Julio Merino

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

  • pkg-config: Mixed state in some libraries

    A reply to my previous pkg-config introductory post outlined a real "problem" with "mixed-state" packages. These packages provide pkg-config metadata files in some situations; i.e., not always. This is a quite common situation in libraries that did not use pkg-config in the past, but have been recently converted to do so. Some examples are OpenSSL or the X libraries (which are being converted to the GNU toolchain by Freedesktop.org). But why is this a problem?

    March 15, 2005 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • TV series: Dark Angel

    I've just finished watching the second (and last) season of Dark Angel, a TV series I discovered around past summer. All I can say is that the whole series are great, but IMVHO, too short. In fact, that's because FOX canceled them just after two seasons; what a pity. These series tell you a science fiction story, set in the not so distant future. The plot is based around a genetically engineered girl, known as Max.

    March 14, 2005 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • pkg-config: A quick introduction

    If you have ever tried to check for the presence of a library from a configuration script, you know this is not an easy task. Getting the right compiler (CFLAGS) and linker (LIBS) flags can be very difficult, if not impossible, without manual help from the user. To detect some libraries, you have to create a little test program and link it against the library you are looking for. If the build is successful, the library is available, and possibly ready to be used.

    March 13, 2005 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • GNOME 2.10.0 released

    The GNOME Project has just released the 2.10.0 version of its Desktop Environment. This is a new major release of the 2.x branch, which is source and binary compatible with all previous versions in the 2.x series. Aside lots of fixes, improved translations and code cleanups, which are typical in minor releases, this one includes several new features and utilities designed to make your desktop experience better than ever. You can see a summary of changes here, and in case you are impatient to see it working, just download and try the live cd.

    March 9, 2005 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • How to get the window size?

    Today, a friend of mine raised the issue of how to get the terminal window size from within a program. He had observed in his system an environment variable, called COLUMNS, which was automatically set to the window's width; that variable even changed when resizing the window. But then we checked on two more systems (SuSE Linux and NetBSD) and we couldn't find the variable anywhere. I don't know where it's coming from in his system, but this is clearly not the way to go.

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

  • pkgsrc: Yesterday's changes

    It has been a while since I've done any "big" changes in pkgsrc, basically because I've been quite busy with VCS Made Easy during the past month. To make things worse, I've got back to university and there is a lot of work to do. But anyway, yesterday I was able to finish two major changes I had going on. The first one was the update of GNOME to 2.8.3, which was released past Wednesday.

    February 27, 2005 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Tabulators vs. spaces

    Code indentation is a very personal thing; people use 2, 4, 8, or any other amount of whitespace to align their constructions. However, few of them pay attention to the usage of spaces or tabulators to accomplish what they want. Some others do, but problems remain. Let's analyze what these are: Many text editors try to be smart and replace groups of eight spaces by a tabulator character. This may seem like a good idea to reduce on-disk space, because the resulting document will usually look the same.

    February 26, 2005 · Continue reading (about 4 minutes) · Comments

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