About me.
Well, probably this page has to be set in case someone has curiosity beyond technicalities. I do not intend to give a kind of biography; instead I consider more interesting for the hunter of old personal stories to read how I came to the SW products I use today.
Since
some friends have stated my face didn't change in the last 10 or 12 years, I
still use for curriculums the only photo I took for that purpose when I was at
the first years in the university... I don't enjoy at all taking photos of
myself.
I went to the university to get a degree in Electronic Engineering, but too soon I discovered I didn't like it really more than for knowing how some devices work and I passed almost all time trying to understand how to program in some machines that now would be part of a museum, probably. I didn't suffer the times of the punch cards... at least keyboards and CRT screens were already in use, :-) although the standard ones were text capable displays and not graphical ones.
Ironically, my only previous experiences with computers were a training on LOGO on some old Apple computers when I was a child and some hours of BASIC the year before going to the university. Since I didn't got enough money to have a computer and the people I knew used them only for playing games in cartridges, I deemed personal computers uninteresting, because I never have liked games.
At the university I had to learn Pascal first. I've always considered string handling a must on languages and the original Pascal was really dumb about strings. I didn't like it. Then I learned on my own to program in REXX, an ancient IBM language that's all about string handling and that still survives as ObjectREXX and NetREXX along with some versions on UNIX and NT like Regina.
First impression is key to SW products, but I discovered Turbo Pascal from Borland and the successive releases were a much more flexible Pascal implementation than the ones I had met previously, so I reconsidered the language.
Two years later I had to learn COBOL. Surprisingly, I liked the language despite its fixed structure that resembles how Internet Explorer is firmly tied to Win98. :-) Almost at the same time I had to learn C. This was a huge improvement. Even though C's string handling often caused program termination due to unchecked bounds, the same freedom gave you more power at the cost of more risk. However, reading input from the console was not easy as in Pascal, but the library of standard string-related functions was very important along with the compactness of the source code. Why should I write three lines if I can express the same on two or perhaps on one? Of course, there's a tradeoff between compactness and readability; the tightest code is not a synonym for good code necessarily.
Next natural step was C++ and I decided to master it. I did some projects with it. I've trained people sporadically in C++ and although I don't develop in it currently (simply because the requirement has not appeared; otherwise I'm willing to use it extensively), I still continue reading new books on the subject. My acquaintance with Borland C++ dates from that experience. If I like two features in C++ that I miss in Delphi, they're templates and multiple inheritance.
I wanted to learn LISP in my own but the show can't stop and there were other duties waiting for my attention at the university, so I had to eat books on systems' theory, basic economics, structured analysis and design, learn Clipper and then relational theory and SQL with practice in Sybase.
At the last year, I didn't want to use the typical tools available to build the obligatory project to pass the last requirement in my studies prior the to graduation's thesis. So I purchased Delphi that I had read was based on an upgrade of the Borland Pascal 7 (that borrowed object extensions from an Apple's operating system) plus an IDE that resembled the one in VB. Despite uncle Bill's advocates saying that Delphi was the last red herring from a dying Borland and Sybase's advocates saying PB was the only serious database tool, I was among the first people to acquire Delphi in my country. I was able to raise some enthusiasm for the tool and it became in use for some students' projects. Local Interbase 4.0C for 16-bit Windows 3.1 was bundled in the package and this was the first time I used a DBMS that ran on this pseudo-operating system and that wasn't a desktop database but a little but complete SQL engine.
Curiosity killed the cat. Fortunately, this time the saying didn't happen and I was able to help finish others a project with CORBA, C++, JavaScript, Oracle and a mixture of UNIX and NT.
Then I decided to continue in my old OO-DBMS researches and worked for two years on ObjectStore's small cousin (PSE Pro C++) plus MSVC++ to come up with my presentation and get my title of engineering in Information Technology. (In this two years period, my interest in IB and other relational databases became secondary.) At the time I left definitely the university, Delphi fell in disuse again for reasons that aren't too clear to me.
Curiosity had me at the edge of technical problems because I decided to prove my recently acquired theoretical knowledge on Internet applications against IIS, JavaScript, VBScript and ADO on-the-fly, namely, as a project I accepted was in development, without previous testing (there was no time for that). After several sleepless hours, I delivered a functional but not very visually attractive solution, due to the browsers' incompatibilities. Well, I was asked for the minimum common denominator between MSIE and Netscape. Some months after, I had the possibility to deliver a more complex and decent UI thanks to my client only wanted to use MSIE, so I used several of the tricks it allowed.
