Julio Merino

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

  • Interview on NetBSD 4

    I'm happy to have been part of the "Waving the flag: NetBSD developers speak about version 4.0" interview. Enjoy!

    January 31, 2008 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • BenQ RMA adventures, part 1

    A couple of weeks ago, I called BenQ's RMA service to ask for a fix for my new FP241W Z. I have problems with the HDMI digital input: the monitor crops part of the image on each side and makes it slightly bigger to fill all the screen. It turns out that there is a firmware upgrade for this specific monitor that adds a configuration option to turn off overscan, which effectively should resolve this problem.

    January 30, 2008 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • A request to virtualization software developers

    Here is a request for a feature I have not yet seen in any virtualization application — used Parallels Desktop 2, VMware Fusion 1.1 and another product I can't speak of yet — that I'd love to have. It'd make things so much easier for me... So here is an open request just in case one of the developers of free alternatives (e.g. VirtualBox) reads it and decides to get ahead of the competence by implementing it.

    January 18, 2008 · Continue reading (about 4 minutes) · Comments

  • Testing the process-tree killing algorithm

    Now that you know the procedure to kill a process tree, I can explain how the automated tests for this feature work. In fact, writing the tests is what was harder due to all the race conditions that popped up and due to my rusty knowledge of tree algorithms. Basically, the testing procedure works like this:Spawn a complete tree of processes based on a configurable degree D and height H.Make each child tell the root process its PID so that the root process can have a list of all its children, be them direct or indirect, for control purposes.

    January 17, 2008 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • How to kill a tree of processes

    Yesterday I mentioned the need for a way to kill a tree of processes in order to effectively implement timeouts for test cases. Let's see how the current algorithm in ATF works: The root process is stopped by sending a SIGSTOP to it so that it cannot spawn any new children while being processed.Get the whole list of active processes and filter them to only get those that are direct children of the root process.

    January 16, 2008 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • Implementing timeouts for test cases

    One of the pending to-do entries for ATF 0.4 is (was, mostly) the ability to define a timeout for a test case after which it is forcibly terminated. The idea behind this feature is to prevent broken tests from stalling the whole test suite run, something that is already needed by the factor(6) tests in NetBSD. Given that I want to release this version past weekend, I decided to work on this instead of delaying it because.

    January 15, 2008 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • Got a BenQ FP241W Z flat panel

    As I already mentioned, I was interested in buying a 24" widescreen monitor for both my laptop and PlayStation 3. I considered many different options but, based on my requirements (1920x1200, 1:1 pixel mapping, dual HDMI/DVI-D inputs), I ended up choosing the BenQ FP241W Z (yeah, did it again). This thing is gorgeous as the following photos will show you. Lots of real screen state to work — the ability to have many different, non-overlapping editors and terminals open at once is very convenient — and great to watch videos.

    January 6, 2008 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

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