Nokia 6630 and Internet Connection in Linux

Finally, I managed to connect to the Internet with my Nokia 6630 in Linux Kubuntu; it's not that I had troubles before: it's just that I had never had to connect with the cellphone, and I must admit that I quite appreciated that it was really easy and straightforward to this :-)

Actually, first I had tried with the bluetooth way and thanks to many documentation found on the web, I succeeded, though the procedure might not be trivial. However, in that case, I noticed that the connection was not reliable and not very fast. So I decided to buy a (quite expensive for what it does) USB cable (it's just a usb cable... why does it cost 20 euros?!).

Well, with USB the procedure is even more trivial: you just connect it and you'll see that dmesg happily reports this:

[ 149.162045] usb 3-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 2
[ 149.207194] usb 3-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 149.461122] cdc_acm 3-2:1.8: ttyACM0: USB ACM device
[ 149.463589] usbcore: registered new interface driver cdc_acm
[ 149.463594] /build/buildd/linux-2.6.24/drivers/usb/class/cdc-acm.c: v0.25:USB Abstract Control Model driver for USB modems and ISDN adapters

Isn't it nice? It correctly detects the modem and creates a device for it!

ll /dev/ttyACM0
crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 166, 0 2008-12-24 17:28 /dev/ttyACM0

So you'll just have to configure your dialup tool using that specific modem. In particular I use kppp, and I have a TIM connection, so I created a new modem using /dev/ttyACM0 and setting as INIT 2 string the following one:

AT+cgdcont=,"ip","ibox.tim.it"

and as for the telephone number *99# (username and password are not used, so you can use dummy ones). Here are some screenshots:

And then you're online! Not as fast as an ADSL... but still faster than an old serial modem ;-)

PhpBibliography 0.6

The new release of PhpBibliography is out!

First of all, this release fixes a very bad bug, discovered by Ezio Bartocci: in the merge authors procedure, the system did not check whether the two authors were exactly the same (i.e., the same id), and this used to lead to the removal of the author as the final step of the procedure, which was really bad. This is now fixed in this new release.

Concerning new functionalities:

• a procedure for trying to detect duplicate papers is now available (it can also use the SOUNDEX algorithm); this will present possible duplicate papers, and let the user select those that are actually duplicate ones;
• as for the main page, it is now possible to group papers also according to the years (an example can be found at my home page);
• by default, papers are ordered by descending year, so that the most recent papers are shown first (this should be the most common wanted behavior);
• a modification timestamp is automatically added to papers, and this timestamp is used as a sorting criterion when showing papers (the papers most recently modified are shown first)
• another desirable feature is now available: when listing papers in administration mode (i.e., when you're logged), a direct edit/delete link is always shown;
• each paper can be now marked as private, meaning that that specific paper will be shown only to logged users;
• as for the DBLP import procedure, this was improved: when there is a cross reference (typically concerning the proceeding book where the paper was published), which is separate from the paper's own bibitem, the system will merge the two bibitems, so that the resulting inserted paper will contain all the information.

Finally, in the previous release 0.5 announcement, I forgot to mention that phpbibliography makes use of AJAX technology to perform some checks during the insertion/modification of a paper through the HTML form; in particular, it shows some warning messages for possible duplicate fields (e.g., title, bibtex key, etc.) and error messages when the type of the field is not correct (e.g., non numeric years). These messages are shown right under the field, upon leaving that field, as shown in the following screenshots:


The user specifies a non-numeric year

and the system checks it as soon as it leaves that field.

The same holds for instance for the title, but this time it's just a warning (since you can have two papers with the same title, e.g., one can be an extended version):