Julio Merino

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

  • Rewriting parts of ATF in C

    I have spent part of past week and this whole weekend working on a C-only library for ATF test programs. An extremely exhausting task. However, I wanted to do it because there is reluctancy in NetBSD to write test programs in C++, which is understandable, and delaying it more would have made things worse in the future. I found this situation myself some days ago when writing tests for very low level stuff; using C++ there felt clunky, but it was still possible of course.

    February 18, 2008 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • C++: Little teaser about std::set

    This does not build. Can you guess why? Without testing it?std::set< int > numbers; for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) numbers.insert(i); for (std::set< int >::iterator iter = numbers.begin(); iter != numbers.end(); iter++) { int& i = *iter; i++; }Update (23:40): John gave a correct answer in the comments.

    February 8, 2008 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • BenQ RMA adventures, part 2

    My monitor is back from service! It was picked up on January 30th, and it has been returned today just after 6 days (4 work days). Note that the technical service's office was located in Portugal, just at the opposite side of the peninsula. And best of all, the monitor is fixed: firmware updated, so I can now disable the Overscan feature and get a perfect 1:1 pixel mapping on the HDMI input.

    February 5, 2008 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • ATF 0.4 released

    I'm pleased to announce that the fourth release of ATF, 0.4, just saw the light. The NetBSD source tree has also been updated to reflect this new release. For more details please see the announcement.

    February 4, 2008 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • Home-made build farm

    I'm about to publish the 0.4 release of ATF. It has been delayed more than I wanted due to the difficulty in getting time-limited test cases working and due to my laziness in testing the final tarball in multiple operating systems (because I knew I'd have to fight portability problems). But finally, this weekend I have been setting up a rather-automated build farm at home, which is composed so far of 13 systems.

    February 4, 2008 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • unlink(2) can actually remove directories

    I have always thought that unlink(2) was meant to remove files only but, yesterday, SunOS (SXDE 200709) proved my wrong. I was sanity-checking the source tree for the imminent ATF 0.4 release under this platform, which is always scary, and the tests for the atf::fs::remove function were failing — only when run as root. The failure happened in the cleanup phase of the test case, in which ATF attempts to recursively remove the temporary work directory.

    February 3, 2008 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Linux is just an implementation detail

    You can't imagine how happy I was today when I read the interview with KDE 4's developer Sebastian Kuegler. Question 6 asks him:6. Are there any misconceptions about KDE 4 you see regularly and would like to address?And around the middle of the answer, he says:Frankly, I don’t like the whole concept of the “Linux Desktop”. Linux is really just a kernel, and in this case very much a buzzword. Having to mention Linux (which is just a technical implementation detail of a desktop system) suggests that something is wrong.

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

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