@JosephWright I'm Brazilian, born and raised in the countryside area of the economic heart of the country, the great São Paulo state. The city I live is quite small (near 4k people), and it's a great place. I've been working with software development for quite a long time and just recently I'm back to academia for a PhD in computer engineering. Fun times, I'd say. :)
My first contact with TeX and friends was during my Masters, when I had to write a lot of mathematics. Nothing was working (Microsoft Word, I'm looking at you!), so I was in despair. Suddenly, a friend of mine suggested about this LaTeX thingy he was using for his own thesis, so I decided to give it a try. It was surely love at first sight. :)
@tohecz I believe it was something close to 4 years, if I recall correctly. :) It was interesting because it was a great time for discovery. Sometimes we need to broaden our horizons. :)
@ClaudioFiandrino The first language I learned was Pascal (Wirth is truly amazing). It was a lovely experience. Then later came C and C++. Nowadays, I always try to learn something new (at least the basics) language-wise. I know Java (it's the language I use in a daily basis), PHP, Scala, Ruby, Groovy, a bit of Python, Haskell, Lisp, Clojure, Prolog, Lua and probably a couple more, not to mention the languages I write myself. :) I love languages. :)
@DavidCarlisle Sadly, I think I'm a lone voice for TeX and friends. IMHO Brazil has no strong tradition of TeX in universities (if I had to blame something, I'd point my finger at ABNT, but that's another story). I know a couple of departments which offer LaTeX templates, but students prefer to stick with Microsoft Office. I usually try to act as a TeX evangelist at times, but my claims go unheard. :)
@HarishKumar I work with adaptive technology (think of something that has self-modification features). :) We deal with theory of computation all the time and then we come up with mathematical models. :)
@ClaudioFiandrino Thanks, but it's not that impressive. :) Once you know about algorithms, it's just a matter of learning a particular syntax. :)
@tohecz ABNT should be the Brazilian analog of German DIN or the international ISO. It shares with the other similar organization a deep ignorance of typography.
@JosephWright ABNT stands for Brazilian National Standards Organization (acronym in Portuguese, of course). They are responsible for technical standards. Personally I don't like their standards, and bear in mind that they have so many rules that one university can select which subset to follow and then a certain department can override these subsets by defining their own standards. I love standards, there are lots and lots for you to choose from. :P
It's a living hell to comply with their rules, and you are hearing this from someone that (at some extent) knows how to write TeX code. :)
@HarishKumar I usually do everything with TeX (from a conference certificate to a pamphlet). So when people mention to me that the layout is nice, I then reveal it's TeX-powered. :)
@egreg For my work, I have a couple of IDE's (Eclipse, NetBeans, Idea) and several terminal windows side by side. For TeX, it's usually vim or TeXworks. Since I use Linux and Mac, I can organize all my things in several workspaces. :)
@egreg I wrote a tool that generated some images of finite state machines, but I was unable to make my TeX code keep the aspect ratio. I found TeX.sx and decided to give it a try. It was my first question. :) And the answer was quite obvious: I had to use keepaspectratio. D'oh. :)
I have a script which automatically creates a beamer presentation with several .ps images, each one inserted in a distinct frame. Those images consist on graphs built using GraphViz. The script is basically iterating on this code snippet:
\begin{frame}{Image 1}
\begin{figure}
\inclu...
@HarishKumar I always go with vim and TeXworks. :) Vim is something I learned to love; I was enraged at the beginning, but then I was successfully brainwashed. :) I like the modal philosophy and since I always had endless fights with my keyboard, reducing my typing range was something desirable. :)
@DavidCarlisle It's like Marmite, I guess. :) I have emacs installed in my machines as well and I tried AUCTeX for once. Since it's Lisp-based, I somehow respect it. :) But since I look like a heavy vim bloke, I need to fight in the right side. :)
@DavidCarlisle I used to work with producing animated GIF's (oh the shame). :) Those were the times, I used to draw every single frame with a very bad mouse and almost no skills. :) I decided to give it a try and I could make some bucks out of it, that's why I somehow draw things from time to time. :)
@HarishKumar arara came by accident. I had a nice experience with rubber and liked some things about it (directives, for instance). Then I wrote a very basic code in less than 24 hours and showed a screenshot of it in the TeX.sx chatroom. You guys bought the idea and I decided to convert my attempt into something more serious. :) Marco was the culprit of arara growing so fast, he was the true evangelist. :)
@HarishKumar I think I once mentioned the duck story in the chatroom, but I'm glad to tell it again. :) I think the story starts when I tried to learn German. I was very eager to learn it (I was a Ramnstein fan at those times), but the time was quite terrible: I was in the beginning of my Masters and had lots and lots of things to do, so I had to give up the classes. I decided then to try to study some language by myself, and I opted to sign language.
