Julio Merino

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

  • set -e and set -x

    If you write shell scripts, you definitely need to know about two nice features that can be enabled through the set builtin: set -e: Enables checking of all commands. If a command exits with an error and the caller does not check such error, the script aborts immediately. Enabling this will make your scripts more robust. But don’t wait until your script is “complete” to set the flag as an afterthought, because it will be a nightmare to fix the scrip to work with this feature enabled.

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

  • Installing NetBSD/macppc on a Mac Mini G4

    Yesterday, I spent a while installing NetBSD/macppc 5.0.1 on a Mac Mini G4. The process wasn't easy, as it involved the following steps. I'm omitting many details, as they are "common knowledge" to Mac users (or otherwise can be easily found on the net): After booting the installer from the CD image, drop into the shell.Use pdisk to create an Apple_HFS partition for the boot loader and two Apple_UNIX_SVR2 partitions, one for the root file system and another for swap.

    January 11, 2010 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Processing Makefile.am with M4

    ATF's Makefile.am, which is a single Makefile for the whole tree, was already at the 1300 lines mark and growing. At this size, it is unmanageable, and a quick look at its contents reveals tons of repeated delicate code. Why so much repeated code, you ask, if the whole point of Automake is to simplify Makefiles? Automake does in fact simplify Makefile code when you define targets known by Automake, such as binaries and/or libraries.

    October 25, 2009 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Extending sudo credentials

    If you use sudo for, e.g. pkgsrc's just-in-time su, you may have often bitten by the problem that some compilations are slow and the build process stops right in the middle to ask you for a root password. If you go away while the system compiles, you'll be frustrated when you come back, as the process may still well be at the very beginning. This happens because, unless disabled by the system administrator, your sudo credentials last for 5 minutes.

    September 23, 2009 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • Best config setting ever

    echo 'set editing-mode vi' ~/.inputrcThis will enable vi-editing mode for all commands that use the GNU readline library (e.g. bash, python, bc, etc.), not only the shell. For the shell only (including non-bash shells), add 'set -o vi' to your shrc file. I don't know why I didn't do this before given that I'm a pretty hard vi user. Still, for some reason, I kept using emacs-like key bindings for command-line editing.

    August 31, 2009 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • 1000 revisions for ATF

    Mmm! Revision 7ca234b9aceabcfe9a8a1340baa07d6fdc9e3d33, committed about an hour ago, marks the 1000th revision in the ATF repository. Thanks for staying with me if you are following the project :)

    August 3, 2009 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • Books by Joel Spolsky

    I just finished reading the third book in a row from Joel Spolsky, titled Joel on Software. Before this one, I read More Joel on Software and The Best Software Writing 1, all in a bit over a month. Note: I hadn't read any book cover-to-cover for a loooong while. Very interesting and entertaining books; highly recommended. Oh, and his writing style is really enjoyable. We, crappy blog writers, can learn a lot from him!

    August 3, 2009 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

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