Julio Merino

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

  • GNOME 2.6.2 released

    The GNOME Project has just released the 2.6.2 version of its desktop environment, probably the last release of the 2.6 stable branch. The official announcement provides more information, including a list of changes since the previous version. Furthermore, I've just updated all the GNOME packages in pkgsrc to their respective versions in this new release. That is, you can easily install GNOME 2.6.2 with the simple cd pkgsrc/meta-pkgs/gnome && make install command.

    June 28, 2004 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • Making an Athlon system consume less power

    This has been posted today to Barrapunto, but as I find it very interesting, I'm repeating it here. The Athlon Powersaving HOWTO describes a way to make your Athlon, Duron or Athlon XP microprocessor consume less power when it's unused, i.e., when the null process of the operating system is executed. This process does nothing; it's just an endless loop, activated when no other process can use the CPU. So why use the entire power of the microprocessor when the null process is running?

    June 27, 2004 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • Watching remote system activity

    gkrellm is a very good program to watch system activity. It provides a small window where monitors are stacked up; these include things like CPU and network monitors, weather reports, sensor control, etc. The window is also themeable, so that you can customize gkrellm's appearence in any way. Just because of this, you have to give it a try! One of the new features in the (somewhat recent) 2.x version is support for remote logging of computers.

    June 27, 2004 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • The art of bug reporting

    Software is not perfect. When using it you'll eventually hit bugs, some of which may be trivial, like a typo, or very annoying (crashes, broken features, etc.). Reporting them is a good way to help developers, and you can do it even if you are not a coder. But you should be careful when reporting a bug. If they are repeated, incomplete, or are not really bug reports, they can annoy developers (and that's not what you want to do ;).

    June 26, 2004 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Connecting two networks

    First of all, a bit of background. My home network is based on the old 10base2 connection. There is a server doing firewalling and NAT (among providing some services). There are also several workstations; mine has two NICs, one integrated in the motherboard, which only supports 10baseT (so I can't use it for my home network), and one plugged in a PCI slot. This network is class C, using 192.168.1.0/24 IPs.

    June 25, 2004 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • Helping pkgsrc (through pkgsrc-wip)

    I suggested you yesterday to contribute to a free software project. I know choosing one can be difficult, so this post is to give you a suggestion: help the pkgsrc project. pkgsrc is The NetBSD Packages Collection. Despite its name, it works on many other operating systems, like Linux, Solaris or MacOS X, to name some. pkgsrc provides a package tree from where you can install any kind of program. It takes care to download the sources, configure and build them and install the results.

    June 24, 2004 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Getting involved in a free software project

    It's now late June and, for many people (not me, yet), summer holidays are here. If you don't know what to do, or want an idea, here is it: join a free software project. You'd ask: "Why?". I'd answer: "Why not?". There are many reasons. To mention some of them: to return something to the free software community; to learn and improve your general (coding) skills; to do something useful (depending on your POV); or simply put, to have fun!

    June 23, 2004 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

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