Brazil has its own format called Libras. I think the one I started was ASL (American Sign Language), if I recall correctly. Pardon if I say something very stupid, it's been a while. :) I tried to memorize the basic gestures, but I'm a slow learner. In a short period of time, I forgot almost all sentences. Except for a few words.
One day, I was in a conference and saw a lone girl in the corner of the auditorium. And I decided to talk to her. :) When I said hi, she actually didn't look at me. When I came near her (apparently she didn't notice my presence), she then looked at me, but said no words. Then she wrote in a piece of paper that she was hearing impaired.
So I decided to talk to her through writing sentences in my notebook. :)
At some point, I think I mentioned that I tried to learn ASL, but failed miserably, mostly because I was stupid and could not memorize things. She then asked me to try a sentence for her. I got stuck because, as I said, almost 100% of my sign vocabulary was lost in broken synapses. :)
The only words I could remember were: I (you point your index finger to your chest), love (you cross your arms in front of your chest, just like some pirate flag), you (you point your index finger to the person you want to refer to) and, of course, duck (you close your hand and "quack" it twice with it). :) I thought that if I said I love you, it wouldn't be interesting. :P So I went with the second best sentence ever known to manking: I love ducks.
When I did this, she looked at me, very surprised. And then laughed a lot. :) So I still keep the theme as a good memory of something very tender. :)
@HarishKumar I like araras too, and parrots. And hummingbirds. And lots more. :P
@DavidCarlisle My favourite question was Creating a zebra effect using listings, which resulted in yet another great package from Martin Scharrer. :) And my favourite answer was this one: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/55324/… It's quite trivial now that I look at it, but it was the first I actually dealt with coding. :)
@egreg I would say voting plays an important role in our community. Because it's a way of making people feel welcome. My philosophy is, if a question shows effort, it deserves an upvote. :) For answers, the idea is basically the same. If, by chance, there's a huge feeling towards downvoting a question, I prefer to leave the question be and try to ask the OP to rephrase things.
We can move the world with votes.
6
It's a good way of making things happen. Everything wins.
I vote a lot because I care a lot. :) I want people to feel the same way I do with this community. We have a lot of fun, it's a way of brightening your day. We are all part of this and the more people we can get involved, the better.
@tohecz I have a piano and a couple of guitars (accoustic and electric). I'd like to have a bassoon, so I could run after people while carrying an orchestra bazooka. :)
@egreg I used to play soccer, but I had several injuries, so I had to quit. :) Nowadays, I do some bow and arrow and jog a lot. :) Not to mention that I like to read comics. :)
@tohecz I'm used to some Brazilian pieces, like the ones from Heitor Villa-Lobos. :) Also Bossa Nova is a great exercise for pianists, I think everybody should at least give it a try (start with Girl from Ipanema). :)
@egreg I love classical music, but when I jog, it's usually Pink Floyd that follows me (You better run! -- bad pun, I know). :) I think it's good for musicians to have a wide knowledge of songs, including the ones you don't like too much. :)
@tohecz It's been a while. :) I used to have a band, but nowadays I don't have time for performances. I play in the church, but that's another kind of repertoire. :)
@ClaudioFiandrino I used to read a lot of comics (Marvel in general), but for now I only read those ones available on the web. :) These are the ones I follow: Awkward Zombie, Dilbert, Dumbing of Age, Garfield, Nerf Now, Foxtrot, XKCD and Questionable Content.
