| |
About me
Welcome to my place!
My name is Juan Vuletich. I live with my
family in
Buenos Aires, Argentina. My main interests are Smalltalk programming,
Image and Signal Processing, Graphics and Music.
I hold a Ms. Sc. in Computer Science from the University
of Buenos Aires. I specialized in Image and Signal Processing. My
thesis “New bases for music processing in the time-frequency
domain” is about a new representation for digitized music,
akin
to wavelet transforms, and useful for many manipulations that
“sound good”. You can read more at Time-Frequency Representations.
I lead the development of Cuis, an open source Smalltalk environment. I've been member of the Squeak
open source Smalltalk community for a long time. My contributions there include the
port to the OS/2 Operating
System, the PhotoSqueak image processing framework, the JPEG
reader, the separation of Morphic in 3 packages: Morphic, MorphicExtras
and Etoys, and some writing here and there. I have some stuff that is
waiting to be published, including the extraction of the
Numeric Linear
Algebra and Statistics from PhotoSqueak, and various enhancements to
the music synths, including a library of orchestral sounds.
I’ve been programming since I was 14, and doing it for a
living
since I was 18. Since 1997 I’ve only programmed in Smalltalk,
with just a few excursions to C and Java for support to Smalltalk
environments, and some machine code for low level fun. I’ve
had
the incredible honor of joining Alan Kay's Squeak Central team at Walt
Disney Imagineering for an internship. I also worked at IBM, Telecom
Argentina and several smaller companies.
I've been a researcher at the Department of
Computer Science
at the University of Buenos Aires for several years, doing further work
along
the lines of my thesis and publications.
I helped organize the Buena
Señal group,
a place for talking about digital signal processing in Spanish.
You can write me to  .
Click on this link to get my résumé.
These are some things I've done that I'm proud of (in sort of chronological order)
1974, age 3: By the time I turned 4, I could read and write fluently.
1980, age 9: Successfully built a differential with Lego, after struggling with the problem for several days.
1981,
age 10: Despite a Catholic education, concluded that religion was not
giving me real answers and declared myself an agnostic. My position
w.r.t. religion hasn't changed much after many years of curious study
of history, philosophy and religion.
1983, age 12: Built my first crystal radio.
1984,
age 13: While trying to solve an elemental computer programming problem
at school (adding an arithmetic progression), together with a friend, I
rediscovered the famous trick that C. F. Gauss discovered when he
was 8.
1985, age 14: Travelled alone from Argentina to the USA
to visit a friend. Not a technical achievement, but quite a challenge
for a kid.
1986, age 15: Hacked my Tandy CoCo and BW TV to use
composite video, avoiding the RF modulator for higher image quality.
This was before formal training in Electronics.
1986, age
15: Software high resolution character generator allowing 24 lines of 64
characters on the Tandy CoCo, instead of the 16 lines of 32
characters mode supported by hardware. Integration with the assembly language programming
environment. This and all the software hacking I did as a teenager was
before any formal training in Programming or Computer Science.
1987,
age 16: Reverse engineering and hacking enabling a 7 bit ASCII only word
processor (VIP-Writer) and printer (DMP-105), to display and print
Spanish alphabet, including acute accents. It was the only
multilingual word processor for the CoCo.
1987, age 16: Real
time music synthesizer in 6809 assembly language. Supporting 4 voices,
many instruments, envelopes, and time varying timbres.
1988, age
17: Co-produced, authored and published "CoCoMania" the only magazine
in Spanish devoted to assembly language and low level hacking on the
CoCo.
1988, age 17: Real time sampler in 6809 assembly language.
Independently reinvented and implemented DSD (Direct Stream Digital)
audio.
1988, age 17: Reverse-engineered and hacked a few cassette games for the CoCo to remove copy protection.
1988,
age 17: Designed and partially built an EPROM programmer, a digital
tester / osciloscope and a 256kb memory expansion for the 64kb CoCo.
1990:
Mandatory military service. They said that the way to get out early was
to have good scores in evaluations. Even if I always disliked armies
and strict command hierarchies, and I refused to attend to religious
services, I got the highest evaluations in my battalion and was awarded
the "Military Virtues Prize" medal.
1997: Ported the Squeak VM to the OS/2 operating system.
1999:
Real time music processing with 100 microsecond latency, controlled
from Squeak, on a standard audio card with custom driver and VM plugin
software.
1999: Networked direct manipulation Scrabble game hacked in 2 weekends.
2000: PhotoSqueak and PhotoSqueak2 - Image Processing lab for Squeak.
2000: Internship with Alan Kay's Squeak Central group at Disney.
2001:
New music synthesizer for Squeak, with Moog (resonant) and smooth
filters controlled by envelopes. Emulation of orchestral string sounds.
2003-2005:
Thesis: "New bases for Music Processing in the time-frequency plane".
Additional research on Time / frequency representations of audio for
better DSP. See Time-Frequency Representations.
2005:
M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Buenos Aires, with
honors (Gold Medal and Honor Diploma). GPA 9.78 / 10.0.
2006:
NiceFonts: Innovative use of existing BitBlt rules for high quality
text rendering, handling sub-pixel anti-aliasing, colored text,
translucent text and various Display depths (adopted later as the
default fonts in Squeak and derivatives).
2006-current: Morphic 3
2008-current: Cuis Smalltalk
|
|
