Julio Merino

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

  • GNOME 2.14.3 hits pkgsrc

    Last night I finished updating the GNOME meta packages in pkgsrc to the latest stable version, 2.14.3. Yes, I had to take a break from Boost.Process coding (which is progressing nicely by the way; check the docs). The meta packages had been stalled at 2.14.0 since the big update back in April which shows how few time I've had to do any pkgsrc work — well, you can also blame the iBook with its Mac OS X, if you want to ;-) Luckily the packages are now up to date, but I hope they'll not get stalled at this version for too long: 2.

    August 7, 2006 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • X11 and the Win keys

    For quite some time I've been having issues with the Windows keys in my Spanish keyboard under X11. I like to use these as an extra modifier (Mod4) instead of a regular key (Super_L), because it is very handy when defining keybindings. The X11 default seems to treat them as Super_L only. For example, trying to attach Win+N as a keybinding to one of the actions in the GNOME Keyboard Shortcuts panel resulted in the Super_L combination instead of Mod4+L, hence not working at all.

    August 6, 2006 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • SoC: Playing with Doxygen

    My Boost.Process prototype is almost feature complete; the major thing that is still not included is the ability to create pipelines. I should address that as soon as possible because I'm afraid it will have some impact on the existing classes, but for now I wanted to start documenting some code. There are already 21 header files to document and doing so is by no means an easy task. In order to document the library's API I've decided to use Doxygen, a documentation system for multiple languages including, obviously, C++.

    July 26, 2006 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • SoC: Status report 2

    Another week has passed and I'm happy to announce that the Boost.Process prototype is now completely ported to the Win32 API. In other words, a program can use the current library to transparently manage child processes both from Windows and Unix systems. There are still several rough edges and incomplete classes but the code passes the test suite on both systems :-) OK, you know that passing a test suite does not mean that the code is correct; it only means that it complies with the existing tests.

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

  • SoC: Status report

    Mmm... SoC. Multiple things have been going on lately in my SoC project, yet I've kept you uninformed. As I already told you, my project aims to develop a C++ library for the Boost project to manage child processes; it's named Boost.Process. During June I discussed with Jeff Garland — my mentor — the general design of the library. The design is surely not final but it is a lot better than it was at its first sketches.

    July 13, 2006 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Fixing suspension problems

    Once upon a time I could put my desktop machine to sleep either from Windows XP or Linux. When I replaced both with Vista Beta 2, I tried to suspend the machine and saw it fail miserably; I quickly (and incorrectly!) blamed the OS and forgot about the issue. But a couple of days ago I installed Ubuntu 6.06 on the same machine and it exposed the same problems: after asking the OS to suspend the machine, everything could power down as expected but in less than a second of suspension it could resume operation.

    July 9, 2006 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Disabling bitmapped fonts

    A week ago or so I reinstalled NetBSD — 3.0_STABLE, not current — on my machine, finally replacing the previous unstable and out-of-control system. I had to do it to get some work done more easily than on Windows and to be able to keep up with my developer duties. After a successful and painless installation, I built and installed Firefox and Windowmaker, both of which come handy from time to time (specially while rebuilding the entire GNOME Desktop).

    June 25, 2006 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

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