alejandropulver

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Alejandro Pulver

This page contains some information about myself.

Information

Contact

Computers

Activities

Interests

  • UNIX fan (command line, automating repetitive tasks with scripts, programming, etc)
  • Playing some computer games (FPS, racing and action)
  • Programming, algorithms, data structures, etc
  • Computer low-level details

How did I start

I started with computers when I was about 5, playing Wolfenstein 3D (I even remember the MS-DOS commands I used to start it: cd wolf3d; carga.bat). Then I continued with Doom, and that's how I started learning english (and with technical manuals, movies and music I learnt more english than at school).

About 2003 my father recommended me to start programming with Pascal (however he is not a programmer), I was using Windows 2000 with the Dev-Pascal IDE (uses FreePascal compiler). I learned the basic concepts from various tutorials in the internet (mainly Roby's Pascal Tutorial), but didn't reach pointers until starting with C, using the Dev-Cpp IDE (uses MinGW GCC). Then I learned basic data structures (lists, queues, stacks, binary trees, etc).

The next year I heard UNIX like systems were an excellent platform for development, and started with some Linux distributions. (Un)fortunately I had bad luck with them (was disappointed by the lack of central documentation, and didn't find a distribution of my liking). So my father recommended me FreeBSD as it was used in PairNetworks, where he hosts his website, and had a reputation of being serious and well documented.

So I installed FreeBSD 4.9 (at the end of 2004), and printed the Handbook. Then I updated it (by complete reinstall) when 5.3 came out, and started with ports, mainly games. In April 2006 I became a committer mentored by garga@, and continued working on other ports related areas.

Some past works

  • In October 2005 participated on a beginnier programming contest organized by the ITBA (Buenos Aires Technological Institute), which didn't publish the 3 winner programs (either in source or binary forms), breaking their own contest rules and ignoring most of my e-mails (they removed that item from the rules the next following year). But it was useful since I researched and learned redblack trees and hash tables (the final version used the latter, and placed 10th).
  • From December 2005 to August 2006 made some coding for QuDos (a Quake II engine modification with enhancenments): virtual filesystem functions, clean up, and a mini Ogg Vorbis player inside with playlists, commands, looping and shuffling. See the ogg_readme.txt in [http://www.freshports.org/games/qudos games/qudos].
  • In October 2006 participated in a Microsoft Gaming.NET contest about artificial intelligence (didn't win, but placed about 14th and learnt C# and some about .NET).

Other subjects

Activities

  • Swimming (since 1999)
  • Box training (since fall of 2006)
  • Used to play the piano (from 2000 to end of 2005)

Interests

  • Music
  • Movies
  • Cars
  • Photography
  • Psychology
  • Dogs
  • Books (novels, story recopilations, etc)

Projects

Ports

Docs

Currently these are ideas and I'm not working on them yet.

  • Building a custom desktop (about exchanging different desktop components, tiling WM, random backgrounds, display managers, desktop icons, etc). As an article or part of Handbook.
  • Add section about DocBook WYSIWYG editors to the Documentation Project Primer guide.
  • Maybe migrating to DocBook XML 4.5/5.x and XSL stylesheets?
  • Better ports documentation (both for users, with updating information, and developers).
  • alejandropulver.1204202631.txt.gz
  • Last modified: 2008/02/28 12:43
  • by AlejandroPulver