In the university, I was one of the few convinced that OO-DBMS products would take the world by storm because they offer an homogeneous model. In the current state of the art, you build your application with an OO language but disassemble the information entities to be able to fit them in the plain tables that the relational engine uses, so you have a clash between two different models. I expected by 2000 or 2002, classic DBMS engines would be in a museum. However, in 1998, I realized this wouldn't happen... and maybe it will never happen. One reason is that using the same model ties your program to your stored data's format (this is the ideal for performance) but in a way that a change in the data representation forces a revision and recompilation of your program and vice versa. Another reason: you can blame or bless the Internet. It has pushed many technologies but it also changed focus from some technologies that might have been great but that disappeared or were relegated to academic research. The Internet could have been the spark for OO databases but it wasn't and one explanation is companies didn't have enough time to adapt to the Internet, so they pushed their relational data straight to the web and voila. Given these facts, I retook my interest in SqlServer and Interbase. Since I still use Delphi3, the natural companion has been IB4.2.1.328 for 3 years but since I entered kinobi (IB6) beta field test, I've replaced IB4 with the successive IB6 beta releases. Because I have a natural tendency to give tech support (I've given free assistance to several of my former classmates in the past), I decided to participate strongly in Interbase newsgroups and see if I can help... ultimately, I learn, too.
I've worked most of the time as an independent consultant and sometimes as a semi-independent employee of some consultancy companies that value more the work you do than the tie or jacket you use and that count the net results of your efforts more than the time you spend trying to date the secretary or drinking coffee. I'm not married and if the need to marry arises, since I've spent the last 10 years in front of the computer screen almost exclusively, I would need some book on human behavior to determine if the correct one to marry is a clever, brunette and peaceful girl or a computer. :-) This is the definition of a geek, isn't it? Apart from that and although the photo shown above is not much clear, I have a pale, white skin that's burned by the sun in a quarter hour, so I have another motive to avoid direct natural light between 11:00 and 17:00 hours by staying in front of the computer instead of in the beach that's approx. 300 meters far from home... and past 17:00, the soft wind that often appears in the beach makes me to remain at the computer. :-)
I think the Internet opens new job opportunities that span countries and entire continents. Clearly, governments lag behind the new order set by the Information Highway. Should one get a formal contract, written in paper from an overseas company, stipulating the salary and all the benefits either my country's laws or the company's country's laws give to employees before starting to work for that company? Should one travel from one continent to another only to sign a paper's sheet and come back home the same day?
Even so, I'm willing to participate in some projects that might be external to my country as the current restrictions allow. It wouldn't be a surprise to enumerate my skills if you read the previous paragraphs. I won't name HTML as an asset because with current WYSIWYG editors, even a monkey can produce pages with the kind of layout I have in this site. I'm not involved in XML yet, because I'm unsure whether it's the next red herring or the perfect companion for EDI, B2B, structured storage and other buzzwords. I have experience in Delphi, C++ (BC/BCB/MSVC), IIS/ASP/ADO, JavaScript, SqlServer, CORBA (unfortunately, somewhat forgotten for lack of practice), NT itself and some of its tricks (specially the dreaded registry), UNIX (almost forgotten until I was able to get another disk and install FreeBSD and learn to be admin instead of plain user), the [in]famous BDE and other things. Oh, I almost forget to say that I'm an experienced Interbase developer using either BDE or IBO. :-) And of course, if you have visited Interbase newsgroups, you'll can see I try to provide free tech support. By the time given, I cannot give personalized (email based) support but I know that two companies are building infrastructure in Internet to allow person-to-person transactions that don't involve physical things but services as it's the case with tech support.
Probably your curiosity needs a last hint: since my email address is at usa.net, it says nothing about my physical location, I live in Chile (South America) in the city of Viña del Mar, near Valparaíso. Here you can view a map online of my country in South America context (showing the location of Valparaíso) and a simpler map showing only the limits.
Maybe a last touch to finish: I have three pets: a cat and two dogs, all females. The cat already turned age 10 and is healthy.