DebConf! The venue here at Le Camp is pretty much perfect. Short walking distances, organic layout of the buildings, and a stunning view of the lake. I would be hard pressed to think of other venues which could be as nice... After arriving Fri/Sat night at 0330, Saturday was spent setting up the Access points: This little green valve caused a power outage in the server room, messing with servers, and resetting several switches to old configs. Xtaran had a lot of fun as a result of this. The ikiwiki BoF on sunday was rather interesting. I will try to publish some notes from this BoF and the other Git-related ones towards the end of the week. The Gitify ALL the things BoF managed to fill the room from "full-ish" over "good thing we don't need the beamer and can use the space in front of the whitescreen" over "out of chairs" over "the chairs from other rooms won't fit any more" to the final state of "people stand around near the walls and in the doors". At a total of 54 people, turnout has been... unexpectedly high.. The BoF started at 1130 and usually, slots are 45 minutes long. We extended our BoF into lunch time (I chose the slot just prior to lunch for precisely that reason) and finally finished at around 1245, i.e. 30 minutes late. After a quick show of hands on if there's interest in another BoF, I applied for and got the next slot, tomorrow at 11:30, once again in BoF room 1 and just before lunch. It's called Gitify EVEN MORE of the things and will expand on use cases and best practices. At a guess, we will focus on managing configurations and photos in default and complex situations. Sadly, neither of those BoF are taped. Afterwards, I had a chance to sit down with Lucas Nussbaum to talk over some points regarding the Debian Trademark Team. Finally, during Why Debian should (or should not) make systemd the default (it probably should not, but that's a different story), my kernel panicked. 3.9 and 3.10 have been less than ideal on my new X1 Carbon, but this was the first panic. I was not even done cussing and Ben Hutchings suddenly appeared on my side, telling me that yes, this particular module (mei) has been causing issues recently. As a closing note, I am really enjoying my first DebConf. Great venue, great people, great content, winebeer and cheese party tonight, and I found out that we have a fire place and fire wood...

Seems like DebConf 13 is in full swing, I'm not heading over until tomorrow because I spent the weekend at the Bloodstock Festival. As sad as I am to miss the Cheese and Wine party tonight, having seen a dozen or so excellent bands since Friday, lubricated by a few gallons of Hobgoblin, and rounded off by Exodus, Anthrax & Slayer last night I think I made the right call! So I got home around lunchtime today, unpacked my rucksack, scrubbed myself clean, repacked again for Switzerland (no tent this time). Next up is a curry with my parents tonight and then catching the Eurostar tomorrow morning, I'll have plenty of time for hacking on my cubieboard2 on the train and finally arrive in Vaumarcus tomorrow evening. See everyone soon!

The Fay compiler is a simple way to build fairly comprehensible javascript code from Haskell source. It occurs to me that it should be rather easy to modify Fay to emit perl code rather than javascript. This would allow contributing things like plugins to various perl programs, without writing perl. Of course, the same idea could probably be used to compile Haskell to other languages like python, but perl seems particularly well suited as a second Fay target, since javascript and it have quite similar syntax and similar support for features like closures which Fay relies on. I do not have time to work on this idea myself. It would be a good project for a beginning Haskell programmer. You probably don't even need to fully understand monads to do it! Essentially, look at Fay output examples, translate them from javascript to perl, and then much of the code changes in Fay would probably be in simple string generation code.

---

I will forward any bitcoins sent to the address 149eBtWS6i8cwQdPQJJ8hAGpDuEqNidyTj to whoever makes this. If it doesn't happen in 1 year, any donations will be forwarded to the EFF instead.

