Julio Merino

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

  • Teleworking considered bad

    Gah, I forgot to post a message yesterday (hmm... does anybody care?). Anyway, let's talk about what I wanted to look at yesterday. While doing my English homework on Monday, I came across a quite interesting article about teleworking, titled Second Sight, from Guardian Unlimited. If you think that working at home is all advantages, this article will show you the other point of view. Most of the reasons it gives are related to the lack of communication with people.

    July 20, 2004 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • Build your own PRAM battery

    My Mac has never worked properly since I got it, as its internal battery, which keeps PRAM data, was dead. PRAM stores a lot of information (more than you could imagine, if you come from the PC world), so losing its data is very annoying (aside of producing strange system problems). So I decided to fix it today. The first step is to reach the battery; in the Mac model I have, it's just a matter of removing the motherboard through the back tray, and detach the battery from it.

    July 18, 2004 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Playing with NetBSD keymaps

    Having configured my mac68k to boot with NetBSD, I wasn't very surprised to see that it doesn't have an Spanish keymap. So... first task, write one. Yeah, I could get used to the us mapping, but hey, I want to hack the sources ;-) Keymaps are specific to each platform (just think that keyboards are different). Furthermore (and if I'm not too confused), some platforms use kernel keymaps while others use userland ones; if you ask me, the way to go is userland.

    July 17, 2004 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Deprexification

    Have you ever used a Mac? No matter what you answered, there is an interesting concept that makes things a lot easier when it comes to installing and/or deinstalling applications. To install a new application, you just unpack it in the directory you want. To remove it, you just remove the folder. You can even move that folder to other locations and the program will keep running as well as before.

    July 16, 2004 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Got the Mac's ethernet card working

    As I commented a while ago, I got a Macintosh Performa 630. Fortunately for me, it came with a regular Ethernet network card; it kinda worked with the Mac OS that came installed with the machine (7.something). However, since I zapped the disk and installed MacOS 8.1, I haven't been able to get the card working again... until today. I've been pointed out that I could be lacking the drivers. Oh, drivers.

    July 15, 2004 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • My solution for the 'shared directories' problem

    The previous post explained a problem in pkgviews WRT directories used by a program where other packages can install files; the most typical example are directories holding plugins. It also outlined two possible solutions, or better said, workarounds. I'll explain my solution here, which is already implemented but waiting for approval. The idea is to "configure" programs at run time to let them access the view from where they are executed.

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

  • The 'shared directories' problem in pkgviews

    As I explained in a previous post, pkgviews enables the installation of each package in its own depot directory. To accomplish this, the package gets configured with a different prefix (for autoconf users, using --prefix flag) for each package. Now consider a program that uses a directory where other programs can install files. Let's take, for example, XMMS. This package, when installed with pkgviews, will have all of its files under /usr/pkg/packages/xmms-1.

    July 13, 2004 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

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