Here there follow some comments about my intertwining with computers.
TeX
TeX
is an outstanding language,
devised to produce high quality typesetting,
including mathematical text.
I entered
Donald Knuth's
wonderlang in 1987 through the LaTeX door
(writing my degree thesis using a popular wysiwig program
had been an unfortunate experience).
Useful information about TeX can be retrieved from the
TeX Users Group home page;
see also the
Comprehensive TeX Archive Network.
LaTeX is a wide and popular set of TeX macros.
Since it is a bit tight,
one of my first tasks was to give some flexibility to the "document styles",
which at the beginning did not allow some elementary features as
chosing if you want your references to be called
"Bibliography", or "Bibliografia"...
A later version of LaTeX has included most of this flexibility,
mainly due to the Babel project.
I also wrote a file containing hyphenation patterns for Catalan.
Since other people have written similar files,
some day we should unify them,
but for the time being you can
get it
at the home page of the Catalan TeX Users Group,
Tirant lo TeX.
Another problem I worked on is the Catalan double ell
("ela geminada"),
that appears in words like xarel·lo.
I wrote macros for producing a typographically pleasant middle dot;
perhaps they should be slightly improved,
but you can find them
here
(it is only 15 lines of TeX code).
I also wrote some macros to draw commutative diagrams,
to deal with derivatives,
to number equations in special ways, ...,
and many more,
but nowadays there are better solutions somewhere in the web.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia
has become one of my favourite sources of information
(together with
Google).
I have written and edited several pages, mainly for the
Catalan Wikipedia.
Maple
Maple
is a program for performing symbolic mathematical computation,
designed at the
University of Waterloo
some years ago.
The mathematics courses at Telecommunications
include since 1992 laboratory sessions with Maple.
I have been largely involved with them;
I even dared to produce a booklet (1998) about Maple
for the course on
Vector Analysis.
Maple can also be useful to compute Lie brackets in 8-dimensional spaces...
HTML
HTML
(HyperText Markup Language)
is the language used to compose pages for the World Wide Web (WWW)
--as this one.
This language and the web as we know it were devised at the
CERN
in late 1990
--look at
here.
I learned some HTML in order to create the
home page
of my research group in 1997.
Of course, writing raw HTML is not especially difficult
if you know TeX previously.
PostScript
PostScript is a page description language invented by
Adobe
some years ago.
Though PostScript is not intended for humans,
learning something about it may be fun and interesting.
I devised some simple macros to draw circuits
that were useful for some colleagues.
Some years ago I found PostScript useful also
to solve some serious printing problems...
You can find some information about PostScript
at the home page of
Ghostscript;
you can also look at
A First Guide to PostScript
or
these pages.
Perl
Perl,
sometimes dubbed as
pathologically eclectic rubbish lister,
is a postmodern programming language,
developed by
Larry Wall.
I learned some about Perl, and the CGI library
(created by
L. Stein),
to program some forms for the web page of the year 2000 session of the
Fall Workshop on Geometry and Physics,
as well as to publish its proceedings.
Some resources are
perl.com
and the
Comprehensive Perl Archive Network.
Linux
Linux
is an operating system
(a free clone of Unix).
It was originally created by
Linus Torvalds
in 1991,
and is being developed with the collective effort
of many volonteers around the world.
I strongly adhere to this philosophy!
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