This has been a fairly quiet release from a regulator point of view, the only real framework features added were devm support and a convenience helper for setting up fixed voltage regulators. Much more coming next time, though! The most noticeable thing in the changelog is that Axel Lin continued his relentless and generally awesome stream of fixes and cleanups.

• Managed (devm) versions of regulator_get() and regulator_bulk_get() simplifying error handling and resource management for drivers.
• Added a convenience interface for setting up fixed voltage regulators.
• Device tree support for TWL4030.
• New drivers for Freescale i.MX Anatop, Samsung S5M8767, TI TPS62360 and TPS65271 regulators.
• Removed BQ24022 in favour of the more generic gpio-regulator driver.

Things are really quieting down with the regmap API, while we re still seeing a trickle of new features coming in they re getting much smaller than they were.

• Support for padding between the register and the value when interacting with the device. This is required by some devices with high speed control interfaces in order to give the device time to get the values ready.
• Support for applying register updates to the device when restoring the register state. This is intended to be used to apply updates supplied by manufacturers for tuning the performance of the device (many of which are to undocumented registers which aren t otherwise covered). For want of a better term this feature is known as a patch.
• Support for two bit address, six bit value registers contributed by Wolfram Sang.
• Support for multi-register operations on cached registers contributed by Laxman Dewangan.
• Some additional diagnostics available via debugfs for the cache state.
• Support for syncing only part of the register cache, useful for devices with power domains or sub devices which can be reset independently.
• Stubs and parameter query functions intended to make it easier for other subsystems to build infrastructure on top of the regmap API.

plus the general bug fixes and tweaks you d expect.

Released a few days ago, I am happy to announce that LLVM and clang 3.1 are already available in the Debian archive in Unstable. RC versions were already available for the last few weeks in Debian experimental. They are very likely to be part of wheezy.
We will soon try a new rebuild of the Debian archive with the version 3.1. Talking about clang, a couple of months ago, I proposed a GSoC project to extend the Debian infrastructure in order to use clang instead gcc to build Debian packages. The goal is not to replace gcc but it is more about building packages with a new compiler. With Paul Tagliamonte as co-mentor, Alexander Pashaliyski is going to work during the summer on this subject. The final deliverables should be:

• Build services modified to be able to use clang instead of gcc/g++
• Integration into the Debian infrastructure (buildd.d.o, and similar services)
• An easy way to switch of compiler between gcc/g++ and clang
• A way to build a package with a different compiler (gcc, clang, intel compiler, etc)
• Time permitting, a fully clang-built Debian installation

For now, Alexander is working on an installation of the wanna-build and buildd services in order to have a dedicated testing environment.

This will be a repost for anyone subscribed to Planet Debian, sorry. In case you have not heard about git-annex yet and you care about syncing, tracking, and managing your private or public files, go click the link; it's OK, I will wait. The use cases sound intriguing, don't they? But unless you are comfortable with a shell and git, don't bother using it; pain is inevitable. joeyh announced a kickstarter project to make git-annex more user friendly, support automated adding and syncing of files, and a web front-end. Notwithstanding the cut that kickstarter and amazon payments will take and the inherent questions that are being raised by paying for FLOSS, this is a very worthwhile endeavour to support. PS: Yes, this feels a tad circle-jerky inasmuch joeyh's post links to my blog; I would have linked to his post anyway, though. If anything, this made me think twice about posting this here. PPS: Yes, I will continue writing my Trans-Siberian series even though I am home already. Air China decided to keep me in China longer than planned, real life is busy, and, truth be told, Diablo 3 came out. The second Mongolian post is half-way finished, at least.

Recently I was asked to present a short introduction to the Linux kernel for our project managers. I put together a short slide deck for the presentation which I have decided to share.
I feel its important to note that I had a lot more to say about each section and the slides were more an aid for my memory to cover the important points. Of special note would be the diagram showing the "hierarchy" of contributors, this is of course nowhere near as well stratified as portrayed.

An offtopic post for an issue that I just ran into for the n-th time: after upgrading to Ubuntu Precise, my HP LaserJet 1018 stopped working again, the issue being that the printer firmware was not being uploaded to the printer properly. For posterity, (one) way to fix this is to uninstall the printer-driver-foo2zjs package, remove the printer itself from the list of printers, and then use HP utilities to set up the printer:

sudo apt-get remove printer-driver-foo2zjs
sudo apt-get install hplip-gui
sudo hp-setup

You may need to turn the printer off and on after the procedure to trigger the firmware uploader.

