Julio Merino

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

  • Serial console cable for an old Mac

    I'm currently working on the NetBSD/mac68k kernel to migrate it from the old rcons framebuffer driver to a more modern one that supports colors, virtual terminals, custom fonts and all other assorted goodies that come with wscons. Unfortunately, I've found a very mysterious system hang-up with my code that I cannot easily debug from the machine itself because the console does not work at all. Hence, I needed to have a serial console for this machine, a Performa 630.

    September 5, 2007 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • New camera (and current desktop)

    After some time complaining about the slowness, the size and the non-working zoom of my old camera, a Kodak Easyshare DX4530 that my father gave me when replacing it, I am now a proud owner of a Canon PowerShot A570 IS. This is my first "decent" digital camera, and I'm looking forward to learning the basics of photography with it. This camera is bigger than what I planned — it is not much smaller than the Kodak —, but, on the other hand, it offers lots of features worth having.

    September 3, 2007 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Weird laptop keyboard

    My aunt asked me if I'd do a full reinstall of the software in her laptop, a Compaq Presario 1200, because it was not working properly. This was horrible to do due to the speed of the machine, which feels incredibly slow nowadays. Plus there was a problem with the keyboard: it had never worked properly as in "some keys were not mapped to the right place". The keyboard looks like this:

    September 1, 2007 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Random MacBook Pro notes

    Some things I have had in my mind for a while but for which I'm lazy to post full-blown posts: Updated the internal Hitachi 160GB 5400RPM drive to a Seagate Momentus 7200.2. There is a lot of people who say that the difference between 5400RPM and 7200RPM is negligible in laptop disks. Screw that. For daily tasks (browse the network, read your mail, etc.) it may not be too noticeable, but for disk intensive operations it really is.

    August 26, 2007 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • SoC: Second preview of NetBSD with ATF

    Reposting from the original ATF news entry: I have just updated the first preview of NetBSD-current release builds with ATF merged in to match the ATF 0.1 release published today. As already stated in the old news item: These will ease testing to the casual user who is interested in this project because he will not need to mess with patches to the NetBSD source tree nor rebuild a full release, which is a delicate and slow process.

    August 20, 2007 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • SoC: Some statistics

    Here go some statistics about what has been done during the SoC 2007 program as regards ATF: The repository weights at 293 revisions, 1,174 certificates (typically 4 per revision, but some revisions have more) and 221 files. This includes ATF, the patches to merge it into the NetBSD build tree and the website sources. (mtn db info will give you some more interesting details.) The clean sources of ATF 0.1 (not counting the files generated by the GNU autotools) take 948Kb and are 20,607 lines long (wow!

    August 20, 2007 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • SoC: ATF 0.1 released

    To conclude the development of ATF as part of SoC, I've released a 0.1 version coinciding with the coding deadline (later today). This clearly draws a line between what has been done during the SoC program and what will be done afterwards. See the official announcement for more details! I hope you enjoy it as much as I did working on it.

    August 20, 2007 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

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