Alejandro Pulver
This page contains some information about myself.
Information
- Age: 19
- Studies: coursing second year of Computer Science at local university
Birthday: December 23rd, 1989 (see committers calendar)
Location: Buenos Aires, Argentina (see xearth committers markers)
Contact
Email: <alepulver AT SPAMFREE FreeBSD DOT org> or <alepulver AT SPAMFREE gmail DOT com> (checked almost every day)
- PGP key
ID: 945C3F61
Server: hkp://pgp.mit.edu
Fingerprint: 085F E8A2 4896 4B19 42A4 4179 895D 3912 945C 3F61
MSN: <alejandro AT SPAMFREE varnet DOT biz> (currently not in use)
- ICQ: 499432891 (currently not in use)
XMPP: <alepulver AT SPAMFREE amessage DOT de> (currently not in use)
Computers
Activities
- FreeBSD user since beginning of 2005 (almost no previous UNIX experience)
Porting/using enhanced versions of IdSoftware's classics (Doom, Quake, etc) and games based on them
FreeBSD ports maintainer, and committer since April 2006
In 2006 I wrote (and maintain since then) bsd.wx.mk and bsd.lua.mk (with Porters Handbook documentation)
Alien Arena maintainer of FreeBSD support from March 2007 to late 2008
Integrated block aligning code with ublio layer for sysutils/fusefs-ntfs, which increased read/write speed from 2-5MB/s to 20MB/s, and maintain it since then (May 2007)
Participated in Google Summer of Code 2008, with a project for adding a ports licensing framework. See Ideas entry, and Ports/LicenseInfrastructure. At the end of the summer, the framework was in a working state but FOSSology integration wasn't completed because of incompatibilities with FreeBSD, which are being corrected together with the developers.
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 (in C, with pointers and dynamic memory)
- Computer low-level details
- Compression software (not developing, but understanding how to get best results)
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 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 (from fall of 2006 to start of 2008)
- 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
Ports/ToDo (recopilation of all ports system enhancenments)
Ports/Tasks (recopilation of all ports related tasks around, except previous)
Docs
Not started 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?
-- AlejandroPulver 2008-03-08T03:49:30+0000