I'm doing a Kickstarter! The plan is to take git-annex and use it as the foundation to build a DropBox-like application, that can be used without any knowledge of git. The other part of the plan is for me to get through the summer with my finances intact. :) My Kickstarter page explains in more detail, but the basic idea is to make git-annex watch a directory, with inotify, and automatically add and sync files placed there. Then build a local web app to control and configure it. I have a working prototype of the inotify part already; getting the distributed syncronisation to work well will be a major challenge; and overall it's going to be a challanging but I think very achievable project. One thing I'm really excited about is the potential of Kickstarter to connect me with a diverse group of potential users, who are interested enough in a distributed and autonomous equivilant to DropBox to fund my project. Because, with luck, their involvement won't stop at giving some money, but will extend to actually using what I'm developing, and giving me feedback on it. I hope this will widen the sphere of git-annex users, beyond the current very technically inclined crowd. It's awesome to have users doing things like taking git-annex on the transiberian railroad to help manage all their photos, and others using it to store scientific data ... but getting more regular folks using git, even if they don't know about it, is something I'm very interested in. BTW, I was surprised how much I got into doing the video for the Kickstarter. Using xkcd-style drawings used to explain technical concepts is a medium I enjoy working in. My own git-annex is stuffed with 17 gigabytes of video clips -- 99 separate takes! -- that boiled down to a 2 minute video. Anyway, please consider backing me if you can, and more importantly, do anything you can to help spread the word. Thanks!

Redefining the meaning of Installed-Size:

Package: gcipher
Version: 1.1-1
Installed-Size: 0

$ dget gcipher=1.1-1
...
$ dpkg -x gcipher_1.1-1_all.deb gcipher
$ du -hs gcipher
188K    gcipher
$ du --apparent-size -hs gcipher
75K     gcipher

I've just released version 0.13 of Summain, my tool to generate file manifests, which contain metadata about the files, and a checksum of their content for regular files. The manifest can be generated for a directory tree at different points in time and compared (with diff) to see if something has changed. Changes in this version:

• Bug fix: Summain now fails if the filename given on the command line does not exist.
• Added xattrs support.

I've uploaded 0.13 to Debian and amd64 and i386 backports to my own package repository.

Puppet has a built-in functionality to serve small files to its clients. However, for my internal use I sometimes find easier to create a custom debian package to install a specific component then to write a puppet recipe and to copy files around. To create a local debian repository I use the package reprepro. This is a simple tool that creates and manages apt repository, it is easy to configure and for the moment it lived fully to my expectations. First of all you need to create a configuration file where you describe your distribution. In this case I choose /var/www/debian/conf/distributions and add the following content : Notice that since reprepro wants to sing you repository, you need to provide a gpg keyid for it. To add a package to the repository it is straightforward : As I said, since the repository is signed, we need to make have a way to add the keyid to the known keys of the target machine. In order to achieve this, we add the following puppet recipe : First we copy the keyid that we have stored in the puppet file bucket in the root directory of the client, then we exec the apt-key command. Note that since puppet executes each action in parallel, we must specify an execution order using the attributes subscribe and notify. Similarly as soon as the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/puppet.list is added to the machine, we run apt-get update to refresh the cache of apt. The last stanza simply installs the package that we added to the local repository.

Puppet has a built-in functionality to serve small files to its clients. However, for my internal use I sometimes find easier to create a custom debian package to install a specific component then to write a puppet recipe and to copy files around. To create a local debian repository I use the package reprepro. This is a simple tool that creates and manages apt repository, it is easy to configure and for the moment it lived fully to my expectations. First of all you need to create a configuration file where you describe your distribution. In this case I choose /var/www/debian/conf/distributions and add the following content : Notice that since reprepro wants to sign your repository, you need to provide a gpg keyid for it. To add a package to the repository it is straightforward : As I said, since the repository is signed, we need to make have a way to add the keyid to the known keys of the target machine. In order to achieve this, we add the following puppet recipe : First we copy the keyid that we have stored in the puppet file bucket in the root directory of the client, then we exec the apt-key command. Note that since puppet executes each action in parallel, we must specify an execution order using the attributes subscribe and notify. Similarly as soon as the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/puppet.list is added to the machine, we run apt-get update to refresh the cache of apt. The last stanza simply installs the package that we added to the local repository.