I also soon will be on my way to Debconf13 and those who asked for more photos from the place on Planet Debian will soon start getting their fill Privacy note: as always, I will be trying to balance the need for people to get lots of pictures as fast as possible with privacy of people, who do not want to be in published photos. The way this has been done before and will be done this time (at least from my side) is that:

• I will myself filter the photos so that bad or embarrassing photos would not be published
• If you see a photo of yourself published that you do not want to be, ask me and I will take it down ASAP
• If you see me taking a picture that you don t want to be taken or published, just come up to me and say so and I will erase it
• If you do not want to show up on any published pictures, please come up to me at any time and say so. I will have to then to take a full face portrait of you for my own reference (my memory is not that great) and will be my best to avoid even taking pictures with you in the shot

Update: http://www.aigarius.com/blog/2013/08/12/not-going-after-all/

Two months ago I complained about how hard it was to get patches into PHP as the core member didn t give much attention for pull requests on github. After posting it on the blog, I raised the issue in the developers mailing list and was suggested to join and help. A month ago, I started sending a weekly report about new / pending / merged / closed pull requests and got cooperation from the community with reviewing the pull requests and processing them. In this period 40 requests were dealt with (obviously not all merged), and much more are work in progress while the developers are commenting on the requests. The credit is obviously for the contributors for the patches and the core developers for the work. Stas Malyshev was of special help with this change. You re welcome to follow at https://github.com/php/php-src/pulls
Filed under: PHP

Hi everyone! We now have both Qt4 and Qt5 in the archive. Those using Qt4 should not need to make any changes in their packages, although you can be extra-safe with a few steps. Don't rush, just read below.
Some backgroundSune took the time some months ago to consult upstream for a sane way to allow both SDKs to coexist without us distros having to reinvent the wheel choosing which tools have to be in use in each case.

After a long discussion, upstream decided to write qtchooser (already in the archive) to be able to select between Qt4, Qt5 and even special user's cases like cross-platform builds.

So instead of going trough Debian's alternatives as we did with Qt3/Qt4, we will make use of this new tool.
My package uses Qt, how should I proceed?There are many ways of choosing either of the versions of Qt:

- Using any qtchooser method (preferred):

* Exporting QT_SELECT with 4, qt4, 5 or qt5 as a value in debian/rules.
* Call the tool using the '-qtx' parameter, where x can be replaced with any of the options above.

- Build-depending on qt4-default or qt5-default. You can't B-D on both of them, as they can't coexist.

It is good to notice that:

- any qtchooser method will take precedence over build depending on qtX-default.
- If you export XDG_CONFIG_DIRS it will ignore the default paths to qtchooser's configs we setted up in the packages.

We have also provided qt4-[arch-triplet] and qt5-[arch-triplet] options for special cases.

Once again, if you are already using Qt4, there is no need to rush. See below.

Can is use both Qt4 and Qt5 in my package?You can't mix Qt4 and Qt5 in the same binary, but you may provide libraries compiled against one or the other. For example, your source package foo could provide both libqt4foo1 and libqt5foo1. You need to mangle your debian/rules and/or build system accordingly to achieve this. At the time of this writing I don't know of any examples yet.

So are you going to break the archive with a big transition?No, we have done our best to avoid having to make any changes to existing Qt4 packages. Qt tools should default to Qt4 except if overriden by any method described above.

My package uses Qt4, can I leave it as it is?While there is no need to apply the changes in this case, explicitly setting the Qt version will surely not hurt at all. But don't rush ;-)

[no pictures here, just a short report]. Today DebConf, this year's edition of the annual Debian developer conference, started with two inspiring talks about Debian proper, one by Lucas Nussbaum, the other by Joey Hess. This also means that yesterday DebCamp ended, the period preceeding DebConf and dedicated to working on Debian together with others. Here's a short report from my point of view: I arrived here on Tuesday, the first day of DebCamp. I immediately fell in love with the venue, & despite the early stage of setup, everything I needed was working fine for me from the very start. Like in previous years, I used the time to do work in the Debian Perl Group, especially taking advantage of the presence of other team members. That's the great thing about DebCamp & DebConf: collaborating in real-life & real-time, from quickly asking a question over sitting together to think about solutions for a problem to "just" chatting & thereby developping ideas for the future. In the previous days I

• tried to get down the amount of packages with not-yet uploaded new upstram releases;
• looked into the pending bugs around the Perl 5.18 transition;
• investigated with others the details of the upcoming new timezone file handling in the Perl world, which will make our lives easier but still needs some work on the Debian side;
• prepared with others the Perl Group's BoF that will take place during DebConf on Thursday;
• helped with the creation of a new pkg-perl-tools package.

