Julio Merino

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

  • Dying MacBook Pro battery

    I've had my MacBoook Pro for a bit over than 11 months. Not so long ago, I remember that the battery lasted for more than three and a half hours when using the machine very lightly (some web browsing or some e-mail reading, for example), and for a bit over an hour with (very) heavy usage. But recently, I started to notice that its capacity had shortened to alarming levels: it now only lasted for about an hour with the machine idle!

    November 28, 2007 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Hello world in Linux/ppc64

    I'm decided to improve my knowledge on the Cell platform, and the best way to get started seems to be to learn 64-bit PowerPC assembly given that the PPU uses this instruction set. Learning this will open the door to do some more interesting tricks with the architecture's low-level details. There are some excellent articles at IBM developerWorks dealing with this subject, and thanks to the first one in an introductory series to PPC64 I've been able to write the typical hello world program :-)

    November 25, 2007 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Mad at the Cell SDK

    I've been installing the Cell SDK 3.0 on two Fedora 8 systems at home — a PlayStation 3 and an old AMD box — and I cannot understand how someone (IBM and BSC) can publish such an utterly broken piece of crap and be proud of it. Sorry, had to say it. (If you are one of those who wrote the installer, please excuse me, but that's what I really think.

    November 18, 2007 · Continue reading (about 5 minutes) · Comments

  • Fixing id's command line parsing

    Today's work: been fixing NetBSD's id(1)'s command line parsing to match the documented syntax. Let's explain. Yesterday, for some unknown reason, I ended up running id(1) with two different user names as its arguments. Mysteriously, I only got the details for the first user back and no error for the second one. After looking at the manual page and what the GNU implementation did, I realized that the command is only supposed to take a single user or none at all as part of its arguments.

    November 16, 2007 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • ATF imported into NetBSD

    Finally! After more than five months of development (with different intensities of work), I am very pleased to announce that ATF, my Google Summer of Code 2007 project, has been integrated into the NetBSD source tree. For more details see the official announcement in the tech-userlevel@ mailing list.

    November 12, 2007 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • ATF 0.3 released

    I've just published the 0.3 release of ATF. I could have delayed it indefinitely (basically because my time is limited now), so I decided it was time to do it even if it did not include some things I wanted. The important thing here is that this release will most likely be the one to be merged into the NetBSD source tree. If all goes well, this will happen during this week.

    November 11, 2007 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • Games: Resistance: Fall of Man

    Yesterday night I finished playing "Resistance: Fall of Man", a game that came with the PlayStation 3 Starter Pack I bought. It was not as long as I expected but found it to be a very good game. The storytelling, sound and gameplay was nice, but I cannot judge the graphics. I already showed you the crappy monitor used with the PS3... so I'll surely go through the whole game again when I get a nicer screen.

    November 5, 2007 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

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