Jacobo Tarrío

DUBLIN, Ireland — November 5th 2009 — Jacobo Tarrío, a leading Galician software engineer residing in Dublin, today announced in his website the general availability of a press release.

“This press release is a milestone in my quest to write content other people will read,” said Jacobo Tarrío. “Thanks to it, tens and even dozens of persons will know that I published a press release.”

The idea for the press release was born when Jacobo Tarrío read a press release from Apple and noticed that all press releases followed the same scheme. After many seconds spent in research and development, and investments in IT totalling almost one cent, a new press release was born.

“I am glad that this press release went out,” said Jacobo. “Now I can sleep happy knowing that it is out there, possibly being read by someone other than me.”

About Jacobo Tarrío:

Jacobo Tarrío is the leading member of the community of Galician software engineers who live in Dublin near a rail track. He revolutionized the world of press releases when he published in his website a press release about his publishing a press release. Jacobo also makes revolutionary humorous videos when he is not writing revolutionary press releases.

I just wanted to post a note saying that I abandoned the Windows Twitter client a month ago, when I discovered that embedding IE in an application using the raw Win32 API is hard, but not as hard as making it do something more than just browsing web pages (it is very easy with .NET and other frameworks, but, then again, the point was not using them).

But fear not; for the past two weekends I wrote a Twitter client for Android; and, in this case, I will actually use it every day, because I was really fed up with the one I had been using before. I even recycled the name "CheepCheep" for the new client.

Ah, and I programmed it entirely from Windows, of course :)

I will post some more about it one of those days.

Poco antes de que comenzara a operar en Dublín el nuevo sistema de alquiler de bicicletas, la prensa pidió su opinión a un representante de la menos numerosa que antaño, pero todavía influyente, comunidad yonki de Dublín.

— Bah, esas bicis no sirven para nada —fue su veredicto—. Son demasiado distintivas.

As you know, I've been living in Ireland for a bit over two years. That's why, even though I'm not an Irish citizen, I was really proud when I heard the news that an Garda Síochána, the Police force of the Republic of Ireland, has won a prize.

Yes, an Garda has won the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize on Literature. Their work: issuing dozens of tickets all over the territory of the Republic to the most persistent infringer, a Polish citizen called Prawo Jazdy. Whose name, coincidentally, means “Driving Licence”.

Congratulations, and good work!

This is what my Twitter client looks like today.

It is displaying my "home timeline"; that is, the list of tweets I see when I log in to Twitter. The timeline is rendered in an embedded Internet Explorer control (and I need to apply some more CSS styles). I have also implemented the preferences dialog, and it works, but I cannot save the preferences yet (I have to enter the credentials every time I restart the application).

Not implemented yet: automatic updates, entering new tweets, deleting your tweets, viewing single tweets/conversations, viewing a single user.

Yes, I'm learning quite a bit writing this program. One of the things I have learnt is that Windows programming is not as horrible as I remember it — but then, it was about 15 years ago :)

I'm still learning how to program for Windows in C++ using the Win32 API, and I'm writing more of my impressions — remember that I've worked with Linux for the past 12 years, and this all is practically new for me.

• Visual Studio is not a bad IDE, but it is not excellent either (at least for C++). That, or I have been spoilt by Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA and their excellent support for refactoring (at least for Java). IDEA has such a powerful autocompletion, I have written complete modules without writing a method or variable name in full. In Visual Studio, OTOH, IntelliSense stops working all the time. Are you initializing a variable in the definition? It stops working. Have you got a syntax error 50 lines up? It stops working. Are you using C++ templates? It stops working. I don't know why it stops working so much, when it doesn't even try to figure out whether you want to input a type or a method or a variable name.
• It is hard work embedding Internet Explorer in an application when you aren't using MFC or Visual Basic or C# or one of those frameworks that give you a "WebBrowser" class in which all the work is already done. Not knowing anything about OLE/COM/ActiveX didn't help, of course. I have to thank Jeff Glatt for his article, “Embed an HTML control in your own window using plain C” (and his “COM in plain C” series), and the authors of wxCode's IEHtmlWin component (once again, Free Software comes to the rescue!). Reading them helped me to understand how it works. Now when I go read the documentation on MSDN, it makes sense!.
• Talking about MSDN, the quality of the documentation varies. At some points it is very comprehensive and includes tutorials and guides and everything, and can be read as an introductory book. However, at other points it already assumes you know how to do what you want to learn, and only includes a very broad overview and reference information. Not that the documentation in most Linux or free/open source projects is much better in general, mind you...
• Update: I also want to correct my previous assertion that there was few documentation and my assumption that they kept it scarce on purpose for book publishers' sakes. It turns out there is plenty of documentation (see the point above), only that I didn't know how to find it, as it wasn't in the Express Edition help files. I think. Anyway, it's all online on MSDN.

On August 15th I had posted a story saying that I was going to use Windows more frequently, and that I was even going to learn how to program for Windows. Let's see how it's going:

Of all the differences between Windows and Linux, the one I notice the most is the lack, in Windows, of the “primary selection”. That's the technical term for the X-Window feature that allows you to select some text with the mouse and then paste it anywhere pressing the mouse wheel. I use that all the time in Linux, so in Windows I always forget to press Control-C and Control-V to copy and paste.

