

Well, i finally had enough time and ideas to add direct support for bluetooth in kmobiletools. It was more tricky than i though anyway.. First i had to update kdebluetooth to make it export some classes, and add a new one, RfcommSocketDevice, which is similar to the existant RfcommSocket, but more usabile on threading. Then.. well, i had only to learn their API, and to find a new good UI for my "New Mobile Phone Wizard". I simply added another page dedicated to bluetooth, which can scan over devices, find names, and services. Later i'll also add an automatic "good service discovery" which will find the best service for KMobileTools. New stuff then.. adding a mobile phone is even easier, since you don't need to run ANOTHER wizard for bluetooth binding, and the rfcommsocket seems a bit faster than the rfcomm binded serial device. Bad news: to use it you have to upgrade kdebluetooth to trunk, of course :P Good news: you don't have to recompile the WHOLE kdebluetooth.. just configure it, then enter in "libkbluetooth" and type "make install". That's all! Read More

Long time since last blog post.. But i've been quite busy with KMobileTools 0.5 beta1 release. Pre-release time was a hell.. i had to rewrite the whole theme for the homepage (looks really good now, anyway :P ) and some new reference pages, since a lot changed since 0.4. But post-release was busy too: trying to get the best visibility as possible, writing here and there, but above all answering to all the emails, bug reports, and feedbacks. Well.. sometimes it's annoying, and it takes a lot of time, but hey.. we love our users :P Even if tired, i'm very satisfied by users interest, and so i was a bit more motivated than before on bugfixing. Now it's still a bit early for beta2, but seing a lot of code fixed, i feel it's not even too far... So just a polite reminder: beta1 has still old and annoying bugs, try current svn instead. I was also working with Marcin Przylucki for the Season of KDE project regarding mobile filesystems. We started with obex:/ protocol, rewriting it in place of kdebluetooth (outdated) one. It started working good, and it has also write support, now. Also, i implemented a more complex url syntax: obex://transport@device:port/ where transport can be Read More

After a long wait and many code rewrites i finally release the first beta of the new KMobileTools. Totally redesigned user interface, better codebase stability, full phonebook support, integration with KDE AddressBook and Kontact, better support for a lot of mobile phones. I've prepared also a Live CD, LiveMobileTools, with everything (including kdebluetooth) integrated and ready-for-use. Read More

..than studying! At least, this is what i learned today.. the second exam finished, and i must admit, my way of studying really sucks. I'd really need a real job, something really hard to find here.. Anyway, while travelling from university to my city, i wrote a template for a new SerialDevice class, dcode will help me porting it to kde4. I'm also quite impressed by the increasing number of people interesting in KMobileTools. My last blog post brought some fresh new coders, one of them already fixed a bug for Siemens mobile phones. And i'm also really happy to be co-mentor with Stephan Kulow of one of the Season of KDE 2006 projects. There's still a huge amount of work to do, anyway, so if you feel you can help, even with only small contributions, please contact me. In the meantime, i'm still thinking about my serial class.. i'm still a bit undecided about how to do threading.. currently we're using ThreadWeaver, a good library, but maintained only for KDE4. There're a couple of other applications using theyr internal threadweaver modified version, but i'm wondering if it's better to not thread jobs, but only serial-port access. Which means, anyway, that other engines (like gammu) should develop theyr own threading model. Perhaps it's better to do some incremental changes.. first implementing a good and clear serialdevice class. Then i'll look around to see what's the best solution. Also now i've some new "heads" for asking ideas ;) Read More

Well, time for exams has come, only a few days and i'll be killed... err.. i mean.. oh.. whatever :D I really don't feel to much ready, but we'll see.. maybe i'll be lucky now. The nice news is that, whatever will be exams result, i'll restart coding on KMobileTools, probably after july the 20th. Please, please, please: we REALLY need help, so if anyone would like to help us coding please contact me. Read More

I don't think there're more words to say.. I also changed "just a bit" KMobileTools HomePage theme.. enjoy :)

