Tommaso Cucinotta: Hobbies and spare time

My preferred hobby has always been programming and computers. I've been programming since I was in middle school on an old Commodore 64 in Basic and Assembler 6502. During the high school, I switched to an Amiga 500 with such languages as QBasic, Amiga Basic, Assembler 68000 and Pascal. In those ages, I used to waste time by writing a 100% assembly clone of the Sound Tracker, with an interface towards a very bad keyboard with no MIDI, which my brother (with more passion for electronics than computers) had unmounted, pulling out magically a set of wires connected to a mysterious box which could be plugged into the parallel port. Afterwards, it came the age of the PC with C/C++, Object-Oriented Programming, Design Patterns, HTML, JavaScript, Java, Perl, Python, Zope, AspectJ, and in the end modifying the Linux kernel.

Various

Some useful Emacs commands which ease both writing and programming tasks

A few contributions of mine to the open-source community

Advanced Search patch for the LyX editor. It allows to search for text entered in a WYSIWYG way, including the possibility to search for mathematics and both character and paragraph styles. The patch has been integrated into the code baseline, and will be included in the upcoming LyX 2.0.0 release.
LyX XMPP-enabled chat patch for the LyX editor. It adds to LyX XMPP-compatible chat capabilities, where users can chat exchanging WYSIWYG format-enabled text, including the possibility to typeset mathematics, use character and paragraph styles, insert tables, and others. Users using a regular plain-text XMPP client, such as Pidgin, would simply see (and type) the LaTeX equivalent of the text.
Quick External Link patch for the OWL Intranet Engine document management system. It provides a faster access to the link for accessing a document from the outside.
Patch for automatic detection of repeating segments in scores and application of corresponding notation to the MuseScore open-source music notation editor.
Open Macro Library is a library of highly reusable C macros providing a set of well-designed commonly needed functionality to C developers, like logging and debugging helpers, containers, sorting and other algorithms, trying to mimic the C++ Standard Template Library in terms of flexibility of use.
SubTitle Viewer is a subtitle-only player. It is able to play a .srt subtitle file on top of anything else on the screen, particularly full-screen windows of movie players.
Patch to compile the old driver for the Argos Todos Mini II USB smart-card reader on Ubuntu 16.04, and generate the corresponding .deb file, along with the pre-built binary.

Small utility programs I made for myself

WordTeacher, helper program for remembering terms of foreign languages

Last updated on
07 November 2024