Julio Merino

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

  • Some pictures of my rig

    I've just decided to learn how to publish images in Blogger. And in fact, it's damn easy, but for some reason I thought it was not — that is, I believed I had to register myself in some other service and was lazy to do it... Here come some pictures of my rig: The picture above shows my desktop. You can see the iBook G4 working in clamshell mode (well, sort of).

    January 17, 2006 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Routing protocols

    IP networks communicate with each other using L3 devices named routers. A router has a table that tells itself how to reach a given network; i.e., if it has to communicate with another router or if it is directly attached to it. Obviously, these tables need to be filled with accurate information, a thing that can be done in two ways:Static routing: The network administrator manually fills in the required data in each router and/or host.

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

  • Taking backups of your data

    I've been playing with Apple's Backup utility (in trial mode) for a couple of days and it seems to be ideal for people like me: those who know that backups must be done but who never spend the time to do them. After opening it you get a dialog that lets you configure a backup plan. A plan specifies the list of the items to back up, the backing up interval and the destination for the copy (be it a remote server, your iDisk, a local volume or a CD/DVD).

    January 14, 2006 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Apple unleashes Intel-based systems

    You probably know it by now: Apple unleashed its first Intel-based computers yesterday during Steve Jobs' keynote. The PowerBook has been replaced by a completely new model, named MacBook Pro. It features a Yonah dual core processor plus a lot of other hardware updates and additions (some removals, too!); it won't be ready until February, but can be already ordered. As regards desktop machines, the iMac has been updated; contrary to the laptop, this machine has suffered "

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

  • Applications vs. windows

    One of the things that I've come to love about Mac OS X is the way it handles the active applications. Let's first see what other systems do in order to talk about the advantages of this approach. All other desktop environments — strictly speaking, the ones I've used, which include GNOME, KDE and Windows — seem to treat a single window as the most basic object. For example: the task manager shows all visible windows; the key bindings switch between individual windows; the menu bar belongs to a single window and an application can have multiple menu bars; etc.

    January 6, 2006 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • Updating the pkgsrc GNOME packages

    A while ago, somebody called John asked me to explain the process I follow when I update the GNOME packages in pkgsrc. As I'll be doing this again in a few days (to bring 2.12.2 into the tree), this seems a good moment for the essay. Here I go: The first thing I do is to fetch the whole distribution from the FTP site; i.e., the platform and desktop directories located under the latest stable version.

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

  • File previews in Nautilus

    Yesterday's evening, I was organizing some of my pictures when I noticed that Nautilus wasn't generating previews for any of them. This annoyed me so much that I decided to track down the issue, which I've done today. The first thing I did was to attach a gdb session to the currently running Nautilus process, adding some breakpoints to the functions that seemed to generate preview images; I located them using grep(1) and some obvious keywords.

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

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