I really enjoy my time here, & I'm especially happy to meet some people for the first time in meat space. This is only possible due to the generous support of the DebConf sponsors & the immense efforts of the DebConf team. Thank you!

Cloud is passing the hype curve and we are seeing more stable developments and offerings on the market. Lately I ve been playing with RedHat s Openshift. Openshift is a PaaS (Platform as a Service) offering that intends to be an alternative for vendors such as Heroku. The focus for such offerings is to give developers enough flexibility and tools that handle the application deployment and maintenance process in a way that is integrated with their existing development workflow and tools. I ve been using Heroku for a while to deploy small to medium size projects. I liked the tools and developer-centered experience they offer. Openshift is quite new on the market and it comes in two flavors: Openshift Online, which is a PaaS service, and Openshift Enterprise, which allows organization to setup a PaaS within their own infrastructure. Both of them powered by the Openshift origin software. I ll not compare Heroku vs. Openshift feature by feature but from my experience I can tell that Openshift is far from mature and will need to give developers more features to increase adoption. When developing applications for Openshift developers are given a set of application stack components, similar to Heroku s buildpacks. They call them cartridges. You can think of them as operating system packages, since the idea is the same: have a particular application stack component ready to be used by application developers. Most of the cartridges offered by the service are base components such as application server, programming language interpreters (Ruby, Python, etc), web development frameworks and data storage, such as relational and non-relational databases. Cartridges are installed inside a gear, which is a sort of application container (I believe it uses LXC internally). Unsurprisingly this Openshift component doesn t leverage on existing packaging for RHEL 64bit, the OS that powers the service. I d expect such things from the RedHat ecosystem. I had to develop a cartridge to have a particular BI engine to be used as embed component by application developers. After reading docs and reference I realized this can be piece of cake, since I have packaging experience. Wrong. Well, quite so. The tricky part for Openshift Online is that it does not offer enough information on the cartridge install process so you can see what s going wrong. To be able to see more details on the process you ll need to setup an Openshift origin server and use it as a testing facility. Turns out that having a Origin server to operate correctly is also a challenging task and consumed a lot of my time. Over the recent weeks I ve learned from origin developers that such features are on the road map for the upcoming releases. That s good news. One of the challenges I had, and still have to figure out, is that unlike the normal cartridges mine didn t required to launch any service. Since it is a BI engine I just needed to configure and deploy to an application server such as JBoss. Cartridge format requires to have a sort of service init.d script under bin along with setup, install and configuration scripts that are ran on install. Although every day I become more familiar with origin and Openshift internals I still have work to do. Nice thing is that I was already familiar with LXC and Ruby-based applications so I could figure where things are placed and where to look for errors on origin quite easily. The cartridges are on my github account if you care to take a look and offer advice.

This hasn't been my week. I had to fix two of my Hurd installations I use for development and testing. I spent countless hours waiting for some package to be rebuilt, reading scientific papers about adding stuff to the Mach kernel. Fascinating stuff like thread migration that would (among other things) allow for proper resource accounting on Mach kernels. Oh, and gcc is a sadistic bastard:

In file included from printf-parsewc.c:2:0:
printf-parsemb.c: In function  __parse_one_specwc :
printf-parsemb.c:407:1: internal compiler error: Segmentation fault
Please submit a full bug report,
with preprocessed source if appropriate.
See <file:///usr/share/doc/gcc-4.7/README.Bugs> for instructions.
The bug is not reproducible, so it is likely a hardware or OS problem.

