Julio Merino

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

  • Back to Stone Age

    For a rather long while I had been able to avoid the use of the Subversion services offered by my research group even if they were omnipresent. But today, this lucky trend vanished. I have been "forced" to use one of these devilish repositories to add some of my stuff. Using this goes against my "principles", as a colleague said. If you don't know it, Subversion is a centralized version control system.

    April 12, 2008 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • NetBSD talk at Isla Cristina

    Yesterday night, I got back from the "I Jornadas Tecnológicas Isla Cristina", a small technological conference organized at Isla Cristina, a little town in Huelva, Spain. The main organizers were the teachers of a local technical school (the IES Padre José Miravent), and they invited me to give a talk about NetBSD development. I will publish the slides soon, but I have to warn you that you will not like the source format, aka PowerPoint.

    April 5, 2008 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • New Apple keyboard

    I recently went from this: To this: The reason for the change was that the old keyboard was not comfortable any more after around two years of usage. I think that the old keyboard model (in general, not the specific one I had) developed problems after some months of intensive use: its keys lost the smooth pressure feeling they once had. (Maybe adding some kind of oil beneath them might fix this problem, though, as the keys can be easily detached from the keyboard.

    March 30, 2008 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • Problems booting Debian on the PS3

    I had been running Fedora 8 for a long while on my PlayStation 3, but I got sick every time I had to run a yum update: that process was very slow. Furthermore, I prefer Debian as a Linux distribution due to its administration utilities and strong policies, so I thought to give it a second chance on my PS3. Second? Yes, I already installed it a while ago, but given that the Cell SDK is only packaged for Fedora made me switch.

    March 22, 2008 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Google Summer of Code 2008 and NetBSD

    Google has launched the Summer of Code program once again this year, and NetBSD is a mentoring organization for the fourth time as announced in a netbsd-announce post. Unless things go very wrong in the following days, I will not take part this year as a student because I will be intering at Google SRE during the Summer! However, I will try to become a mentor for the "Convert all remaining regression tests to ATF"

    March 19, 2008 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Software bloat, 2

    A long while ago — just before buying the MacBook Pro — I already complained about software bloat. A year and two months later, it is time to complain again. I am thinking on renewing my MacBook Pro assuming I can sell this one for a good price. The reasons for this are to get slightly better hardware (more disk, better GPU and maybe 4GB of RAM) and software updates. The problem is: if I am able to find a buyer, I will be left without a computer for some days, and that's not a good scenario.

    February 28, 2008 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • ATF's error handling in C

    One of the things I miss a lot when writing the C-only code bits of ATF is an easy way to raise and handle errors. In C++, the normal control flow of the execution is not disturbed by error handling because any part of the code is free to notify error conditions by means of exceptions. Unfortunately, C has no such mechanism, so errors must be handled explicitly. At the very beginning I just made functions return integers indicating error codes and reusing the standard error codes of the C library.

    February 24, 2008 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

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