Julio Merino

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

  • Why learning English is a good idea

    This is an article I have had to write for my English classes as homework. So, instead of throwing it to the trash after it gets reviewed tomorrow by my teacher, I'm posting it here. Nothing specially interesting, but it may change your mind about English ;-) These days it is becoming more and more important to know English. There are multiple reasons to make this statement, which I'll discuss below.

    July 12, 2004 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • An introduction to pkgviews

    pkgviews is a new technology in pkgsrc; in fact it's not that new, but it is getting popular nowadays. What does it provide over the regular pkgsrc? It lets you install every package in an independent directory, called the depot directory. Lets say you install the buildtool-0.16 package; all of its files will end up in /usr/pkg/packages/buildtool-0.16, and nothing will be installed outside that location. Which are the advantages of this approach?

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

  • Need new music? Get Nightwish!

    So, you are bored of always listening to the same music in your collection. Maybe it's time to get some new discs. If that's what you are thinking, give a try to Nightwish, a Finnish band. You won't regret about this choice ;) Their style is often described as gothic metal, although I've also seen them classified as opera metal. Never mind, just listen to them and then make your own conclusions.

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

  • The seahorse project

    Seahorse is a GNOME frontend for the GnuPG utility. This program is quite nice but, unfortunately, it has been unmaintained for a long time. I've just seen in the main page of the program that they are looking for someone to take over the project maintainership. This post is just a call for volunteers. I would like to help that project (it seems a nice way to get more involved in GNOME), but I feel I don't have the time to do it :( And it could be good to have an up-to-date program that can compete with kgpg.

    July 9, 2004 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • Ease the way to plug your earphones

    I was tired of having to manually connect the earphones every night to my computer and disconnect the speakers. So I decided to put a solution: construct a small "switch". All you need are some cheap pieces and some hours to work on it (how many depends on your experience). What I've done is the following: put a switch which alternates between two female jacks (one to connect the speakers and one to connect the headphones).

    July 8, 2004 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • Silencing the computer

    I've decided to try to silence my computer a bit; it made too much noise. So, after reading several articles from 7Volts, as well as other sites, I've done some computer "modding" today, and the noise has decreased, but the overall temperature has increased a bit, *sigh*. Guess I'll have to tune it a bit more. The first step has been to disassemble the box completely. Why? To cut the metal sheet covering the front and rear fans.

    July 7, 2004 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Test Driven Development

    TDD? Test Driven Development? Don't you know this concept? I didn't, until two or three weeks ago. TDD is, simply put, a development technique where test code is written before the code itself, so that the test fails before the funcionality is added and passes later. Furthermore, you'll end up with a complete suite of regression tests, useful to check if a new feature (or bugfix) breaks any other part.

    July 6, 2004 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

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