A similar error came up like five hours into my libc rebuild. How nice of gcc to retry the build to figure out whether it is to blame or the environment only to throw away the successful build and abort my build process :/

• I published my patch series addressing all sysvinit-related issues: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2013-08/msg00000.html
• I since found three minor issues, so I'll roll another series shortly. But since this somewhat breaks the ABI (/hurd/init is no longer PID 1) this is waiting for a libc rebuild that I haven't managed to get done so far.
• I updated my patch series for the sysvinit package. I'm quite pleased with it as it is and I'll propose it for inclusion with the sysvinit package shortly. Unfortunately this depends on the patched hurd package with is blocked by the libc package :/

Next week I'll finally propose my sysvinit patch series. Oh, and implement the -d flag in our umount. I thought I had implemented all the flags used by the initscripts, but somehow I missed -d. If I get bored, I'll take a look at the network related issues, but I bet I won't get there...

pidof is a program that finds the PID of a named program. In some ways it is like a cut-down pgrep found in the procps package. pidof currently sits in sysvinit-tools. There are plans to move all utilities that use the proc filesystem under one package which will make the maintenance of them simpler, which in effect means moving pidof from sysvinit-tools to procps. The short-term bump should make it better in the long term. Now as I wear two hats (Debian maintainer and procps upstream) there are two very important things I/we need to know.

• If your Debian package depends on pidof being present, then we need to discuss dependencies. procps is generally installed on most systems but there might be corner cases. Possibly just depending on a specific version of procps will do it
• If you, your Debian package or anything else (including other distributions) need the non-LSB options of pidof (ie they use -c -n or -m) then we (upstream) need to know about it. There are provisional plans not to support these options but they re needed, or a subset is, then that could change.

Debian developers can chime in on the debian-devel email list, or email myself. If its an upstream issue then either email me, or even better, the procps email list

pidof is a program that finds the PID of a named program. In some ways it is like a cut-down pgrep found in the procps package. pidof currently sits in sysvinit-tools. There are plans to move all utilities that use the proc filesystem under one package which will make the maintenance of them simpler, which in effect means moving pidof from sysvinit-tools to procps. The short-term bump should make it better in the long term. Now as I wear two hats (Debian maintainer and procps upstream) there are two very important things I/we need to know.

• If your Debian package depends on pidof being present, then we need to discuss dependencies. procps is generally installed on most systems but there might be corner cases. Possibly just depending on a specific version of procps will do it
• If you, your Debian package or anything else (including other distributions) need the non-LSB options of pidof (ie they use -c -n or -m) then we (upstream) need to know about it. There are provisional plans not to support these options but they re needed, or a subset is, then that could change.

Debian developers can chime in on the debian-devel email list, or email myself. If its an upstream issue then either email me, or even better, the procps email list

Small update as someone was complaining about the lack of pictures from DebCamp on planet. Not to worry, everything is going fine, and some of the most important stuff is ready You can see a few pictures from the gallery. The view from the venue is quite outstanding (it was better when there was some sun on Tuesday, but my camera battery was out ). On my TODO-list:

• A lot of mentors.d.n related stuff : prototyping things to make our codebase more bearable by actually using other people s work, e.g. debianqueued, firehose, , and building upon Lucas s idea from his new contributor survey (see the quite vague idea at the bottom)
• FedMsg stuff (will probably pick up when Simon arrives)
• Some 3D-printing packaging stuff (actually getting software in NEW, I got started on Printrun, and maybe Slic3r)

See you there!

With the number of female software engineers standing at 20.9% [1], recruitment of females into the industry is a major concern. A friend of mine, Rosemary Francis who's MD of Ellexus, has a great talk about this issue. It mentions various methods you can use to tailor your job applications to be more attractive to females, by simply being careful not to exclude or put off potential applicants. However, there is also a very poor way of doing so, which is highly sexist and plays to stereotypes. As we can see from Bloopark's hiring page, this is exactly what they have done.

