Julio Merino

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

  • Mailing lists for commit notifications

    The project I'm currently working on at university uses Subversion as its version control system. Unfortunately, the project itself has no mailing list to receive notifications on every commit, and the managers refuse to set this up. They do not see the value of such a list and they are scared of it because they probably assume that everyone ought to be subscribed to it. Having worked on projects that have a commit notification mailing list available, I strongly advise to have such a list anytime you have more than one developer working on a project[1].

    May 13, 2009 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • DEBUG.EXE dropped in Windows 7

    Wow. DEBUG.EXE is being finally phased out in Windows 7. I can't believe it was still there. This brings me back two different memories. I had used this program in the past (a long while ago!) and it caused me both pain and joy. Regarding pain: I had an MS-DOS 5.x book that spent a whole section on DEBUG.EXE, and one of the examples in it contained a command that caused the program in memory to be written to some specific sectors of the floppy disk.

    May 8, 2009 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Using C++ templates to optimize code

    As part of the project I'm currently involved in at university, I started (re)writing a Pin tool to gather run-time traces of applications parallelized with OpenMP. This tool has to support two modes: one to generate a single trace for the whole application and one to generate one trace per parallel region of the application. In the initial versions of my rewrite, I followed the idea of the previous version of the tool: have a -split flag in the frontend that enables or disables the behavior described above.

    May 7, 2009 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • Numeric limits in C++

    By pure chance when trying to understand a build error of some C++ code I'm working on, I came across the correct C++ way of checking for numeric limits. Here is how. In C, when you need to check for the limits of native numeric types, such as int or unsigned long, you include the limits.h header file and then use the INT_MIN/INT_MAX and ULONG_MAX macros respectively. In the C++ world, there is a corresponding climits header file to get the definition of these macros, so I always thought this was the way to follow.

    May 4, 2009 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • The NetBSD Blog

    The NetBSD Project recently launched a new official blog for NetBSD. From here, I'd like to invite you to visit it and subscribe to it. It's only with your support (through reading and, specially, commenting) that developers will post more entries! Enjoy :-)

    May 4, 2009 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • NetBSD-SoC needs your application!

    The Google Summer of Code 2009 application deadline for students is tomorrow and NetBSD has got very few applications so far. If you have the interest in working on a cool operating system project, where almost any project idea can fit, take the time to read our proposals and apply! New, original ideas not listed there will also be considered. It'd be a pity if the number of assigned slots to NetBSD was small due to the low number of applications!

    April 2, 2009 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • Returning to Google

    I've been holding back this announcement until all affected parties knew in advance. They do know now, so I'm happy to announce that I'll be joining Google Dublin on May 25th as a Google.com Software Engineer! Thanks to everyone who made that possible.

    April 1, 2009 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

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