Update There is a better way to add a gpg key, that is to put it in the /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d directory. Thanks for the suggestion !

This morning, I nearly missed getting off at my train station to go to work because I was too engrossed in writing documentation for the company s leave accounting system. I wonder if there s a 12-step program for people like me. It can t be healthy.

• Finnish completes level 1 and makes progress in level 2
• Danish, Persian, Hebrew are full 100% (they were indeed forgotten in last list, thanks to Phil Miller for pointing)
• Uyghur now finally listed in stats, as well as Tibetan. Sorry, the language not appearing was because I forgot a commit pending somewhere in my local copy of D-I repository.
• Marathi completes level 2
• console-data dropped from level 2 as it is not used anymore in D-I

Status for D-I level 1 (core D-I files):

• 50 languages 100%: ar ast be bg bn bs ca cs da de el eo es et eu fa fi fr gu he hi id it ja kk km kn ko lo mr nb nl pa pl pt pt_BR ru si sk sl sr sv te th tr ug uk vi zh_CN zh_TW
• 1 languages 99%: ta
• 2 languages 97%: ga hu
• 4 languages 95%: dz is mk ro
• 1 language 92%: ml
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 2 (packages that have localized material that may appear during default installs, such as iso-codes, tasksel, etc.):

• 31 languages 100%: ast be bg ca cs da de eo es fa fr gu he id is it ja kk km mr nl pl pt ru si sk sl sv tr uk zh_CN
• 7 languages 99%: eu fi hr nb th vi zh_TW
• 3 languages 98%: dz pt_BR ro
• 1 language 97%: ta
• 1 language 96%: ug
• 3 languages 94%: ar el gl
• 1 language 92%: sr
• 5 languages 92%: bn bs hu ko ne
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 3 (packages that have localized material that may appear during non-default installs, such as win32-loader)

• 38 languages 100%: ast be bg bs ca cs da de el eo es fa fi fr ga gl he hr id is it ja kk km nb nl pl pt ru sk sl sr sv th tr vi zh_CN zh_TW
• 3 languages 98%: hu ug uk
• others are 90% or below

Full 100% completeness (hall of fame) for 26 languages: Asturian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, German, Esperanto, Spanish, Persian, French, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Khmer, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, Simplified Chinese

Below are four of my (150!) browser tabs opened, that I oddly had in sequence. There has been much made of the pheonmen of lifelong learning and although I thought I had finished my exams when I finished University, I'm still doing them. From left to right:

Duolingo, where I am learning Spanish.

Quite a reasonable site, currently invite-only. My worry is my pronounciation will be crap though. I do wish that it did not have to use Flash to accomplish things though.

Udacity, where I am doing CS212 - Design of Computer Programs

Nice interface, annoying that it uses YouTube to host videos as that meant I had to whitelist YouTube in Flashblock.I picked this course as one of the other ones I wanted to do had already closed. I suspect I'll eventually do each of the courses they have on offer. One nice thing is that courses run every 8 weeks or so.

Codeacademy, I am currently doing their Codeyear course.

Well presented, but I find that their Javascript interface is extremely slow to startup. It consistently lags behind my typing speed by about 3 seconds.I'm using Firefox beta, so I'm always running something fairly fast and modern too.I'm primarily doing this course to see how/what they are trying to teach non-programmers. My feedback is that it is not geared towards someone with no programming knowledge. The initial 10 weeks of Javascript presentation proceeded at a very fast pace. If I weren't a programmer already, I'd have stuggled to keep up.

Coursera, here I am doing the Machine Learning class.

I'm not a fan of this interface at all, which is why I find it hard to come back to the site each week. I'm not sure exactly why though, since it uses WebM and no Flash. Hurray!!Either way, I'm doing the Machine Learning class. I tried this last time it was offered and got to week 5 same week I'm on now and then I got suddenly busy IRL, so was not able to complete the course.Unlike Udacity, courses run at set times and you have to do the work on the required dates in order to get the statement of attainment, which can be hard when you are juggling multiple things

Keep in mind, these are just the extra things I have decided to learn. I'm also learning more about Django, Puppet and Python in my work everyday. Plus I'm actually doing a Spanish course in real life too. Oh, and I have a job and I go out. I'm generally actually pushed for time. Which probably explains why I have not been keeping up with the blog. It isn't because I hate you, although it might be too ;-) , I'm just busy.