Web developer (m)
Need for programming
You are addicted to PHP, MySQL and Javascript since years? Your life makes no sence without programming? Your girlfriend doesn't understand, why you start learning the fifth php framework and your parents say, your head is full of unix and linux. Do you want to talk to us about this? We want to invite you to an anonymous or maybe very personal meeting. No worries, we will bring you to a team that understands you and will support your passion of programming. Web developer (f)
Beautiful und sexy code wanted
We are convinced that woman are great programmers. Woman write sexy code: neat and clean. Many of them have long relationship... with PHP5, MySQL and Javascript. They like to talk and communication is essential in our work. Female programmers get along with customers very well and take such a good care of code quality, as if it is a pair of their new shoes. The best thing is that their detailed documentation and code organisation match the rules of Feng-Shui. Are you a female programmer with passion? May we invite you for coffee?

Really? New pair of shoes? Pictures of nail varnish? They're in a relationship with code? And why does the male version need to have a girlfriend rather than a boyfriend? [1] US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) - ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/lf/aa2010/aat11.txt

Dear lazyyweb, Has anyone got a way for postfix to use a transport map such that it sends email to the given MX host for some specified domains then default to a smarthost for the remainder? The logic would be: IF domain in ( example.net , foo.bar ,etc etc) THEN use the relevant MX host ELSE send to smarthost.isp.net i can use a transport map to send from specific domains to specific hosts, eg @domain.com goes to otherisp.net mailserver but not to just use domain.com s MX hosts

Dear lazyyweb, Has anyone got a way for postfix to use a transport map such that it sends email to the given MX host for some specified domains then default to a smarthost for the remainder? The logic would be: IF domain in ( example.net , foo.bar ,etc etc) THEN use the relevant MX host ELSE send to smarthost.isp.net i can use a transport map to send from specific domains to specific hosts, eg @domain.com goes to otherisp.net mailserver but not to just use domain.com s MX hosts

I recently had to migrate the main Libravatar server to a new virtual machine. In order to minimize risk and downtime, I decided to write a migration plan ahead of time. I am sharing this plan here in case it gives any ideas to others who have to go through a similar process.

Prepare DNS

• Change the TTL on the DNS entry for libravatar.org to 3600 seconds.
• Remove the mirrors I don't control from the DNS load balancer (cdn and seccdn).
• Remove the main server from cdn and seccdn in DNS.

Preparing the new server

• Setup the new server.
• Copy the database from the old site and restore it.
• Copy /var/lib/libravatar from the old site.
• Hack my local /etc/hosts file to point to the new server's IP address:

  xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx www.libravatar.org stats.libravatar.org cdn.libravatar.org
  

• Test all functionality on the new site.

Preparing the old server

• Prepare a static "under migration" Apache config in /etc/apache2/sites-enables.static/:

  <VirtualHost *:80>
      RewriteEngine On
      RewriteRule ^ https://www.libravatar.org [redirect=301,last]
  </VirtualHost>
  <VirtualHost *:443>
      SSLEngine on
      SSLProtocol TLSv1
      SSLHonorCipherOrder On
      SSLCipherSuite RC4-SHA:HIGH:!kEDH
      SSLCertificateFile /etc/libravatar/www.crt
      SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/libravatar/www.pem
      SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/libravatar/www-chain.pem
      RewriteEngine On
      RewriteRule ^ /var/www/migration.html [last]
      <Directory /var/www>
          Allow from all
          Options -Indexes
      </Directory>
  </VirtualHost>
  

• Put this static file in /var/www/migration.html:

  <html>
  <body>
  <p>We are migrating to a new server. See you soon!</p>
  <p>- <a href="http://identi.ca/libravatar">@libravatar</a></p>
  </body>
  </html>
  

• Enable the rewrite module:

  a2enmod rewrite
  

• Prepare an Apache config proxying to the new server in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled.proxy/:

  <VirtualHost *:80>
      RewriteEngine On
      RewriteRule ^ https://www.libravatar.org [redirect=301,last]
  </VirtualHost>
  <VirtualHost *:443>
      SSLEngine on
      SSLProtocol TLSv1
      SSLHonorCipherOrder On
      SSLCipherSuite RC4-SHA:HIGH:!kEDH
      SSLCertificateFile /etc/libravatar/www.crt
      SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/libravatar/www.pem
      SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/libravatar/www-chain.pem
      SSLProxyEngine on
      ProxyPass / https://www.libravatar.org/
      ProxyPassReverse / https://www.libravatar.org/
  </VirtualHost>
  

• Enable the proxy-related modules for Apache:

  a2enmod proxy
  a2enmod proxy_connect
  a2enmod proxy_http
  

Migrating servers

• Tweet and dent about the upcoming migration.
• Enable the static file config on the old server (disabling the Django app).
• Copy the database from the old server and restore it on the new server.
• Copy /var/lib/libravatar from the old server to the new one.

Disable mirror sync

• Log into each mirror and comment out the sync cron jobs in /etc/cron.d/libravatar-slave.
• Make sure mirrors are no longer able to connect to the old server by deleting /var/lib/libravatar/master/.ssh/authorized_keys on the old server.

Testing the main site

• Hack my local /etc/hosts file to point to the new server's IP address:

  xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx www.libravatar.org stats.libravatar.org cdn.libravatar.org
  

• Test all functionality on the new site.
• If testing is successful, update DNS to point to the new server with a short TTL (in case we need to revert).
• Enable the proxy config on the old server.
• Hack my local /etc/hosts file to point to the old server's IP address.
• Test basic functionality going through the proxy.
• Remove local /etc/hosts/ hacks.

Re-enable mirror sync

• Build a new libravatar-slave package with an updated known_hosts file for the new server.
• Log into each server I control and update that package.
• Test the connection to the master (hacking /etc/hosts on the mirror if needed):

  sudo -u libravatar-slave ssh libravatar-master@0.cdn.libravatar.org
  

• Uncomment the sync cron jobs in /etc/cron.d/libravatar-slave.
• An hour later, make sure that new images are copied over and that the TLS certs are still working.
• Remove /etc/hosts hacks from all mirrors.

Post migration steps

• Tweet and dent about the fact that the migration was successful.
• Send a test email to the support address included in the tweet/dent.
• Take a backup of config files and data on the old server in case I forgot to copy something to the new one.
• Get in touch with mirror owners to tell them to update libravatar-slave package and test ssh configuration.
• Add third-party controlled mirrors back to the DNS load-balancer once they are up to date.
• A few days later, change the TTL for the main site back to 43200 seconds.
• A week later, kill the proxy on the old server by shutting it down.

Getting new Front Desk members (part of things to do at Debconf) We need more Front Desk members. Jonathan Wiltshire has kindly put together a job description for the current status quo. Currently we'd like a person to have been an Application Manager before joining Front Desk, but FD tasks are now more diverse than they used to be, and I'd like to spend some time thinking about it, for example here. Job Description for Front Desk Assistant Front Desk assistants are often the first point of contact for new applicants to Debian's New Member process, and are responsible for guiding them through all stages. Front Desk collates applications, assigns them to an Application Manager, checks over the completed application and hands it off to the Account Managers. Front Desk also handles membership of the collab-maint Alioth project. It is not currently involved with applications for Debian Maintainer status. You will 'meet' a wide variety of applicants, some of whom are excited to be starting their journey to Debian membership, whilst others are already established and taking the next step to full developer status. This is a mostly procedural role, but some diplomatic skills are required, particularly when applications are held up for reasons beyond your control. You must have excellent written communication, an eye for detail, and a thorough understanding of what it is to be Debian Members. Expect to spend 2-3 hours per week on this role, divided by as many days as you can manage (to ensure mail is dealt with as soon as possible). The most time-consuming part is processing the completed application. Responsibilities:

