Thanks

"If I have seen farther than others, it is because I've stood on the shoulders of giants." -- Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727).

     In one way or another, I'm the product of others' work, since I would have not been able to reach my current state without their knowledge, help and support. For this reason I say thank you to several people who have made possible my developement as programmer, or whose personal work has allowed me to enjoy my experience with computers, creating programs, showing me how to use them, or simply giving me their point of view.

    Shawn Hargreaves. When I contacted him in 1996 because Allegro didn't work with my obsolete version of DJGPP you could say I started to walk the correct path of programming. Since then, leaning on Allegro and its wonderful community of programmers, I have learned to program, collaborate, and above all enjoy programming (and losing my time). Not only Shawn Hargreaves, I also thank to many other members of the Allegro community, sometimes simply because they were there, or they answered some misguided email, like George Foot, Peter Wang, Iván Baldo, and many many others.

    Aritz Albaizar. Always being my companion in my programming experiences from the side of the artist and graphist. With him I've written Wotan (see http://welcome.to/gogosoftware/) among other things and of course I keep asking him for help when I need to.

     Salvador Eduardo Tropea. Indirectly, when I started programming with Allegro and DJGPP, I used RHIDE, an integrated developement environment created by Robert Höhne. What I didn't know was that RHIDE used the text editor created by Salvador Eduardo Tropea. Later when I switched to Linux, RHIDE was not the best tool to keep programming, but Salvador Eduardo Tropea's program (Setedit) had grown and become independent. Since that moment I can use a fantastic editor under DOS, Windows and Linux.

     Thanks to Linux framebuffer developers, for creating an architecture which allows to create graphic applications nearly effortles without the complexity of X, and specially thanks to Petr Vandrovec for writting and maintaining the Matrox framebuffer drivers. Thanks to them I can keep enjoying my command line without the limitations of X for my daily work.

     Michael Elkins, for writting Mutt. Obviously email communication is managed with an email program. While I started my windows age using Pegasus Mail, created by David Harris, and when I switched to Linux I used Pine, since then Mutt has been for me the most productive mail program ever. For its flexibility, performance and number of features, I doubt that I'll be substituting this program in the near future.

     Being hostile to graphic environments and to any program which requires using the mouse for things which can be done equally right with the keyboard, Lynx was the first text browser I started to use. However, it had some deficiencies which were annoying for browsing. These deficiencies where solved with the links browser by Mikulas Patocka thanks to its totally asynchronous architecture, and to the improved web rendering, which features tables and frames.

     Finally Petr Baudis took links, Peter Wang's patch which added embedded Lua, and some things more, like cookie support, and started the Elinks fork, my current text browser. It's fantastic being able to browse with the keyboard, without images and popups distracting you from the content of the web. Besides, its customization possibilities thanks to Lua and the inmense configuration files are great. Of course, when I have to I use Mozilla. Thanks to it I don't have to use any more my father's computer with Windows, or a computer at the university to see graphic only pages or those heavily using Javascript, although some day Graphic Links will allow me to drop Mozilla, adding graphics and javascript to my framebuffer.

     CVS. The numerous contributors and authors of CVS have provided to the free software the tool necessary to collaborate and build quality software. Today it's even useful as tool for small one-developer jobs, although it shows its excellences allowing direct collaboration of developers aroung the globe working through internet. It will surely be substituted by next generation toolsl ike Subversion, but you can't negate the value added to the millions of projects who have used it.

     Having started my first years to program with Basic, I had lost all my respect to any interpreted language... until I found Python, a very productive interpreted language created by Guido van Rossum. It brings to the world of imperative programming some benefits of functional programming, and improves heavily the possibilities of polimorphysm with its object oriented style, which benefits from dynamic execution. Even its syntaxis, it's so logical and beautiful that since I learned about it I wish all languages used it (mainly because it avoids unnecessary and uncomfortable punctuation symbols).

     Thanks to the W3C for providing internet's citizens with the necessary vehicle to communicate coherently. I only hope that the rats which are trying to introduce patented stadards will be exterminated, since everybody knows that all information should be free. Since we are at it, I borrowed one of their stylesheets to make my own (which you can disable, of course, if your browser is good/flexible enough).

     Thanks to Borja Sotomayor, exemplary hacker, for his never ending help given in the last years of university, when we met personally (I had heard of him before, but I'm so lazy that I regret it now). I'm speaking of help in different meanings, going from advices or experiences about Linux to the lending of books I would have never read if not for his correct advice, without forgetting his magnific work on the LaTeX template I used for my graduating project.

     Thanks to the SDF public access Unix system. The Super Dimension Fortress is a networked community of free software authors, teachers, students, researchers, hobbyists and enthusiasts. It is operated as a non-profit and is supported and governed by its members. This web is hosted at SDF-eu, and it's true that you learn when your Linux tricks don't work in a machine with NetBSD and you have to figure out what's wrong.

     Thanks to eFaber for having allowed me to work for a year hacking free software and expanding my limited view of software with TCL and AOLserver. Agus, Eli, Esti, Iñaki, Svet, Zubi, I'll do an exception in my "selective memory" policy. After all, if I only remembered you for the bad things, I wouldn't remember you at all!

     Thanks again to Shawn Hargreaves for offering the chance to work with him as console videogame programmer. Shame that I didn't end up liking the job as much as I expected and left.

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