geek

I am a software programmer, but I also enjoy making music, writing, and composing images. I believe the act of creation is an important thing to do, especially nowadays. Creation often means helping other people, in many different ways, by building "objects" they might find useful. It can be a very good feeling.

The operating system I use for work, free creation, and fun is Mac OS X. The major attractive of this platform is its Cocoa programming framework (of NeXTSTEP descendance (1986!)). Some of the original NeXTSTEP features are described here. Cocoa/NeXTSTEP/OpenStep is the most beautiful and elegant piece of software I've ever seen. It's too sad only geeks knows about the OpenStep standard (signed by Apple and Sun). Development using the Cocoa framework is a wonderful experience and a lot of fun. In relation to that, I found out that OS X makes me focus on the actual use of the computer, it often frees me from hassles and problems, and this way it saves me precious time. However it still has some design flaws that get in my way sometimes.

The biggest drawback of OS X is the fact that it is not free software. I believe it could be free, and Apple still make a lot of money. Even if the software built upon Cocoa is based on a non-free framework, at least we have GNUstep, a free implementation of the OpenStep specification. I think GNUstep is really cool (it can be used on various Linux, Solaris, BSD and more (even Windows)). This prevents me from knowingly build something that will be trapped in a non-free system. Eventually I will join GNUstep and support their efforts.

I think at myself as a computer geek (geekcode) - or nerd, since my social skills are not very well developed (though my girlfriend/wife is working on it). I actually have fun sitting down in front of the computer programming for the entire day (sometimes I forget to eat). There's a page where you can find more information about my computer. As a geek, I use logic as a way to elaborate propositions that will help me to inspect the events happening around me. You can read some of them throughout this web site. Moreover, I have a weblog (the old one is here).

I also wrote (in Italian) an ode to TextEdit, the default text application on OS X.