@tohecz I don't know. Maybe because @Joseph poked about giving a talk at the 2012 speaker meeting through Skype. :) And I'm still struggling with getting my subscription. But when I ever get one, it will be from UK-TUG because reasons. :P They have David, so it's awesome. :)
@DavidCarlisle There's no Brazilian TUG so far, although I thought of founding one (Karl even gave me some ideas on this subject). I think it wouldn't be a big group and we would have a lot of headaches because reasons of ABNT. :P
@DavidCarlisle To be honest, I'm still stuck with PDFLaTeX for now, but I'm gradually moving things to XeLaTeX. :) Once in a while, I write one or two documents which require XeLaTeX, but in general, it's PDFLaTeX all day and all night. :)
@Johannes_B I had some fun with LuaTeX but so far I was quite pleased with XeLaTeX. :) The idea of embedding Lua code inside a TeX document is quite interesting, but I'm quite reluctant in mixing them. :) Maybe in the future. :)
@egreg Yes, it's in my TODO list. :) I'd love to visit Italy, specially now that I am officially an Italian citizen. :) And of course I need to lure you to sign my TeXbook. :)
@tohecz I'll say something crazy: I actually don't hate anything about TeX. :) Perhaps because I love languages, I learned to appreciate the design of them. :) Knuth knew what he did (as always) and the result was awesome. I once wrote my own macro expander and I discovered how tricky it is to provide "mere expansion". :)
@tohecz I have The TeXbook, The LaTeX Companion, TeX By Topic (I printed one copy) and the L3 interfaces (but thanks to @JosephWright, my copy is now outdated). :)
@egreg I have arara 4.0 ready, except I still have the manual to write, so the release will be greatly delayed. :( Let's see if I can fix that in December. I have plans for a local tree package manager (associated with Martin Scharrer's CTAN archive), so we will be able to deploy any package version in our local TeX tree for testing purposes. Let's see if I find time to finish this project. :)
@texenthusiast Hello, thanks for joining the interview!
@texenthusiast I know a couple of things, but to be honest, I never got into hardware design. I think I'm more of a software bloke. :) But it's surely nice to have important concepts in mind, even if you don't work directly in an specific area.
@texenthusiast I started with Linux in 2000/2001 with a distro based on Red Hat. Later on, I jumped into Slackware and got stuck with it for quite some time. Then I came back to Red Hat until version 9.0, I guess. If I recall correctly, after version 9.0, Red Hat forked their distro into a community driven effort named Fedora Core and a corporative branch named Enterprise Linux. I decided to give FC1 a try and I'm a loyal user since then. :)
I think it's a natural path, like Debian folks trying out Ubuntu. I believe I'm still a Slackware user at core (my old laptop proudly runs the latest version), but I think Fedora is a great option. As long as people use Linux the right way, I'm happy. :)
@tohecz The naming convention I have for my machines is cities. I have alexandria (Fedora 20), manchester (Fedora 20), oxford (Mac OSX Yosemite), herakompolis (Mac OSX Lion), and thebes (Slackware 14.1). To break the pattern a little, my development laptop is satyagraha which means insistence on truth. :)
My portable devices are named after cardinal virtues (in Latin): my iPad is temperantia (temperance), my iPod is iustitia (justice), my other tablet is sapientia (prudence) and my cellphone is fortitudo (fortitude). :)
@PauloCereda Thank you for sharing your thoughts and time. You are a nice human being. I had to run away in the middle but Thanks a lot for arara and biblatex GUI (in advance) and local tree package manager (in advance) /you are caught! ;-)
@YiannisLazarides Hi Yiannis! :) I think I borrowed the name from a city of the ancient Egypt (I believe the spelling might vary). :) I once also had a machine named hamunaptra, surprisingly not from Egypt as The mummy movie portraits, but from India. :)
@Johannes_B To be completely honest, there are plans for me to learn cooking. :) Once in a while, I grab a notebook and make some notes while my mum is cooking. :) I even considered preparing a cookbook (in LaTeX, of course). I might come back to this project any time soon. :) Also, I want to try German again.
How do you manage your voting "strategies". Do you keep a log of "to do"s handy for when the UTC flips over to 00:00:00 and then let your voting duck bots kick in?
@Werner I used to have a "to upvote" list in a plain text file, so my voting spree was actually head -n 15 list.txt, then I'd get usually 30 votes (1 question and 1 answer), which would grant me 10 extra votes. Then these votes keep going to the next 5 items in my list or other answers from the threads I've already visited. :)
@PauloCereda I guess as the popularity of TeX - LaTeX increases - see this map/graph - there may come a day when you may struggle with the voting decisions.
@PauloCereda That's admirable, and something that definitely distinguishes this community from others. True, tenacious, unsung heros are non-existent, but ever-present.
@Werner I think we all do what we can. :) It's so lovely to see @egreg and @DavidCarlisle, two TeX demigods, having fun on writing competing answers for the sake of helping people to understand TeX and friends. :)
@PauloCereda I agree. Major players in this community understand that there is a greater benefit to just answering the question. A little capitalistic competition is benefiting the greater good.
Arbitrary question: When did you join this community?
I have a script which automatically creates a beamer presentation with several .ps images, each one inserted in a distinct frame. Those images consist on graphs built using GraphViz. The script is basically iterating on this code snippet:
\begin{frame}{Image 1}
\begin{figure}
\inclu...
TeXtalk - Interviews
TeXtalk - Interviews