Julio Merino

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

  • Games: Half-Life 2

    Half-Life 2's Game Of The Year edition was published past Friday. I finally bought it (have been waiting for this since I threw away my illegal copy several months ago); this edition is cheaper than the original game and comes with some goodies. And just a few minutes ago, I completed it :-) (had started with my old saved game, which was almost at the end). All I can say is that the game is really stunning.

    October 6, 2005 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • C++: Templates and the ABI

    In the previous post, we saw why inlined code is dangerous in a public API. Unfortunately, I carelessly put templates in the same bag in an attempt to generalize the idea too much, giving an incorrect impression of how they work. A reader (fellow_traveler) spotted the mistake and here is this new post to clarify what's up with templates and an ABI... if one can relate the two concepts at all.

    October 2, 2005 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • C++: Inlined code and the ABI

    There are many development libraries that provide inline functions (or macros) as part of their public API. This is often done for efficiency reasons, although some times it's done because developers don't know the consequences of doing such things (this last thing is just a guess, but it can perfectly happen). Providing such inlined functions breaks the whole idea of encapsulation and shared libraries. Let's see why. Consider the following simple class:

    October 2, 2005 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • New utility: verifypc

    After five months or so of not touching the code, I've finally cleaned up my verifypc utility and imported it into pkgsrc. Its purpose is to sanity check the dependencies of a given package based on its calls to the pkg-config program. For more information see the announcement in the tech-pkg@ mailing list or this past post in which I detailed the idea.

    October 1, 2005 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • Lose vs. loose

    Some days ago, I misspelled lose as loose in one of my posts. One of the readers pointed me out the error and suggested to look at this comic strip from Queen of Wands (never read it before). I think I'll never make the same mistake again ;-) Oh, and BTW, yesterday's strip is kind of funny too; you ought to read it.

    September 30, 2005 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • Cleaning up a Debian box

    I have to confess that, for a long time, I was a big Debian fan; this changed when I switched to the BSDs, but I still think that it is (one of) the best GNU/Linux distribution. This, and because its excellent hardware support, is why it's the main system on my iBook G3. As a user, it's very common to install lots of packages just to try them, followed by a quick deinstallation when you realize they don't suit your needs.

    September 26, 2005 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • NFS exports lists rototill

    After two weeks of work, the NFS exports lists rototill that I briefly outlined in this past post is finished and committed into NetBSD's source tree. Believe it or not, the whole set of changes was triggered by a XXX mark in mountd(8)'s code (in other words, fixing code marked as such is not always trivial). In the past, when a file system wanted to support NFS, it had to include two fields in a fixed position of its mount arguments structure due to the broken way in which mountd(8) handled the mount(2) calls.

    September 23, 2005 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

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