Julio Merino

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

  • GNOME and the dbus daemon

    It is a fact that dbus is becoming popular and that many parts of GNOME are starting to use it. Nowadays, some applications even fail to start if dbus is not present (e.g. epiphany). Unfortunately, things do not work out of the box when installing GNOME from sources — or when using an "uncustomized" OS; see below — because there is nothing in GNOME that launches a dbus-daemon session at startup.

    March 27, 2006 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • GNOME 2.14.0 released

    OK, I know this comes late but I had to publish it. GNOME 2.14.0 was published a few days ago. As happens with all other major releases in the 2.x series, this one comes with several improvements and tons of bug fixes. Note that these are not "very big" changes; they can be seen as minor refinements over the previous version, aiming for a better user experience. You can check this review for more information.

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

  • Bikeshed

    Don't know what a "bikeshedded discussion" is? This FAQ from FreeBSD explains it well enough. I like this sentence in special: "the amount of noise generated by a change is inversely proportional to the complexity of the change". It's a pity it happens too often in (Net)BSD mailing lists.

    March 12, 2006 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • Linux problems: binary redistribution

    thomasvs (who appears in Planet GNOME) is running a post titled How not to solve a problem in his blog. He talks about the aggressive tone used in a page from Autopackage's wiki and how it can cause a bad impression of that project. (I was going to reply to his post in his blog but commenting is unsupported... so posting this here.) That "Linux problems" page talks about many issues that arise when trying to redistribute software in binary form for the Linux platform.

    March 11, 2006 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Fixing xv problems

    As you may already know I bought a BenQ FP202W flat panel two months ago, which made me switch from a rather small resolution (1024x768) to a much bigger one: 1680x1050 at 24bpp running on a NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT with the free nv driver. As I did the switch I lost the ability to play videos in X11 full screen mode because the Xvideo refused to work. As you can imagine, this was extremely annoying.

    March 5, 2006 · Continue reading (about 4 minutes) · Comments

  • VigiPac: dead and reborn

    A bit more than year ago, jvprat (a classmate) and I started to develop VigiPac, a three-dimensional Pacman-clone with multiplayer support. It was registered on Sourceforge.net soon after to make it available to the public. Since then the project had been completely inactive because we had no time to spend on it. So... this weekend, while I was doing some cleanup, I talked to him and decided to "officially" shut the project down.

    February 27, 2006 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Managing passwords and keys

    Once upon a time I used a single password everywhere except on few, few exceptions (my system account or SSH key, for example). After some time I realized that that wasn't very clever because a break-in in any of my online accounts could open them all for attack. Not to mention that this was also problematic due to different sites having different password policies and having different trust levels: you surely do not want to share the same password between your mailing list subscriptions — which very often travels in plain text form — and your GPG passphrase!

    February 22, 2006 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

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