Julio Merino

Software artist. Writer aficionado. Open source enthusiast. Runner. Father of two.
Currently: Senior Software Engineer at Google, New York City.

  • VCS Made Easy - Project registered

    Yay! Sourceforge.net has accepted my new project, called VCS Made Easy. This program aims to simplify the management of several directory hierarchies controlled by a version control system (such as CVS or Subversion) up to date. The program reads a configuration file, written in XML, which describes the set of directories to be managed together with some properties associated to them. It then later processes the action requested by the user, which at the moment can only update such trees.

    September 14, 2004 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • One time passwords

    When you are away from home, you may need to access your machine through an SSH (or telnet, if you are still using it) client. The client machine will often be public and not administered by you, so you can't trust it. Who warrants you that it does not contain any key sniffer that can capture your password? In this situation, you can still log in by using a one time password (OTP).

    September 13, 2004 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • The old new thing

    I would like to recommend you a blog that I find very interesting: it's called The old new thing, and is published by Raymond Chen. You know, I'm not a Windows fan... and this blog's main subject is Windows... so why am I recommending it? The articles in this blog explain curiosities about why Windows behaves the way it does in some scenarios, how some features are implemented, what is considered when making some decisions, why some things that look strange (in the API, for example) are done that way, etc.

    September 12, 2004 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • Added RSS feed

    As I already said in previous posts, LiveJournal provides a quite good service. However, free accounts do not have the RSS service, which is a pity. Having a sindication method is a very important thing to make a blog popular among people. So... I have implemented it externally: a small Perl script fetches the main page, parses its contents and extracts the recent entries. When it has gathered all the information, it generates the RSS file and stores it in a friend's server - nopcode.

    September 11, 2004 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Why pkgsrc uses static file lists

    In the pkgsrc package system, each package comes with a PLIST file which describes the files and directories that belong to it. Its contents are used at deinstallation time to cleanly remove the package from the system, among other tasks. Now you may be scared because this looks like a real maintenance nightmare (it used to be, though). Almost all other packaging systems do not have such static lists; instead, they are automatically generated at installation time (only when installing from the sources) and stored inside the binary package.

    September 11, 2004 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • About the Finder...

    Today I've been reading a very interesting article which talks about the advantages of spatial interfaces. It is titled About the Finder... and can be found here. The paper starts explaining what spatial interfaces are, how they mimic reality and why they are good in usability terms. To provide implementation examples, it focuses on Mac OS's Finder for the good ideas and Mac OS X's Finder for the bad ideas because, in the oppinion of the author, the later is worse in terms of spatial behaviour.

    September 10, 2004 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • autogen.sh scripts

    The GNU Build System works by generating scripts that have to be later distributed in your distribution file; these include Makefile.ins and configure, among others. Many projects that use it are managed by a version control system (such as CVS), although they don't keep the generated files under revision control (which is a good thing in many scenarios). When you check out a copy of these sources from the repository, you don't get any of the build scripts you need to build the project on your machine; instead, you have to deal with the task of previously creating them.

    September 10, 2004 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

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