Julio Merino

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

  • Variable names in Makefiles

    I've found many hand-made Makefiles that are very hard to read and modify; the reason: they use strange variable names to handle the compilation and linking of programs. In case you don't know, there is a de facto standard in Makefile variable names when it comes to calling to the compiler. Here they are: CC: Path to the C compiler. Sometimes set to cc or gcc. Never hardcode this to an absolute path, unless the value is being filled by the configure script.

    December 4, 2004 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Cederrón

    Did you know that cederrón is a correct word in Spanish, i.e., accepted by the RAE? Oh God, I couldn't believe it the first time I noticed this. Why? Just consider that cederrón comes from an incorrect pronunciation of the CD-ROM acronym. I might like it if it was written with an "m", but not with an "n". Do you imagine ceedeerron being an English word? How ugly. I'm also worried about the word encriptar, which does not exist in Spanish, but is used to refer to the English encrypt term.

    December 2, 2004 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • Buildtool status

    Hmm, Buildtool... one of my pet projects, probably the one on which I've spent the most time working... and it was even starting to get some (few) popularity lately But I must admit it. The code is, in its actual form, dead :-( It's unmanageable (shell scripting doesn't scale, you know) and breaks in many, many places. Just consider the following facts: Detection of C++ features from bt_config fails in many cases.

    December 1, 2004 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • Impressions on Monotone

    I'm amazed after having played with Monotone during the whole evening. Simply put, it is a distributed version control system, similar to CVS in the sense that it keeps track of changes across files and lets multiple people work at the same time with them. But, unlike CVS, it has many other cool features. The front page of its website contains a nice paragraph summarizing all available features, so I'm not repeating them here.

    November 28, 2004 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • QT Parted experiences

    A few days ago I gave QT Parted a try (from a Knoppix 3.6 disk): I shrinked my NTFS partition to leave more room for other OSes (not that space is a problem here, but I wanted to try it). The program is awesome: very easy to use (looks a lot like Partition Magic) and it did the job quickly and correctly. However, yesterday's evening I tried the same but with a ReiserFS partition.

    November 27, 2004 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Differences between a hub and a switch

    A friend of mine asked me yesterday which are the differences between a hub and a switch. After giving her a quick explanation, I realized that I'd write something better and leave it here for anyone else interested. However, a detailed explanation could need a lot of background theory, so these are just the basic ideas that differentiate these network devices. First of all: Ethernet's logical topology is a bus: a single cable carries all data in all directions, which reach all equipments connected to it.

    November 25, 2004 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Linux's UFS support

    The last time I tried Linux's UFS support was around the first 2.4 releases, and IIRC, it trashed my file-systems even in read only mode (sounds strange, I know, but this is what I remember). Today I decided try again to verify if the situation is better now. The first step has been to install NetBSD on another disk, using UFSv2, to have a test partition with a bunch of files.

    November 20, 2004 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

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