Julio Merino

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

  • Fragmentation in Unix file systems

    Back in the days when I started to use Unix-like systems (Linux), I learned that their file-systems barely suffer from fragmentation. Nobody ever told me the reason behind that statement, and I never bothered to look for it, since there was no choice in the file-systems area (ext2 at the time under Linux) and there were no defragmentation utilities. Therefore, I assumed it was true... but it's not! (At least not as I understood it.

    June 12, 2005 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • pkgsrc: Documentation about pkginstall

    Two days ago I started touching the FAQ chapter in the pkgsrc's Guide and I literally opened a can of worms. The thing is that I started to rewrite the question about configuration files placement (because most of the answer was just internal details of pkgsrc) and ended up writing a whole new chapter about the pkginstall framework. Hope it's an interesting read for you ;) Now... I'm afraid to touch anything else, as I know what will happen — more heavy rewrites (I like writing).

    June 3, 2005 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • pkgsrc: mplayer switches to the options framework

    My little project these last two days has been to convert the mplayer packages to use the options framework and deprecate the old-style variables to tune its behavior. This is the "new" (has been around for a while already) way to go in pkgsrc, as it's cleaner, more homogeneous and more flexible. During the conversion, I've added a lot more optional features in the package so that users can build a smaller package if wanted.

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

  • Unprivileged pkgsrc builds

    As you already know, pkgsrc can be used to build a large variety of software. What you may not be aware of is that it can be used without super-user privileges; i.e., as a regular user, you can take advantage of pkgsrc to build software in systems you do not own! (Provided that you are allowed to do that, of course.) The "problem" is that it has never been easy to do so (at least not for novice users): you had to override many variables in mk.

    May 29, 2005 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Distributed streaming

    Data streaming, as known today, lets a single machine send real time data to a number of clients. This number is limited due to bandwidth constraints, as it is expensive (specially on the upload channel). The problem that arises is that individuals or little associations can't set up reliable streaming servers, as they won't be able to pay the costs for it (thus only being able to serve a very limited number of clients).

    May 28, 2005 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Styles in word-processors

    When writing a long document in a word-processor... have you ever seen people creating a table of contents by hand? Numbering pages manually? Having to change the font face of their section headers one by one? Poor guys; I often feel annoyed because word processors impose no rules on how to write documents, and people don't care to discover all the marvelous features they provide. Yes, I'm talking about styles.

    May 25, 2005 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Shutting up /etc/security

    For a long time, I've been receiving, almost daily, useless security reports from my NetBSD boxes. With "useless", I mean notifications of changes that I know are perfectly legitimate. That is, all they contained was: ====== /etc/resolv.conf diffs (OLD NEW) ====== --- /var/backups//etc/resolv.conf.current 2005-05-21 [...] +++ /etc/resolv.conf 2005-05-22 [...] @@ -1,3 +1,3 @@ -# Created by dhclient at: Sat May 21 15:08:21 CEST 2005 +# Created by dhclient at: Sun May 22 13:41:19 CEST 2005

    May 22, 2005 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

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