Here in sicily summer is really something you wanna escape from... especially when you CAN'T go to the sea (even if it's less than 1 KM from you) 'cause you should study. The "geek" answer: Update: since it's getting even hotter, and since i've found 2 bigger (9.something CM) fans, this is the result: Update2: happy (hot) birthday to me :) Read More

It's a really boring time.. too hot, too much things to study at university.. and very few free time. So i had to stop working at kmobiletools (hope i'll work again on it soon.. maybe at the end of july), since it's too complex to develop now.. instead i'm working on some patches here and there on kde (i'll publish them soon, in another post), and to very smalls applications. First i've done CheckCalls, a little daemon based on some kmobiletools code, that checks incoming calls, and do some actions depending on the number. I'm using it on my little home server, to make it turn on the desktop PC while i'm not at home, by wake on lan. Then i also made a replacement for video preview, MPlayerThumbs It's based on mplayer only, instead of the default one that's based on xine and arts. So on x86-64 systems it can use the 32bit version of mplayer, which can load win32codecs. On the university side, i'm trying to finally pass math, so it seems i'll be still very, very busy for a long time :P Read More

After some boring works on GSM and UCS2 encodings, bug fixing, PDU sms, finally i could spend some time on implementing a couple of nice new features. Starting with Calendar Syncing, it was quite easy by using KParts, to embedd a KOrganizer view.. it was less easy to read data, due to stupid AT commands.. but at least now it's working fine, even if read-only, and unfortunately only on Motorola Phones. Read More

We've found this little cat 2 days ago.. he seemed too little to survive.. but after 2 days he seems strong enough, drinks a lot of milk, and scares my dog :) Just hoping he'll continue like this... Read More

Finally it seems that i've some time to spend even blogging.. it's a great progress from the previous months :) First of all.. yes, i left my job finally. Basically because i'm still a student.. it's quite impossible to finish university having a full time job.. and since it also wasn't exactly a nice job, i must admit, now i feel really better :) I started hacking again on kmobiletools. I had enough money to buy a new phone, a Samsung SGH Z140V. The really cool part is that a lot of features are currently unsupported, which makes a lot more interesting coding. It's a PDU able phone, so i was finally able to code a decent implementation of pdu encoding. Also, having 2 mobile phones (yes, i'm still feeling too attached to my old Moto C350, which has made kmobiletools born :P) gave me a nice idea: since i had both ttyACM0 and ttyACM1 busy, i had to find a way to avoid having them exchanged.. So now kmobiletools before loading a device checks for each possible target, looks for the mobile IMEI (if any), and then says "Here it is! Let's connect!". With this system i could also code a nice wizard, that seems very useful also for unexperienced users. Now i should start working on real life.. i'm still too late with studies.. and above all, i'm still single :\ Read More

Well, i think i should make a bit more order, here... Updated: link was broken, and now i also have a better image..

Holydays finally! And a lot more time to develop :) And even if here it's too hot and humid (today: 40°), the last two days i spent a lot of time coding the two most requested features for kmobiletools: phonebook importing and exporting. Of course, the first step was to add a new contact, with a proper dialog that let select you what numbers to add, where to save and so on.. After implementing the api to store a contact, it's easy to store N contacts.. and so an entire KAddressBook :-) And the same thing applies to saving the phonebook to a file, or appending it to the KDE AddressBook, 'cause i already had the mobile addressees into a QPtrList. The result is still a bit unmanaged, but already usefull: you can simply have a backup of your mobile phone on a file by pressing a key, and put it back again in the mobile; or you can merge the phonebook in KDE. What we still need: something like metacontacts, so you can have multiple sources for each entry, and a way to handle duplicates. Also, i'd like to play a bit with OpenSync, since it maybe the real solution for integrating mobile phones data with kde. And tomorrow, stop syncing, and let's go to the sea :) Read More

After finishing (well.. kind of) university exams, i'm again working at kmobiletools. What i'm trying to do is to exit the alpha stage by reprojecting everything, and to provide a complete mobile phone suite, wich can use kaddressbook && kitchensync for addressbook syncing. Read More