Antonio Larrosa's personal page

You want to know about me? Ok, thanks, I'll try to do my best to introducing myself in a way that doesn't scare you away :). I'm Antonio Larrosa Jiménez, born in Málaga, in Spain, when I was only a baby.

I then grew up and became older (which is the natural thing to do when you grow up). Since I was born in 1978, I'm now ... just do the calc yourself and then I will not have to update this page yearly.

I've studied Mathematics in the University of Malaga and finished some years ago. Now I'm doing a PhD in Artificial Inteligence and Neural Networks.

One of my main hobbies is ...

My first (real) program was was a data plotting DOS app called Graficant . It was done in basic (with a 286 at 6 Mhz) and it was very nice, but I lost its sources and even the executable . That was in 1989 or so, fortunately, my friend Miguel Ángel Postigo Torres ( Postigo for friends :-)) had a copy of the binary I left him when I finished it, but he didn't told me before 1995 because I didn't asked him until then !

After that, I learned Pascal and x86 assembly, and thought of a very interesting idea for a game, so I started coding, but when the game was funny to play I abandoned it, because it appeared a game called Clockworks or something like that from the creator of Tetris that shared the same new idea. So I left it . It was called Shadows, it used the 320x200 mode with 256 colors and made a very good use of the VGA hardware,and I suppose its code is anywhere among my old disks, but I'm not sure...

Then, I did a DOS command-line Calculator, it was called MegaMatica.
The main feature was a talking function that told you the result of the operation throught a SoundBlaster soundcard and variables you could use to store values between sessions or operations. It even used DMA for the sound output, all done in assembler, when I was between 10 and 12.
This program was lost in a very unfortunate case of deletion of files with root privileges.

I was also working on a image morphing program, which had very promising results , it was called MegaMorph and was programmed in C. It allowed to morph from one image to another by specifing which part of an image should be mapped into which part of the target image . It also allowed to warp an image, that is, to distort it.
Unfortunately, the sources where also lost in the same accident as MegaMatica, but I saw some time ago its sources among my disks so perhaps ...

In the meantime (Summer of 1992), I started doing one of my first big applications, Cenbase. It was an object oriented database used to store the contents of a collection of disks . The origins where made in a comercial C++ compiler, but after reworking and reimplementing the database engine five times, the sixth was made using DJGPP for compatibility reasons . But Cenbase was a Windows program, so I had to use the same compiler for the GUI.
Cenbase was programmed on a 486/50 with 4 Mb (later versions with 8Mb.), and was quite fast, in fact, was the fastest application of its kind. Later, I added the capacity to store also CD-ROMs along with floppy disks, it was the first one to include this ability and when others also did, it kept being the fastest. Cenbase can also search for disks and files based on any of the multiple characteristics and even for commentaries using regular expressions.
It was programmed in C++, with extensive use of templates. In fact, I think the data base engine could still be used for anything, as it was really nice for that era . As of 1997, I decided not to continue this beast as I left my Windows age away (along with OWL 1.0 :-)).
My brother, Rafael Larrosa, who was doing the help system and gave me some quick lessons about C++ also left it.
Something curious about this program is that it accelerates Windows (no, not to 9.8 m/s² :-)), really, I used Windows timers in a very particular way and the result was that Windows was running faster.

In the meantime I was illuminated and installed Linux,

As I will tell later, I have a Yamaha PSS-790 synthesizer, so I liked to hear midi files, but as it is not a General Midi compliant keyboard, it is very difficult to get it to work ok . In windows 3.1 there was a midi mapper, but there's nothing similar for Linux, so I got the playmidi source code and implemented a midi mapper and a much nicer karaoke handler . After doing this, I put it in a disk (I still didn't have internet connection) and sent it to the author of playmidi.
I had no answer from him.
After getting internet access and an email account I wrote him, and he told me he was already working on a midi mapper, so he could not accept my changes . Also, the sources changed very much in the time that I didn't have internet access (Note: I'm not trying to offend nor to be angry with anyone, I'm just telling the facts that took me to develop the next program, in fact, I thank Nathan for not allowing my changes, because now we have a better midi player and libraries }:-) )

In the summer of 1997, Ángel Jiménez Jiménez, told my brother about KDE, and we installed it . It was the best desktop environment I ever saw (even in early pre-beta state). So there I was waiting since May for a new version of playmidi and without being capable of hearing any midi song in Linux . That made me (in September) start developing a new application, KMid , the KDE midi player.
The same day I started I got a simple engine to play some notes, the day after, I got a midi file reader, and the next it was playing some songs . It evolved quite fast . And is still going where no player has gone before ! :-)

On 1998, I got a free configuration subject (it is a subject you can choose from any other faculty on the same university), called Image Processing, and the result of this was KFourier, a KDE based image manipulation application using the Fourier transform, with which you can find edges, smooth images, and apply nearly any other kind of filter.

At that time I used O2 computers and so also the Irix OS, I got a good impression of the Desk Overview and thought there was nothing similar in Linux (well, there were similar apps, but none so attractive :) ). So I started another project, KPager, a desktop pager which is far nicer than the Irix one, and at the same time, it was the first one to have a Pixmap mode which shows you a small picture of your screen (with the real contents of each window). It was the first pager doing that back in 1998 (yes, even before the enlightenment's pager did it) and in 2003 Microsoft patented that idea. <ironic mode> Patents are really good for innovation </ironic mode> ... sigh.

Some years later (in the begining of 2000) I had another lecture where we had to develop an application, so I decided to do something useful, and I finished with Kalamaris, an application that should be the paradise for mathematicians (at least, when it is finished, althought it's already for me :) )

On 2001, I had a subject about mathematical models, in which I had to develop another application. This time, a billiard game seemed to be the best option, so I made KBillar, a 3D billiard game over user defined surfaces.

Another hobby is ...

My third hobby is collecting Midi files from around the world, it's the same to me if it is a classic opera midi file, a pop/rock one, or a traditional song from Croatia (as long as it is a quality midi file).

If you want to help me increasing the size of my collection, I would be happy to receive any song by email.

I've been working more than a year for SuSE, first in Nurenberg (Germany), and then from home (Málaga, Spain). Then I started working in Tedial, where I'm working since the beginning of 2002.

Note: every single bit of these pages has been done using purely Linux (and mainly vim :) ).
I hope to get a photo from my friends and put it here soon. (Note: I wrote the previous sentence in 1997, so soon is quite undefined :) )

And that's all, if you have any question, or share some common hobbies, feel free to mail me.