As I said before, I'm also learning how to program for Windows. At first I had downloaded Visual Studio C++ Express Edition (as it is free of charge), but it has so many limitations that it did actually get in my way. Fortunately, in Microsoft's web site there's an evaluation version of Visual Studio Professional Edition, which has all the features but also a 90-day limit, so I downloaded it (3 GB) and I'm using it now.

The program I'm writing is a Twitter client. Writing this program will allow me to work in many different parts of Windows, such as the user interface, network communications, APIs for interpreting XML and working with graphics, etc. It will be quite hard because I have to learn everything as I go, but I already managed to write a program that displays a window and can download data from Twitter and show it in the window in the same XML format it was received from the server in:

Ah, and I also played (and finished) World of Goo. That's a game about joining balls of goo forming structures to achieve an objective. It was made by four people on a 10,000-dollar budget, and it was very successful. It is truly a beautiful game, and it's worth it. Ah, and it works on Windows, Mac and Linux (and there are demo versions for the three architectures).

When I first arrived to Dublin, I was told that there were more taxis in Dublin than yellow cabs in New York city. Of course, I didn't believe that, so I asked for clarification: “per capita, or in absolute terms?” “In absolute terms” was the response. I didn't really believe that, but let the matter rest.

Until yesterday, that is. In conversation, the taxi subject came somehow and I finally decided to investigate the matter. I decided to count only licences for vehicles of the type commonly called “taxi” or “yellow cab”; this excludes hackneys, limos and so on.

• In County Dublin, as of 30 June 2009, there were 11,800 taxi licences (source: Taxi Regulator.
• County Dublin's population was 1,187,176 in 2006 (source: Central Statistics Office Ireland).
• In New York City there are 13,137 yellow medallion taxicabs as of today (source: New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission).
• New York City's population was 8,363,710 in 2008 (source: New York City Department of City Planning).

So, for the conclusions: Co. Dublin has roughly 12,000 taxis for roughly 1,200,000 people. That's 100 persons to a taxi. New York City, however, has roughly 13,000 taxis for roughly 8,400,000 people. That's 646 persons to a taxi. Therefore, Dublin has fewer taxis than New York City in absolute terms, but way more per capita. Had my friend said “per capita”, he would have been right.

I've been using Linux since the end of 1996. At first, like everybody else, I dual-booted between Windows 95/98 and Linux; however, when I bought a new computer back in 2004 I only installed Linux in it (even though I had set aside some room for a Windows partition, in the end I never got around to installing it), so I used Linux exclusively until I bought my new computer, one year ago.

This computer came with Windows Vista. I briefly thought about emptying the hard disk and installing Linux alone, but in the end decided to just reduce the size of the Windows partition and install Linux alongside it. This partition remained essentially unused until a couple of months ago.

A couple of months ago I noticed I had been bored when using my computer. After all, even with an Internet connection, there's a limit to the number of LOLcats one can look at in a day. So I remembered I had a Windows partition, and ordered the Orange Box. The Orange Box is a box, coloured orange (duh), containing several games (three episodes of Half-Life 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2, as far as I can remember). I completed Portal in four hours, tried Half-Life 2 (didn't like it very much, so I never got very far in it) and then started with Team Fortress 2, which I play and enjoy quite a lot.

Right before that, I had also bought a HD camcorder, to make all those little videos I post every once in a while. It turns out that all free video editing software for Linux sucks, but there was Microsoft Movie Maker in my Windows partition, which also sucks, but at least it works, so I could edit my videos, even if I could not do a lot of things.

Between those two things, I found myself using Windows quite a bit. Not quite a lot, mind you, but a fair bit nevertheless, so I wondered: “What would it be like using Windows more?”

One of the things I would like to try is Windows programming, so for an “authentic” experience I went and downloaded and installed Visual C++ Express, which is free (as in beer). In search of a tutorial to get me started, I opened the online help and clicked on a link promisingly titled “create your first Windows C++ application”, and sure enough, it was a page full of instructions on how to build a program that displays a window and shows “Hello, World!” However, the link for “Next step” wasn't titled “Add a button to the window” or “Make your application interactive” or something like that, which would be the obvious second step for a tutorial, but something like “Use the CLR from C++”.

I think I hit one of the differences in philosophy between the “Free Software” camp and the... well, the rest of the world. I'm assuming that there's a lot of companies publishing books with titles like “Learn Windows programming in 24 hours” or “How to study for your MSCE exam”, and they would get mightily upset if Microsoft included a comprehensive, free tutorial in Visual C++ Express.

So I caved in and bought two books: “Windows via C/C++” and “Windows Internals” (I'd prefer to do systems programming). I haven't opened them yet (there are still 350 pages left to finish “War and Peace”), but soon will.

I'll report back when I have more experience in this Windows thing.

Este vídeo-documental demuestra que el que juega con fuego (aunque sea virtual) a veces se quema.