This weekend procps-ng version 3.3.3 was tagged and released for distribution. There have been many patches and fixes involved in this release as we move from an unchanging static sort of code into something that is easier to maintain and build on various architectures. The good thing is I m down to 1 or 2 patches in the debian archive which is a big change from the 30 or 40-odd I used to carry. For the sole metric of getting that number down, the project fork has been a success. There were some post-release bugs I found and these were more to do with the various options turned on or off rather than what you d see if you did the basic ./configure && make. One of them was how the version numbers are defined in git, but would only appear if certain files were older than others (such as aclocal.m4 versus config.h.in) Others were when certain features were turned on. The make check doesn t see all of this because it uses the default configure flags. One annoying thing of the autotools is conditionally installing man pages. This is where you don t or cannot compile a binary so you don t install the corresponding man page. The automake documentation is of course obscure about this but I cannot see a way of distributing only a man page, so we have this fiddle where a file goes into distmanMANS or EXTRA_DIST depending. Interestingly, there has been some bike-shedding around Fedora-land (see the link below) regarding the name procps-ng versus procps. Debian is lucky that we do have different upstream and package names (though not ideal) so apt-get install procps still gives you procps. There also has been discussion about merging procps-ng into util-linux whichin the short-term won t be happening.

Related articles

• Fedora 18 Approves Controversial Feature (phoronix.com)
• Change top Command Default Delay (technologiquepark.wordpress.com)

Yes, I said few.

Even if in my blog post about Debian's ever-growing mirrors network it seemed like we have a lot of mirrors, truth be told: they are too few. There are many partial or even complete mirrors out there that are not listed.

If you are the administrator of one of those mirrors, please consider submitting your Debian mirror. It helps keep track of them and expose them to more users.

Granted, there are some that due to policies (on remote connections, bandwidth use, etc.) they are kept private. Hidden behind a LAN, hoping that people inside actually use them. As of this time, there's not much that can be done about them. If they were to be listed somewhere, there's no way for somebody to check them from the outside.

Some other mirror networks require that an IP (or a range) be whitelisted, allowing them to access the mirrors from the outside to perform routine checks. For some reason, I thought Fedora's was one of them but, apparently, they use a different approach: they ask private mirrors to run a tool.

I think that each approach has its pros and cons.

Linux version 3.4 has been released. This was a very active release for ASoC in framework terms, in addition to the usual bug fixes and so on there were a large number of framework enhancements though most are fairly small or are laying the groundwork for more user visible features like dynamic PCM.

• Support for widgets not associated with a CODEC, an important part of the dynamic PCM framework.
• A library factoring out the common code shared by dmaengine based DMA drivers contributed by Lars-Peter Clausen. This will save a lot of code and make it much easier to deploy enhancements to dmaengine.
• Support for binary controls, used for providing runtime configuration of algorithm coefficients.
• A new DAPM widget type for regulator supplies allowing drivers for devices that can power down unused supplies while active to do without any per-driver code.
• DAPM widgets for DAIs, initially giving a speed boost for playback startup and shutdown and also the basis for CODEC<->CODEC DAI link support.
• Support for specifying the number of significant bits on audio interfaces, useful for allowing applications to know how much effort to put into generating data for a larger sample format.
• Support for a range of new TI reference boards including Panda, configured from platform data so new boards can be added without driver changes.
• Conversion of the FSI driver used on some SH processors to DMAEngine.
• New CODEC drivers for Maxim MAX9768 and Wolfson Microelectronics WM2200.

Note: All of the information linked to from this post is in Spanish and related to Mexico Part of it will be translatable via automated means, some will not. Sorry, that's what I have, and it's too much text to invest the effort to hand-translate

