Julio Merino

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

  • pkgsrc: Package-related terminology

    For a long time, I've been noticing a recurrent terminology mistake in some pkgsrc-related mailing lists and bug trackers. The error is that some people use the "pkgsrc" word to refer to single packages inside the pkgsrc tree; e.g., they send a problem report with a summary line saying: "New pkgsrc for foo-1.0". This is incorrect and should read: "New package for foo-1.0", but we will discuss this below. (A confession: I did this mistake when submitting my first packages, too.

    March 31, 2005 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • The TERM variable

    After reading some messages posted during the last few days in a NetBSD mailing list, I realized that several people do not know what is the real purpose of the TERM environment variable. The misinterpretation is the following: they think that TERM is used to specify the terminal type that should be emulated on your terminal. Thus, e.g., if you explicitly set TERM=linux in a NetBSD console, everything should work as in a Linux system.

    March 29, 2005 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • pkg-config: Specifying dependencies

    One of the good things about using pkg-config in a software package is that its configuration script can easily specify external dependencies by their name and their version. It doesn't need to mess with other requirements, such as specific build flags or tricks to determine whether the installed library is new enough to fulfill its needs. In other words: a program can focus on detecting its direct dependencies rather than having to look for other underlying libraries it doesn't care about.

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

  • Books: The Da Vinci Code

    I've just finished reading The Da Vinci Code, which I started this past Tuesday. It didn't take my attention at first, as it seemed just like many other mystery stories, but after around 50 pages, I was hooked. I can't remember any other book which has captivated my interest so much. As you may already know, this is a novel, so the story in it, as well as the characters, are all fiction.

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

  • GNOME 2.10.0 hits pkgsrc

    After more than a week of work, I've finally updated the GNOME packages in pkgsrc to the latest and newest stable version; that is, 2.10.0. You can read more information in the announcement e-mail I sent to the tech-pkg list.

    March 22, 2005 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • XTerm: Anti-aliasing

    One of the things I kept missing in XTerm, compared to Konsole or gnome-terminal, was anti-aliased fonts. But you know what? They are, in fact, supported, as XTerm now — well, I suppose since XFree86 4.0 at least — uses freetype to render text. So, how to do it? Just add the following lines to your ~/.Xresources file, as we did yesterday with the scrolling stuff: XTerm*faceName: Bitstream Vera Sans Mono

    March 22, 2005 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • XTerm: Setting up scrolling

    Back to the days when I used KDE (that was more than a year ago), I got used to the Shift+Up and Shift+Down keybindings in Konsole (I have to say it's a great terminal emulator). These keys combinations scroll up and down, respectively, a single line of text. When I later switched to GNOME, I was quite disappointed to see that these were not supported by gnome-terminal. In fact, this may be false, but I didn't spend too much time looking for it because gnome-terminal is way too slow.

    March 21, 2005 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

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