Julio Merino

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

  • Comments for old posts now moderated

    After waking up today and finding 80+ spam comments all around old posts in this blog, I have decided to set all new comments for posts older than 14 days old to be moderated. Took half an hour to clean them all. Thank you, spammers.

    March 24, 2009 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • What are unnamed namespaces for in C++?

    In the past, I had come by some C++ code that used unnamed namespaces everywhere as the following code shows, and I didn't really know what the meaning of it was:namespace { class something { ... }; } // namespaceUntil now. Not using unnamed namespaces in my own code bit me with name clash errors. How? Take ATF. Some of its files declare classes in .cpp files (not headers). I just copy/pasted some ATF code in another project and linked the libraries produced by each project together.

    March 23, 2009 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Making ATF 'compiler-aware'

    For a long time, ATF has shipped with build-time tests for its own header files to ensure that these files are self-contained and can be included from other sources without having to manually pull in obscure dependencies. However, the way I wrote these tests was a hack since the first day: I use automake to generate a temporary library that builds small source files, each one including one of the public header files.

    March 5, 2009 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Debug messages without using the C++ preprocessor

    If you are a frequent C/C++ programmer, you know how annoying a code plagued of preprocessor conditionals can be: they hide build problems quite often either because of, for example, trivial syntax errors or unused/undefined variables. I was recently given some C++ code to rewrite^Wclean up and one of the things I did not like was a macro called DPRINT alongside with its use of fprintf. Why? First because this is C++, so you should be using iostreams.

    March 2, 2009 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • userconf support for the boot loader

    I have a machine at work, a Dell Optiplex 745, that cannot boot GENERIC NetBSD kernels. There is a problem in one of the uhci/ehci, bge or azalia drivers that causes a lockup at boot time because of a shared interrupt problem. Disabling ehci or azalia from the kernel lets the machine boot. In order to do that, there are two options: either you rebuild your kernel without the offending driver, or you boot into the userconf prompt with -c and, from there, manually disable the driver at each boot.

    January 22, 2009 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • ATF 0.6 released

    I am very happy to announce the availability of the 0.6 release of ATF. I have to apologize for this taking so long because the code has been mostly-ready for a while. However, doing the actual release procedure is painful. Testing the code in many different configurations to make sure it works, preparing the release files, uploading them, announcing the new release on multiple sites... not something I like doing often.

    January 18, 2009 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • pwd_mkdb and the new time_t

    NetBSD-current has recently switched time_t to be a 64-bit type on all platforms to cope with the year-2038 problem. This is causing all sorts of trouble, and a problem I found yesterday was that, after a clean install of NetBSD/amd64, it was impossible to change the data of any user through chfn. The command failed with: chfn: /etc/master.passwd: entry root inconsistent expire chfn: /etc/master.passwd: unchanged Suspiciously, the data presented by chfn showed an expiration date for root set in a seemingly-random day (October 14th, 2021).

    January 15, 2009 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

Subscribe

RSS feed

Subscription by FeedBurner

Featured posts

Archive