December 2008

Back up

Wednesday, 31 December, 2008 - 16:54

Here I am again!

I have changed my web site software once again. Now this website is multilingual. Some of the work I had to do for the “multilingualism” consists in translating the user interface. That is the texts I didn't write but which came with the program instead. As I use Drupal, the work consists, mainly, in exporting a .PO file, editing it with kbabel, and then importing it back.

An interesting fact: did you know that the Drupal translation import/export function was first implemented by me?

It was 2003 (I think), and at work we were going to make a website for a customer using Drupal. One of the conditions was that the site had to be in Spanish. Drupal already had support for translating the interface, but I had to do the translations on the web, which was slow and uncomfortable. Moreover, it was not possible to share translations in any way other than performing a database dump and restoring it in other machine.

As I had already been translating free software into Galician, I was already familiar with the Gettext format and toolkit, so I wrote a module to export and import translations in Gettext format, I submitted it to Drupal, they published it, other people improved it, and they finally integrated the functionality in the Drupal core.

So, every time you download a Drupal translation and import it, remember that this functionality was first introduced by me :)

Legal stuff

Credits

Unless otherwise specified, all contents of this website were created by Jacobo Tarrío.

The page layout is based on the “Holy Grail” layout described by Matthew Levine at http://www.alistapart.com/articles/holygrail. Most of the mark-up is stock Drupal mark-up.

The header background image is based on “Leaf 2”, a photo published by ”A writer afoot” under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license at http://flickr.com/photos/60255232@N00/2865561061/.

The software used for this website is Drupal, running on top of the Apache web server and the Debian distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system.

Privacy statement

I won't sell or give away any of your data.

Terms of use

Don't be an asshole. If you are an asshole, I will take measures to force you off the site.

About me

I was born on the 24th of March, 1979, in Santiago de Compostela, the capital of Galicia, a region in Northwestern Spain.

I live in Dublin (Ireland), where I work as a software engineer for Google Ireland (but any opinions expressed in this website are mine alone, not my employer's). If you'd like to know what I did before, I have a condensed version of my résumé available.

My name is pronounced [xaˈkoβo taˈrio] in Spanish, although I tend to pronounce my first name [xaˈkɔβo].

If you'd like to send me an email, my address is my name at my surname dot org. You can also use the contact form.

Quick Résumé

My name is Jacobo Tarrío.

I studied Computer Engineering (Ingeniería Informática) from 1997 to 2003 at the University of Corunna (Spain). It is a five-year University degree, with a degree project. My degree project was a web portal for accessing Grid supercomputing resources.

After that, I worked at the following places:

  • At Alfa21 Outsourcing (Corunna, Spain) from January 2003 to March 2003 as a part-time programmer, and then from July 2003 to February 2005 as a full time software engineer.
  • At Allenta Consulting (Corunna, Spain) from March 2005 to June 2007 as a software engineer.
  • At Google from July 2007 to January 2010 in Dublin, Ireland, and then from January 2010 to the present day in Mountain View, California; both times as a software engineer.

I also took part in the following volunteer projects:

  • I was one of the founders of the GPUL (Linux user group of the University of Corunna) in 1998, and was a member of its board until 2004.
  • I was one of the creators of the Proxecto Trasno, a project for translating free software into Galician, and was its coordinator until 2004. I translated several GNU utilities, several Mozilla applications (SeaMonkey, Firefox) and the Debian installer. I retired from the project in 2008.
  • I was a Debian developer from 2001 to 2008.

Other relevant information: I am an EU citizen. I speak English, Spanish and Galician. I also have a basic knowledge of Portuguese and French.

Quines

Sunday, 14 December, 2008 - 10:27
Quines are programs that print out their own source code. I have made some, and you might like to have a look if you know how to program.

CAPTCHAs

Tuesday, 2 December, 2008 - 23:07
CAPTCHAs not only serve to let people in and keep computers out.