Julio Merino

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

  • Kyua: Design of the configuration system

    Over a week ago, I mostly finished the implementation of the runtime engine for test cases of Kyua and, along the way, realized that it is imperative to write a configuration system right now before the configuration code becomes messier than it already is. To that end, I spent the last week working on a design document for the configuration system. Summarizing, the document describes what the requirements for the configuration files of Kyua are, what the possible alternatives to implement them are, and advocates the use of Lua — a tiny embedded programming language — to bring these configuration files to life.

    December 22, 2010 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • Sticky bit trivia

    Did you ever wonder where the "sticky" part of the "sticky bit" name comes from? I actually didn't, but I just came across the Sticky bit page on Wikipedia through a tweet from @AaronToponce and discovered why. If you have used any "recent" (the quotes are important) Unix-like system, you probably know what the sticky bit is used for: to restrict the deletion of files in a directory to, basically, the owner of such files.

    December 21, 2010 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Getting the hang of Twitter searches

    I have had a Twitter account (@jmmv) for several years already but I have never leveraged its power. Why? Well... basically because I have never known how. The Twitterville book by Shel Israel (@shelisrael), which I have been reading lately, has opened my mind quite a bit. Twitter is not so much about posting status updates, but more about sharing content and starting/joining conversations with other people. Today I like to think of Twitter as a world-wide chat-room.

    December 17, 2010 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Introducing Kyua

    Wow. I have just realized that I have not blogged at all about the project that has kept me busy for the past two months! Not good, not good. "What is this project?", I hear. Well, this project is Kyua. A bit of background first: the Automated Testing Framework, or ATF for short, is a project that I started during the Summer of Code of 2007. The major goal of ATF was, and still is, to provide a testing framework for the NetBSD operating system.

    December 16, 2010 · Continue reading (about 4 minutes) · Comments

  • Creating atf-based tests for NetBSD src

    Thanks to Antti Kantee's efforts, atf is seeing increasing visibility in the NetBSD community during the past few months. But one of the major concerns that we keep hearing from our developers is "Where is the documentation?". Certainly I have been doing a pretty bad job at that, and the current in-tree documents are a bit disorganized. To fix the short-term problem, I have written a little tutorial that covers pretty much every aspect that you need to know to write atf tests and, in particular, how to write such tests for the NetBSD source tree.

    September 3, 2010 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • ATF 0.10 released

    Ladies and gentlemen: I have just released ATF 0.10! This release with such a magic number includes lots of new exciting features and provides a much simplified source tree. Dive into the 0.10 release page for details! I'm now working in getting this release into the NetBSD tree to remove some of the custom patches that have been superseded by the official release. Will be there soon. And all this while I am a meetBSD in Kraków :-)

    July 2, 2010 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • Testing NetBSD: Easy Does It

    Antti Kantee has been, for a while, writing unit/integration tests for the puffs and rump systems (for which he is the author) shipped with NetBSD. Recently, he has been working on fixing the NetBSD test suite to report 0 failures in the i386 platform so as to encourage developers to keep it that way while doing changes to the tree. The goal is to require developers to run the tests themselves before submitting code.

    June 24, 2010 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

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