Basilio Vieira

1982 - Basic / ZX Spectrum Started programming at the age of 12 and couldn't stop since. Can't do anything else either. Worked with a couple of punched tape machine in my childhood. Most expensive thing I disassembled back then: a ferrite core memory board. Loved the Mac in the first 5 years when it was a really different machine. Then waited 5 more years to be able to work in colour (too damn long.) Used a FDD 3000 from Timex to transfer book scripts from the ZX Spectrum to the Mac (my dad had a job in typesetting) so I managed to avoid retyping thousands of pages :) 1990 - Pascal / Cobol / Unix / C Had a couple of bad years in the '90s so had to resort to program in RM-COBOL/85 for food. In a Unix machine. Life has improved since. Lived across the street from Visus BBS but still felt the need to use a "different way" to connect my Hayes modem to the landlady's telephone line. Got my X3 NUI from Telepac (then Transdata). Used it to connect with compuserve and download a "free copy" of my personal bible: "Inside Macintosh". Spent a lot of time connected to Xerox PARC absorbing their inovative spirit. Managed not to get arrested by the PJ in the "great hacker ride" of 1991. Looking back, it was probably a bad move as everyone else who got arrested turned up better. 1995 - VB3 / [email protected] Everybody stopped calling me "maluquinho dos computadores" because everyone else became "maluquinho dos computadores". Blame it on the Internet :) Started my biggest application in VB3: "DAV - Declaração Aduaneira de Veículo" to handle the customs requirements for assigning licence plates in Portugal. Been improving it for the past 15 years. 1998 - Marriage / BeOS / Panoramic photos BeOS was a funny idea from Jean Luc Gassé (former Apple France president): leave Apple, make a new machine and a new operating system. Sell everything back to Apple: #fail Steve tried the same thing: #win. Funny Managed to cover most of Samouco in 360º panoramic photos using PTGui, a frontend to Helmut Dersch's Panorama Tools. Played with HDR for a while and realized the noise and dynamic range are the last two major problems with digital cameras. 2000 - Survived Y2K 2001 - SQL / Wish I had a Segway 2002 - Survived the Euro 2004 - C# / Sketchup / Unicycle 3D modelling became a major productivity killer. I am very proud of my 3D model of Panteão Nacional First attempts of building a miniature segway using steppers and a Arduino. It's a work in progress...