1. To be the first point of contact at Front Desk
2. To perform initial triage of applications
3. To match each application with an appropriate Application Manager
4. To ensure applicants are processed in a timely manner, which may require intervening with an application when it is not progressing satisfactorily
5. To check completed applications for any missing detail and pass them on to the Account Managers
6. To handle collab-maint membership business
7. To answer any queries from applicants, Application Managers, and other stakeholders
8. To monitor output from the NM routine jobs and fix or escalate any problems

Front Desk staff are not expected to make a judgement call on applicants, though some discretion can be used when appropriate.

Choosing Embedded Processors for AltOS When Bdale and I started building rocketry hardware together, we had already picked out a target processor, the TI cc1111. We picked that chip almost entirely based on the digital transceiver that is built in to the chip, and not because we had any particular love for the 8051 microcontroller. At that time, I d seen people struggle with PIC processors, battle AVR to a draw and spend a lot of time trying to get various ARM processors running. So, the 8051 didn t seem all that far from normal, and the cc1111 implementation of it is pretty reasonable, including credible USB support and a built-in DMA engine. Since those early days, we ve gone on to build boards with a slightly wider range of processors:

• TI cc1111
• Atmel ATmega32U4
• Atmel ATiny85
• STMicroelectronics STM32L151/STM32L152
• NXP LPC11U14

Bdale thinks we should reduce the number of components we use to focus our efforts better. He s probably right, but I have to admit that I ve had way too much fun getting each of these chips running. I thought I d spend a bit of time describing our general process for selecting a new CPU.

• Free software. I m long past the age at which I trust hardware vendors to deliver credible binary software. If you want me to use your silicon, make sure the tools required to use it are all free software.
• Debian support required. Bdale and I do everything on Debian, so any processor we use needs to have tools that run under Debian. We re more than willing to package software for Debian, so if it s just generic Linux-compatible free software, that s fine.
• Built-in USB. Everything we build needs to talk to a computer for configuration and data download. Don t even think of asking me to attach another chip for USB support. Ok, so the ATtiny85 doesn t qualify here, and that project does use an external chip for USB which is connected to the ATtiny85 through an LED and phototransistor. I was excited when TI came out with the CC340 chips because the MSP430 is a much nicer CPU than the 8051. But, they still haven t added USB. If I m going to add another chip for USB, it ll be a CPU anyways, at which point I ll use a stand-alone RF chip.
• Cheap developer boards. TI sells a tiny little cc1111 developer board; STmicroelectronics and NXP both sell boards that include a programmer and a target CPU for prototyping software. And, there are a million Arduino clones with various Atmel processors on them. Cheap means I can buy them without thinking too hard; having a built-in programmer means that early OS development can be done without first having to figure out how to wire up a programmer.
• Probably 32 bits, probably an ARM. Yeah, the cc1111 and Atmel processors were fun to bring up, but I m pretty much over the 8-bit microcontroller now. ARM processors are far more sophisticated in terms of power management and built-in device capability, plus they re a ton faster at doing any math. The ATtiny85 remains an exception here; it s smaller than any ARM I can get, and so it s still useful for projects too small for an ARM.
• Available in small quantities from a reasonable on-line retailer like Digikey, Mouser or even Avnet Express. I d love to try out the new low-cost STM32L100 parts, but the only one available is the largest one in the 64LQFP package, and I really don t need that many pins for most products.

