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Do not trust too much my self-judgement about proficiency in the languages
table. My '''biggest defect''' is that having time I can't help writing too much.
==About me and computers (long story)==
My first contact with a computer was when I was very young. A ZX Spectrum
entered our house. At the very beginning I only wanted to play. But it
happened that my father started to show me how nice is creating rather than
simply using... So I start learning Spectrum BASIC. A 1985 K&R C manual
(in italian) was on a bookshelf and I got used to browse it in a
sospicious way; I had a Forth interactive interpreter (and no Forth manual),
but nothing to try ''that'' "C"...
I started to take a look at Z80 assembly, but then a new computer entered
our house: a glorious Amiga500. I regressed and tried a lot of games, but
then got tired of them all and a friend gave me KickPascal... The digital
manual was in german and in order to be able to understand it I also
started to study german... But in the meantime I wrote ''my manual'' by
looking at examples and experimenting (all my Pascal knowledge was summarized
in two A4 sheets, for a total of 4 pages). One day an Amiga italian magazine
proposed articles for m68k assembly; and I began to get informations on
Amiga hardware and metal bashing. But soon I discovered how easy and wonderful
and less error prone was using system libraries (from assembly of course).
The old Amiga 500 was equipped with a harddisk; then it was ''upgraded''
to an used Amiga 1200 (with a '030 GVP accelerator card, "big" harddisk...);
there were already PowerUP, Commodore gone away... but that ''old'' hardware
continued to give me a lot. The guy that sold that Amiga 1200 gave us also a
lot of software ''in bundle''. So for the first time I had a C compiler (SAS);
before, I had continued to study it (a lot of programs I wrote were translations
from C or AmigaE to assembly)...
At the university I was able to connect to the misterious
Internet for the first time... and touched "with hands" what I had only heard
about: Aminet. I put some of my ''better'' works together, did something
more and uploaded to Aminet... my first public release. The
''request collection'' was rather successful (according to my standards!)
so uploaded it (again) with added ''request tools'', and the a second
collection was shipped few months (or 1 month) later (in the meantime
someone gave me as gift a 56k modem; I entered the IRC world that way,
and strangely was less interested in the web...)... Aminet says that I uploaded
the second ''req collection'' in the year 2003, so we are at the end
(almost) of the history.
A sister of mine bought a laptop, with MS Windows Xp Home inside. I tried to
use it someway, but there was no reason to do so at home (I used the Amiga
also for university works, gnuplot, LaTeX...):
I decided that Amiga was better the first time I was ''forced'' to use
MS Windows 95 (and then other more recent versions of MS Windows), ... even
though university friends told me about installing GNU/Linux (but the laptop
wasn't mine...). It was the first (ugly) ''PC'' owned by someone near me:
of course it was not the first I used, as I've said previously (I also had
used a Red Hat at the university).
One sad day, Amiga felt ill. Time to think about the future? Sad future
for technologies, I believe so. Anyway... One cold day I get my sister's
laptop, a SuSE Linux 9.3 DVD given to me by a friend, and stolen 3 Gbytes
from the harddisk (they became 4Gbytes month later) of that laptop.
My story with GNU/Linux began.
One day my sister bought another laptop and sold the old one to me. It is
now my "home" machine. Of course I upgraded SuSE to OpenSuSE 10.2, but
since I like to ''play'' too much, the Xorg doesn't start anymore...
in order to try other distros, I've installed Mandriva 2008 (using this
until I succeed in fixing the other, but I think I will remove it instead),
and XUbuntu on another old laptop (Pentium III) a friend gave to me recently,
I use this one only for UAE (before installing XUbuntu I tried FreeBSD and
liked it, but I think I need more machines to do my tests and have all
the stuffs I want!)
In this year (2008) I finally get an ADSL flat connection and let my head
bang against a lot of funny or interesting or silly things (from wikis to
social networking... paradoxically I IRC-chat less than before now!)
Since I installed GNU/Linux, I expanded my languages list a lot,
having the possibility to have tons of interpreters and compilers easily
and fastly.
==Other interests and details==
nothing to do with medicine, alas; homonyms exist!).
I have a ''personal'' (read: almost unuseful) site I created long time
Even though I've never gone too deep into the web before, I created and
ago, it grew, shrank, moved... but basically it is always the same.
maintained a personal site already in the Amiga-only time. Indeed I created
several personal sites, changing free hosting and other details... but from
a content point of view, I label it simply as ''my site''.
Since altogether with six friends we founded an association and bought a
I am interested in ray-tracing (POV Ray ... I prefer to write ''codes''
rather than a visual approach like Blender, and indeed I would like
to attend the POV Ray Contest IRTC, butwhich whenis Iback knewon about itSmalltalk/Seaside, the site
wentbut ''onthe hiatus''!site still has bugs...!) and music composing (MIDI).
Since I knowknew TeX / LaTeX, I've forgot any word processing program. TeX
brought me to the world of digital typesetting and, through
Metafont, to the hard world of font creation. I own the METAFONT Book
very hard...)
All my dreams about my maths and physics attitudestuffs shipwrecked somewhere
in the past, when strange things happened. I have often a lot of time
(somedaymore it could becomeor less), and I spend it
on a computer, mainly reading web and programming and it is how I
landed on this interesting wiki.
==Languages I would like to push more on RC==
* Amiga E
* Fortran (>= 90/95)
* Octave
* Rexx/ARexx '''N'''
* 68k assembly (env.? AmigaOS:D) '''N'''
* R
* Metafont / (''mixing'' Metapost?)
* ((Prolog))
* ((Lua))
* ((Pascal))
* (M4)
* (Postscript)
* (TeX/LaTeX)
* Smalltalk
* Objective-C
==Contact detail(s)==
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