I have been following the development of the different e-vote modalities in Mexico for several years already, although I have only managed to do so methodically in the last half year or so. If you are interested in my line of reasoning as to why I completely oppose e-voting, you can look at the short article I published in 2010 or the slightly longer and more updated version published in our book in 2011. Currently, in Mexico there are two different venues of e-vote that are being pushed: Bad and worse. The bad one will be carried out for about 10% of the population of the state of Jalisco and somewhat less for the state of Coahuila (Distrito Federal was also to be in this list, but the contract was cancelled due to the provider company delivering booths with too many problems and unable to deliver in the due time). The worse one is, fortunately, likely to have the least impact. Why? Because it regards votes cast by Distrito Federal residents (the capital entity, where part of Mexico City is located) living abroad. And it will have less impact because of the amount of the population registered for it: We are about 9 million residents in DF, and in the last election (first time IIRC there was the right to vote from abroad) there were only about 10,000 people registered for casting a (enveloped and sent by post) vote. Even if this year we the campaign for this was better (and I'm not yet sure about it), the number of voters will not be enough to make a dent on the results. I'm not going into details as to why it is bad in this post I requested information from the DF Electoral Institute (IEDF) with academic interest, to try to find more information about it, and I want to share my results with you and, of course, to request for your input on how to continue with this. On May 3rd, I sent the following request (this I am translating to English :) You can look at the receipt for the request for the original redaction) to the official contact address, oficinadeinformacionpublica@iedf.org.mx:

• What company was hired to develop the system that will be used to receive the votes from Distrito Federal citizens residing abroad that have decided to use the Electronic Voting over Internet procedure ("Vota chilango")?
• What is the technical information for said system? That is, which technological basis was it developed on? Which operating base (hardware) will it be deployed on?
• How many revisions or security audits has the developed system ben exposed to? Which are the entities in charge of doing them? What has been their evaluation?

Of course, I wasn't very optimistic when receiving this information. Still, I have to share my results: My information request was largely denied:

( )
III. The divulgation of this information harms the interest it protects
Given that, were it to be divulged it would affect the informatic security of the refered system. Anyway, we have to point out that said systems have enough measures and security provisions, so that the citizen can emit his vote in a universal, free, secret and direct way.
IV. The damage that can be produced by making this information public is larger than the public interest to know it
This is so because making this information public puts at risk the correct development of the Internet-based voting, because were the technical, purpose-specific information be made public, it could be misused to carry out informatic attacks.
It is also important to mention that a confidentiality agreement was signed with the company that developed said systems.
( )
VI. The time for the information to be reserved
It will be seven years starting at the present resolution, this information will be made public when the reserve period is over or when the target is reached, except for the confidemtial information that it could contain. ( )

In case some other person is interested in following this information, the other two points were answered, and I'll try to get some relevant information from it:

• The company that provided the Internet-based voting solution was SCYTL SECURE INTERNET VOTING, S.A.
• The only entity in charge of conducting a security revision/audit is Telef nica Ingenier a de Seguridad de M xico S.A. de C.V.. The audit is still in process, and thus it is not yet possible to give any results from it.

So, I don't have any real conclusions yet. I'm just reporting how work is unfolding. Tomorrow evening (Wednesday May 23) I'll give a talk on the "e-voting in Mexico 2012" subject in Congreso Internacional de Software Libre in Zacatecas, Mexico. I'll talk on the situation on this and the other topics I have been able to work on.

Attachment	Size
Receipt of my information request	11.64 KB
Transparency Committee resolution	354.66 KB
Information request answered by UTCSTyPDP (IEDF)	85.75 KB

Third post about ganeti. Ganet-debootstrap-instance contains a nice set of scripts to create a debian (or derivatives) image using debootstrap. Images can be configured and customized by writing simple hooks script to modify various aspects of the default installation. However writing these script is not really fun and pushing it too far can lead to long messy scripts, loosing the overall benefit of automatic configuration. Puppet is my configuration management tool of choice, but installing puppet on a new machine requires few magic incantations that the user should perform manually, or in a semi automatic mode (autosign=true) to make it work. My goal is to install puppet automatically on the newly created instance so it will run and configure the new instance at the first boot. From that moment on I'll forget about ganeti and configure all remaining services of my new VM using puppet. In order to do so, we need to install puppet (and apt-get update/upgrade...), create the ssl certificates for the client and enabling the puppet daemon on the client. We add another hook in /etc/ganeti/instance-debootstrap/hooks/ : This script uses puppetca to create on the puppet (and ganeti) server the client key, sign it, and then copy it to the target machine. Notice that we create the certificate for a fqnd name $INSTANCE_NAME.$DOMAIN or otherwise puppet will complain loudly. This is not strictly needed, but if you want to do otherwise, you'll need to fiddle with the puppet configuration a bit more. The procedure to create a puppet certificate server-side is well documented on the puppet website, so if you are curious about the details duck-duck-it .