CC1111 involved a lot of software hacking The 8051 processor in the CC1111 is very well documented, including the two-wire debugging interface. What was missing was a canned solution for programming and debugging the chip from Debian. However, with sufficient motivation and accurate docs, I was able to create a programmer from a USB device with a couple of GPIOs and a lot of ugly software on Linux. That sufficed to get the USB stack limping along, at which point I wrote a much faster programmer that ran on the cc1111 itself and could program another cc1111. With that, I created an assembly-level debugger that could be hooked to the existing SDCC source level debugger and had a full source-level debugging environment for the 8051. This turned out to be way better than what I could get on the Atmel processors, where I ve got a program loader and a whole lot of printf debugging. STM has been great The STM32L-Discovery board has a standard STM debugging setup for the Cortex SWD interface right on the same board as a target CPU. That made for completely self-contained development, with no jumper wires (a first for me, for sure). There s free software, stlink which can talk over the debugger USB connection to drive the SWD interface. This is sufficient to flash and debug applications using GDB. Of course, GCC supports ARM quite well; the only hard part was figuring out what to do for a C library. I settled on pdclib, which is at least easy to understand, if not highly optimized for ARM. We ve built a ton of boards with the STM32L151 and STM32L152; at this point I m pretty darn comfortable with the architecture and our tool chain. Adventures with NXP The NXP LPC11U14 is a very different beast. I m using this because:

• It s small (5mm x 5mm)
• It s cheap ($1.48 q100)

The LPCXpresso board looks much like the STM32L-Discovery, with a debugger interface wired to the CPU directly on the board. However, I haven t found free software tools to drive this programmer; all I ve found are binary-only tools from NXP. No thanks. Fortunately, the LPC11U14 uses exactly the same SWD interface as the STM32L, so I was able to sever the link between the programmer and the target on the LPCXpresso board and hook the target to an ST-Link device (either the one on the STM32L-Discovery board, or the new stand-along programming dongle I bought). With that, I wrote an openocd script to talk to the LPC11U14 and was in business. What I found in the NXP processor was a bit disturbing though there s a mask ROM that contains a boot loader, which always runs when the chip starts, and a bunch of utility code, including the only documented interface to programming the flash memory. I cannot fathom why anyone thought this was a good idea I don t want a BIOS in my embedded CPU, thankyouverymuch; I d really like my code to be the first instructions executed by the CPU. And, any embedded developer is more than capable of programming flash using a register specification, and calling some random embedded code in ROM from the middle of my operating system is more than a bit scary. NXP could do two simple things to make me like their parts a whole lot more:

• Publish the programmer source code. The programming dongle is a tool for selling your silicon, not a separate revenue stream. Publish the source under a free software license (GPL recommended, of course). We ll take it, make it better, and ensure that you get the changes back to help your other customers. It s a win-win plan.
• Document the flash programming registers. Yeah, I could probably disassemble the mask-rom bits that are on the chip, but I have better things to do with my time. Heck, go wild and document any other hidden bits in the silicon. Again, we re embedded developers, we don t like magic hardware hidden from view any more than PC developers like the BIOS and SMM.

Right now, I m hoping the STM32L100C6 parts become available in small quantities so I can try them out; they promise to be as cheap as the LPC11U14, but are better supported by free software and offer more complete hardware documentation. Yeah, they re a bit larger; that will probably be annoying.

You might (or not if you don t visit) notice all my websites were down. A rushed apt-get dist-upgrade and I found two problems:

1. PHP5 got removed, which is bad if you run a wordpress site that uses PHP to run
2. The apache configuration has changed.

Yes, the NEWS entries did warn me, if I read them fully. Yes, I didn t read them enough. Apache now ignores configuration files that don t end in .conf To give a completely non-theoretical example, if you have your virtual hosts in files such as /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/enc.com.au then this will not be recognised and your sites will show the default It works page. Stuff that doesn t fall in the usual places where website stuff should go, which for my setup is a lot of things, will also be denied as the developers have tightened up the rules around what is permitted. Pretty simple to fix with a few <Directory blah> clauses. This isn t a criticism of the Debian apache developers. They do an awesome job of keeping the package workable, flexible but secure which isn t easy. Now it s all back working, I actually agree with the changes they have made. It is just that the latest changes are, well, tricky so be forewarned.

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