Gustavo Rondina's Personal Page

I am Gustavo G. Rondina and this is my piece of web. I was born on July 16, 1984, in Marília, a very pleasant city located in the center-western region of the great state of São Paulo, in Brazil. On December, 2005, I obtained a Bachelor degree in Computer Science from Centro Universitário Eurípides de Marília (UNIVEM). I still had the wish to learn some Physics so now I am an undergraduate student (again!) at the University of São Paulo (USP), in the Physics Institute at São Carlos (IFSC). Currently I am living in Darmstadt, Germany, where I am working with CUDA simulations at the Technische Universität Darmstadt.

I am pretty much a regular geek guy. I enjoy reading, studying, playing Go, watching animes, and so on... I also like green tea and computers. Also, I support the free software movement because written code is also a form of knowledge, one which must be studied carefully in order to be mastered, and I do not accept the idea of restricting access to knowledge, be it computer code or something else entirely.

Originally I had the intention to have a Portuguese version of my webpage, since it is my native language and all. However it is too much trouble keeping and updating two different versions of the same page, so I decided to stick with English-only for the time being, although some of the links may direct you to content in Portuguese. Enjoy!

I am a major fan of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. His books, his work and his life have offered me a world of fantasy where I wish I were part of. So far I have read The Lord of The Rings, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales (some of this books more than once). I believe he was a great man with a wonderful mind, one who had access to a tiny slice of our history that very few people have ever had. He saw how the world was at the start of times, the rise and fall of the elves, the great battles between good and evil, the rise and the corruption of the race of men, the elvish bards with their magic sounds and poems, the splendor and highness of the ancient cities, but also the simple beauty of the yellow pastures and of rivers crossing lands inhabitated by innocent and bucolic people. His contribution to our society was more than a literary one. He donated us his time and shared with the world all this beautiful tales and stories he had saw. Now he rests his blessed soul in the holy house of Mandos. May Iluvatar take care of his soul, his mind and his genius until the Music of the Ainur is complete. I'm sure now he is part of the story he loved so much and to which he devoted his life and his passion. Thank you Professor, you will always live in our hearts. Your will and aptitude in the art of story telling continues to move us each and every day.

General Topics

• "Mãos Dadas", a poem from the great Carlos Drummond de Andrade: Portuguese | English
• "People", by Mother Theresa of Calcutta: English
• "A Alma dos Diferentes" (The Soul of the Different), by former Senator Artur da Tavola: Portuguese
• Text about learning and life experience: Portuguese | English
• Tolkien Influence in the Blind Guardian Music: Portuguese
• My Geek Code: HTML | ASCII (Official Site, Geekcode Decoder)
• The Geek's Creed (from alt.geek): ASCII

Computer Related Topics

• I would like to ask you to say NO to Software Patents!
• The GNU Project (by RMS - Local Document): Portuguese
• The GNU website (Local Document): Portuguese
• Why Schools Should Use Exclusively Free Software (by RMS - Local Document): Portuguese
• Article published in LinuxGazette #95 (Oct/2003): Software Engineering
• A very brief essay about free software and open source, as well as its relations with society can be found here (Portuguese only).
• I've written a small patch to GTetrinet (an open source implementation of TetriNet) that can be used to manually change the delay taken by the blocks to appear in your field after placing a block (usually referred as the next block delay). The default delay is 1 second, but it is rather annoying to play with such high delay, that's why I've written this patch. To learn how to apply it, just read the README file that is shipped within the tar file. Be aware that you may be considered a cheater if you use this trick inadvertedly in public servers. This patch only works against version 0.7.11 of GTetrinet.
  • Patch: delaypatch.tar.gz
  • GTetrinet version 0.7.11: gtetrinet-0.7.11.tar.gz

Pictures

• # 01 - Old pic, before a haircut (a little feral).
• # 02 - Old pic, after that haircut.
• # 03 - Blurry, my friend Ueta (left) and I.
• # 04 - At ICMC, the Mathematics and Computing Institute at the University of Sao Paulo.
• # 05 - Face only.
• Sunset picture taken from my appartment's window (November, 2007).

Go

• Go is an incredible board game. It is an ancient tradition in the eastern countries (particularly in Japan and China). More than a game it is an art, the Go board reflects the most deeper thoughts of the humans. Go demands a lot of thinking and hard work in order to became a good and valuable player. If you want to learn how to play Go, follow one of the links below.

  • http://www.gobase.org
  • http://playgo.to
  • http://www.usgo.org
  • Wiki Go Brasil

• If you don't have a Go board (Goban), you can play online. There are several ways to play Go online but the most common are IGS, KGS and NNGS. I like to play on KGS because there the people are really helpful and friendly, you can make a lot of friends and improve your game fast. I am usually at the room Brasil-Portugal with the nickname gustgr. If you want to join the KGS community just click here and sign in (As you probably will notice, the KGS software is not free software. I tried to talk with the developer to convince him to turn it into free software but my efforts were in vain. He didn't like the idea at all and cursed me. Unfortunately it is the only client available to play on KGS).

Links

• Olavo de Carvalho (great Brazilian Philosopher, Writer and Journalist)
• Slashdot (news for nerds)
• GNU (GNU's Not Unix)
• Eric S. Raymond's Home Page
• SETI@Home
• TLDP (The Linux Documentation Project)

I am a friend of Israel and I support my brethren sons of Jacob. Let us not allow the anti-semitic and anti-christian mass media twist the facts and delude society. Let us stay together, united we stand, for we are the believers, and God loves His children.

If you, like me, identify yourself with the Israeli fight for freedom, justice and a well acknowledged place amongst the democractic nations, then plase visit the Israel La'ad website and think about contributing. It is a non-profit organization that offers aids and sponsor programs to Israel's less fortunate citizens, particularly those who are economically deprived, including school-age children and the eldery.

Quotes

"Salutations to the Guru who with the collyrium stick of knowledge has opened the eyes of one blinded by the disease of ignorance." --Vishwasara Tantra

Contact me

Thanks to SDF for hosting this site and NetBSD team for providing flexibility, security and stability. All contents of this web site that belongs to me (Gustavo) may be distributed under the GFDL license terms.

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