Julio Merino

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

  • A letter to NetBSD

    Dear NetBSD, It is almost five years since we first met and I still remember how much I liked you at that time. Despite your 1.5 release had slow disk performance when compared to the other BSDs, I found in you an operating system that just felt right. You focused on clean and well designed code among many other goals; sincerely, I didn't come to you looking for portability because I never had anything else than i386 machines.

    September 23, 2006 · Continue reading (about 5 minutes) · Comments

  • Trying out DD-WRT

    Past Christmas I bought a Linksys WRT54GSv4 router to improve wireless access to my home network. Of course, I'd have bought an access point, but I also wanted to replace most of my home server/router functionality with this little device so that I could eventually remove the server box. Therefore it had to provide: NAT.Firewalling.Port redirection.A dynamic DHCP server.Ability to configure DHCP static entries (used for servers within the network).

    September 21, 2006 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • GNOME on NetBSD needs YOU!

    A few pkgsrc developers and I have been working hard for years to bring the GNOME Desktop to this packaging system and make it work under NetBSD. We are quite happy with the current results because the packages are updated very frequently and everything works. Well, almost. There are still several missing details that really hurt the end user experience and need fixing. If things continue as have gone until now, we will always be one step (or more!

    September 1, 2006 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • Recent GNOME fixes

    A week has almost passed since someone told me that D-Bus' session daemon was broken in NetBSD. I curse that day! ;-) I've been investigating that problem since then and (very) beleatedly fixing some issues in other GNOME programs during the process. D-Bus' session daemon did not work under NetBSD because it couldn't authenticate incoming connections; that was due to the lack of socket credentials. After some of days of investigation — which included discovering that NetBSD does indeed support socket credentials through LOCAL_CREDS — and multiple attempts to implement them, I finally got D-Bus session daemon to authenticate appropriately.

    August 28, 2006 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • More on LOCAL_CREDS

    One of the problems of learning new stuff based on trial-and-error iterations is that it is very easy to miss important details... but that's the price to pay when there is no decent documentation available for a given feature. We saw yesterday multiple details about LOCAL_CREDS socket credentials and, as you may deduce, I missed some. First of all I assumed that setting the LOCAL_CREDS option only affected the next received message (I didn't mention this explicitly in the post though).

    August 28, 2006 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • LOCAL_CREDS socket credentials

    Socket credentials is a feature that allows a user process to receive the credentials (UID, GID, etc.) of the process at the other end of a communication socket in a safe way. The operating system is in charge of managing this information, sent separately from the data flow, so that the user processes cannot fake it. There are many different implementations of this concept out there as you can imagine.

    August 27, 2006 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • A split function in Haskell

    Splitting a string into parts based on a token delimiter is a very common operation in some problem domains. Languages such as Perl or Java provide a split function in their standard library to execute this algorithm, yet I’m often surprised to see how many languages do not have one. As far as I can tell neither C++ nor Haskell have it so I have coded such a function in the past multiple times in both languages.

    August 24, 2006 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

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