Julio Merino

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

  • A prompt that does not get in the way

    Yesterday, I saw a screenshot of a developer's box. His prompt was composed of two characters only: a colon and a semicolon (:;). This looks wired, doesn't it? Yes, it does, but there is a rationale behind it: using this prompt, you can copy and paste complete lines from a terminal into another one and they will just work. Why? Because those characters are ignored by the shell (the colon returns success and the semicolon starts another command).

    August 31, 2005 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • SoC: Project announced

    Despite I don't like doing premature announcements of my projects, I've been kind of forced to do it for tmpfs. The reason is that SoC's deadline is really close now and people should have a chance to test it. Not to mention that the code won't suffer any serious improvements in the subsequent days, so delaying the announcement is not worth it either. You can read the announcement in my mail to the tech-kern@ mailing list, which also includes a step-by-step guide to test tmpfs.

    August 26, 2005 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • pkgsrc's strengths

    Jeremy C. Reed has collected an excellent list of pkgsrc's strengths. I encourage you to read his post to tech-pkg@ in case you still had doubts about why to use pkgsrc ;-) His mail contains also some bad things about this packaging system, although the list is very short. Followups to this email list some more items on the negative side.

    August 24, 2005 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • Local sockets' permissions

    A few days ago, I was trying gamin under NetBSD which unfortunately didn't work at all. The first problem I encountered was that it complained about the excessive permissions given to newly created local sockets (those stored in the file-system, also known as "Unix sockets" historically). After analyzing the issue, I saw that those files were given 777 permissions, regardless of the user's umask. Strangely, the code was explicitly checking for this mode after creation, so I was probably missing something.

    August 24, 2005 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • SoC: Status report 6

    This past week has not been excessively productive because I spent some time dealing with long overdue pkgsrc tasks (mainly updating GNOME to 2.10.2, the latest stable version) and was away from computer more time than usual. Anyway, I have done a bunch of things, although they are not as visible as the work from other weeks (this is, in part, why I felt less productive). I started by adding support for local sockets, which was easy enough to do but caused panics (specially when switching /tmp to tmpfs and starting an X session).

    August 23, 2005 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • Manual ChangeLogs; a thing of the past?

    If you have ever examined the source distribution of an open source project, you'll probably have noticed a ChangeLog file. This file lists, in good detail, all changes done to the source code in reverse order, giving their description, the name of the affected files and the name of the author who did the change. So far, so good. But I really think that these files, or better said, the way they are written and managed, is flawed.

    August 21, 2005 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • Booting NetBSD with Yaboot

    I have an iBook G3 with Debian GNU/Linux as the primary OS and NetBSD to play with. Yaboot is the boot loader I'm using because it was installed by Debian automatically. For quite some time, I was booting NetBSD manually; that is, entering into OpenFirmware (by pressing Alt, Command, O and F altogether) and typing the "cryptic" command "boot hd:2,ofwboot hd:5/netbsd" into it. The reason is that I couldn't get Yaboot to boot NetBSD successfully despite I followed the instructions given in the manual page.

    August 16, 2005 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

Subscribe

RSS feed

Subscription by FeedBurner

Featured posts

Archive