As seen in the title, my name is Julio M. Merino Vidal; to those who don't know how to split it, Julio M. is the first name and Merino Vidal (all together) is the last name. I'm from and live in Barcelona, Spain, and I'm currently studying computer science at the FIB faculty (UPC university). The purpose of this page is primarily to keep a list of things I've done in the free software world, especially for NetBSD. It also contains some biographical information for the curious ones. I try to regularly post some random news, little programming related articles, and personal opinions in my journal. I'm also open to suggestions for future posts. Visit The Julipedia! My first contact with Unix-like operating systems was around the end of 1997. At that time I was looking for an alternative to OS/2 Warp 3, a system whose death seemed imminent (of course Windows was there, but it was quite unstable by those dates and I've never been a fan of it anyway). I had heard about Linux (being free was a big plus), so as soon as I got a CD with a distribution on it, I proceeded to install it. It took a long time until I became confident with the system. Since 1997 I've used many different distributions, although the one I like most is Debian GNU/Linux. Around mid-2000, I had to add a firewall and router box to my home network. Due to several suggestions from other people, as well as all the hype about security it has, I decided to give OpenBSD 2.8 a try. Coming from a Linux-only background, it wasn't a nice experience and it left me a really bad impression about the system, which I extrapolated to the other BSDs. A few months later, I switched that box to Debian, having been quite frustrated by the experience. (To OpenBSD users: I'm not saying that the system is bad in itself, just that it seemed bad to me at that time. But frankly, I don't like it at the moment either.) At the beginning of 2001, I wanted to give the BSD systems another try, but this time I installed FreeBSD 4.2 on my workstation (which was recommended to me by some other people, too). Fortunately, that completely changed my view about these OSes: everything is clearly organized, homogenized and it seemed easier to manage overall. Eventually, and thanks to the fine documentation available, I got rid of Linux. Several months later, at the end of 2001, I finally tried NetBSD 1.5. That was certainly love at first sight: the system seemed minimalist, the documentation was excellent, the focus on code cleanliness was exciting and pkgsrc looked more powerful than FreeBSD's ports (despite its lack of packages at that time). Sure, the transition from FreeBSD was somewhat tough, but it was worth it. Since then, NetBSD has been my operating system of choice: I use it whenever I can, and, despite the fact that I try new versions of the previously mentioned systems from time to time, I don't want (nor see any compelling reason) to go back. To summarize: after all these years, I believe that I have achieved a good level of UNIX knowledge in many areas, be it as a user, as an administrator, or as a developer. Obviously, I still have many things to learn, but this is something I don't mind doing. My first contact with free software was when I first started using Unix-like operating systems (do you remember FIPS?). Since then, my interest for it has kept growing, and now I try to avoid proprietary software whenever I can. Free software has given me much more than just programs: I have learned a lot of programming and debugging techniques thanks to it. Personal projects: Buildtool: A build infrastructure, including support for easily creating configuration scripts as well as build scripts (similar to Makefiles). Unfortunately, it's mostly dead, although I'm willing to continue it some day with a renewed code base. 3-clause BSD licensed. VCS Made Easy: Updates a list of directories using a VCS tool, based on an XML configuration file. E.g., it is useful to easily update /usr/src, /usr/pkgsrc, /usr/xsrc, et al. from the &man.cron.8; daemon. 3-clause BSD licensed. Vigipac: A three-dimensional, multiplayer Pacman clone. Born as an assignment at university, although it's quite dead too. A mixture of 3-clause BSD and GPL licenses. XML Catalog Manager: Small utility to automatically add, remove or modify entries from SGML and XML catalogs. Used extensively in pkgsrc. 3-clause BSD licensed. Projects I like to contribute to: Boost: After having used Boost for a project, I feel it's a good library — actually, a collection of them — and would like to contribute to it some day. See my thoughts about a possible future Boost.Process component. GNOME: I use this desktop environment on my workstation (I've become addicted to its "usability") and regularly contribute to it with bug reports and fixes. Furthermore, I'm the main maintainer of the GNOME 2.x packages in pkgsrc, which warranted me a place in the GNOME Foundation. Monotone: My version control system of choice. I have contributed to it with several portability fixes and some minor improvements, and still do so whenever I can. NetBSD: I started contributing to NetBSD because its packages collection, pkgsrc, lacked many applications I needed. Soon after, I embarked in a quite ambitious project: get GNOME 2.x working under this OS while creating packages for all of its components. This caused me to contribute significantly to pkgsrc, and still keeps me busy. I also created the &man.wsmoused.8; daemon — which adds mouse copy & paste support to the console —, did multiple miscellaneous fixes all around and started the Spanish translation of the website. Several months later I was offered an official developer account, which became active on November 22nd, 2002. A while after, in summer 2005, I took part in Google's Summer of Code program. My task was to develop an efficient memory-based file system for NetBSD, named tmpfs. It was integrated soon after into NetBSD's official code base. And generally, I like to contribute with fixes to any project in which I find trivial bugs (or sometimes not so trivial but highly annoying). Yeah, bug hunting is fun. The following is a list of articles I feel confident about that I've written and published: Making NetBSD Multiboot-compatible. March 1st, 2007. Smart pointers in C++. May 5th, 2006. NetBSD-SoC: Efficient memory file system. March, 2006. Written by William Studenmund and me. Lightweight web serving with thttpd. October 13th, 2005. Making package-friendly software, part 1 and part 2. March 31st, 2005 and April 28th, 2005 respectively.