Julio Merino

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

  • Hide a volume in Mac OS X

    Yesterday, we saw how to install Mac OS X over multiple volumes, but there is a minor glitch in doing so: all "extra" volumes will appear as different drives in the Finder, which means additional icons on the desktop and its windows' sidebars. I find these items useless: why should I care about a part of the file system being stored in a different partition? (Note that this has nothing to do with icons for removable media and external drives, a these really are useful.

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

  • Install Mac OS X over multiple volumes

    As you may already know, Mac OS X is a Unix-like system based on BSD and Mach. Among other things, this means that there is a single virtual file system on which you can attach new volumes by means of mount points and the mount(8) utility. One could consider partitioning a disk to place specific system areas in different partitions to prevent the degradation of each file system, but the installer does not let you do this (I suspect the one for Mac OS X Server might have this feature, but this is just a guess).

    January 15, 2007 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • MacBook Pro review

    Since the Intel Macs were published, I had been planning to get one of them; I settled on getting an iMac 20" by next Summer (so that it'd carry Leopard "for free"). But last December I found a great offer on the MacBook Pro 15.4", being the total price similar to what I was planning to buy. Furthemore, going for the MacBook Pro instead of the iMac let me get rid of my iBook G4 and my desktop PC.

    January 14, 2007 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • CVS and fragmentation

    First of all, happy new year to everybody! I've recently got a MacBook Pro and, while this little machine is great overall, the 5400 RPM hard disk is a noticeable performance bottleneck. Many people I've talked to say that the difference from 5400 to 7200 RPM should not be noticeable because:These 2.5-inch drives use perpendicular recording, hence storing data with a higher bit density. This means that, theorically, they can read/write data more quickly achieving speeds similar to 7200 RPM drives.

    January 7, 2007 · Continue reading (about 4 minutes) · Comments

  • Doesn't 'ls f*' do what you expect?

    If you have ever ran ls on a directory whose contents don't fit on screen, you may have tried to list only a part of it by passing a wildcard to the command. For example, if you were only interested in all directory entries starting with an f, you might have tried ls f*. But did that do what you expected? Most likely not if any of those matching entries was a directory.

    December 19, 2006 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • A subject for my undergraduate thesis

    It has finally come the time when I have to choose a subject for my undergraduate thesis on which I'll be working on full time next semester. My first idea was to make a contribution to NetBSD by developing an automated testing framework. I have had interest in this for a long while (I even proposed it as part of this year's SoC), and there is a lot of interest in it within the project too.

    December 15, 2006 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • Software bloat

    A bit more than three years ago, I renewed my main machine and bought an Athlon XP 2600+ with 512MB of RAM and a 80GB hard disk. The speed boost I noticed in games, builds and the overall system usage was incredible — I was coming from a Pentium II 233 with 384MB of RAM. With the change, I was finally able to switch from plain window managers to desktop environments (alternating KDE and GNOME from time to time) and still keep a usable machine.

    December 9, 2006 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

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