Julio Merino

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

  • Degree completed

    After five years of intensive work, I've finally completed my degree in Informatics Engineering (I think Computer Science is a valid synonym for that) at the FIB Faculty. This has concluded today after I defended my PFC, the project that concludes the degree. So you can now call me engineer :-) Yay! In other words: I'm free until October, when I'll start a Masters in Computer Architecture, Networks and Systems (CANS).

    July 6, 2007 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • SoC: Short-term planning

    SoC 2007's mid-term evaluation is around the corner. I have to present some code on June 9th. In fact, it'd be already public if we used a decent VCS instead of CVS, but for now I'll keep the sources in a local monotone database. We'll see how they'll be made public later on. Summarizing what has been done so far: I've already got a working prototype of the atf core functionality.

    July 2, 2007 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • New Processor preferences panel in Mac OS X

    Some days ago I updated my system to the latest version of Mac OS X Tiger, 10.4.10. It hasn't been until today that I realized that there is a new cool preferences panel called Processor: It looks like this: As you can see, it gives information about each processor in the machine and also lets you disable any processor you want. There is also another "hidden" window, accessible from the menu bar control after you have enabled it.

    July 1, 2007 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • SoC: The atf-run tool

    One of the key goals of atf is to let the end user — not only the developer — to easily run the tests after their corresponding application is installed. (In our case, application = NetBSD, but remember that atf also aims to be independent from NetBSD.) This also means, among other things, that the user must not need to have any development tool installed (the comp.tgz set) to run the tests, which rules out using make(1).

    June 30, 2007 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • SoC: Prototypes for basename and dirname

    Today, I've attempted to build atf on a NetBSD 4.0_BETA2 system I've been setting up in a spare box I had around, as opposed to the Mac OS X system I'm using for daily development. The build failed due to some well-understood problems, but there was an annoying one with respect to some calls to the standard XPG basename(3) and dirname(3) functions. According to the Mac OS X manual pages for those functions, they are supposed to take a const char * argument.

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

  • SoC: Start of the atf tools

    Aside from the libraries I already mentioned in a past post, atf1 will also provide several tools to run the tests. An interesting part of the problem, though, is that many tests will be written in the POSIX shell language as that will be much easier than writing them in C or C++: the ability to rapidly prototype tests is a fundamental design goal; otherwise nobody could write them! However, providing two interfaces to the same framework (one in POSIX shell and one in C++) means that there could be a lot of code duplication in the two if not done properly.

    June 27, 2007 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • SoC: A quote

    I've already spent a bunch of time working on the packaging (as in what will end up in the .tar.gz distribution files) of atf even though it is still in very preliminary stages of development. This involved: Preparing a clean and nice build framework, which due to the tools I'm using meant writing the configure.ac and Makefile.am files. This involved adding some useful comments and, despite I'm familiar with these tools, re-reading part of the GNU Automake and GNU Autoconf manuals; this last step is something that many, many developers bypass and therefore end up with really messy scripts as if they weren't important.

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

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