Angel's Egg - the home page of Eduardo Ochs (a.k.a. Edrx)

Welcome! I'm a mathematician, logician, categorist and type-theorist who used to do computer programming and Free Software activism in his spare time... I have a Free Software project that I consider extremely important, and I have decided that I have to spend a few years outside of the academic world working on day jobs related to Free Software in order to concentrate better on it and make it as usable and well-known as possible.

The world does need simpler ways to understand Type Theories and categorical models, true, but it desperately needs to reduce computer illiteracy and other illiteracies and to realize the importance of Free Software and Free Information. The Eev Project is an effort against illiteracies, and it has stayed underground for far too long; type theory will have to wait.

July, 2007: I am currently working full-time (or sort of) on IUP and on the DaVinci Project.

October, 2007: I am no longer working on DaVinci and IUP. I am working a tiny fraction of my time on Plurall, and I am finishing several important personal projects (BlogMe, Dednat4, DNC, eev, peek.lua). Expect releases soon. Cheers.

2007nov07: weird news - a round table that I was invited to speak at turned out to be about Digital TV, Digital Radio, Free Software and Education - and I haven't watched any TV, or listened to the radio, in at least 5 years... the details, and my notes (in Portuguese) are here.

December, 2007: I moved to São Paulo (São Caetano, actually) and I am working at Omnisys.

Quick index:
eev, that is a tool for automating almost everything,
dednat4, for typesetting trees and categorical diagrams,
my outdated page on categorical semantics,
BlogMe, that generates the html of these pages,
a list of all of my little (extensible) languages,
MiniForth and RubyForth (by Marc Simpson)
other programs in Lua and Forth,
other things related to Emacs,
my pages on Tcl/Tk/Expect, Icon, and (La)TeX,
how to contact me (and my CV),
my pages on (micro)politics, veganism and the CoE,
my personal pages.

(Note, 2007mar14: sorry, this site is currently a mess... I'm rewriting parts of the tools that I use to generate the pages in html - BlogMe and TH -, I'm adding an interactive mode to Dednat4, and I'm looking for a job...)

The eev project, computer tourism, and related topics (about making free information easier to use):

The 1979 paper about Emacs by RMS (*), Lisp Conference speech of 2002.

• The current version of eev:
  • The timestamp of the last upload.
  • Its README (slowly being replaced by TeXinfo docs).
  • How to INSTALL. Requires changing some rcfiles, but that can be done automatically and uninstalling is very easy.
  • eev-current.tar.gz; individual files at eev-current/.
  • Incomplete lists of changes: NEWS and ChangeLog.
• 2005may18: work in progress: an article about eev (html, pdf, ps.gz), called "Emacs and eev, or: How to Automate Almost Everything".
• 2005apr21: now eev has a mailing list at Savannah: http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/eev.
• Animations about eev in SWF format, created with vnc2swf:
  • 2005mar23: One about eev-bounded and GDB
  • 2005feb21: One about communication channels (to xterms)
• 2007oct04: eev-0.95.2 pre-announced without a tarball (INSTALL).
• 2007may22: eev-0.95.1 released. See: README-0.95.1.
• 2004dec31: eev-0.95.0 released.
• 2004apr02: eev-0.94.1 released.
• 2004mar25: eev-0.94.0 released.
• 2002jul21: eev-0.93a released.
• 2002may17: eev-0.93 released.
• 2001dec03: eev-0.92 released.
• 2001nov28: eev-0.91 released.
• 2001jul27: eev-0.90 released.
• Brave GNU World published an article about eev in #13.
• The original eev manifesto, written in december '99.
• Other old things:
  • A brief statement about tourism, and practical instructions for visiting my environment.
  • Why users should not exist (unfinished).
• Some e-scripts about the basic concepts of Tcl (in Portuguese).

Related projects: Howm (EmacsWiki, main, wiki, mailing list), rcirc, xnee

Mathematics, Logic and Semantics:

• 2005mar02: a new version of my math page.
• My old math page.
• Some old (and mostly broken) links on logic.
• Packages to help editing and TeXing maths on a computer:
  • vtutil4 (and its ancestor, vtutil) let us replace some characters of a console font by mathematical symbols.
  • For something related that works on X, see this posting in the eev mailing list. Source files: eev-glyphs.el, eev-math-glyphs.el.
  • A preprocessor for (La)TeX for typesetting categorical diagrams and deduction trees: dednat4. Its ancestors, like dednat.lua, supported only deduction trees; the first version was this one-hour hack written in Icon (I don't understand its code anymore).

Other computer things (mostly programs):

• Emacs:
  • Emacs is a Lisp environment that is excellent for editing all sorts of things. When coupled with Expect it can be used to edit (? - sorry, I couldn't find a better expression for that) our interactions with the system. Read more.
  • The site of the Church of Emacs has several nice links, curiously; one of the best serious ones is this text, "Why I became an Emacs user", by Charles Sebold.
  • My (outdated) Emacs page.
  • http://www.emacswiki.org/
• Operating systems and distributions:
  • Hurd Wiki at http://hurd.gnufans.org/
  • Ognyan Kulev's Hurd links
  • Debian GNU/Linux,
  • RedHat [GNU/]Linux
  • FreeBSD, NetBSD. I have never been able to install OpenBSD.
• I use Grub to boot all those OSs in the same machine.
• My favourite computer language is still Forth, even though there's no free implentation of it for GNU systems that I really like.
• I've been using Lua a lot, and I'm maintaining, together with other people, its Debian package.
• TeX and LaTeX.
• Icon, PostScript, HTML.
• Haskell and other functional languages.
• I have to use a bit of Perl from time to time, but I hate it.

Command-line interfaces

• My favorite computer interface is - of course! - GNU Emacs with eev, plus several shells running zsh in other virtual terminals, all that on a Debian GNU/Linux system. I use Linux VTs almost all the time, in true 80x50 text mode (no framebuffers). My VT tweaks:
  • vtutil, to change the console font, and to add some compose pairs to the keymap. I also use it to take screenshots.
  • compose.el lets me enter strange chars in Emacs.
  • glyphs.el lets me display strange chars in Emacs in nice ways.
  • A way to make TeX treat these strange chars in special ways.
  • My e-scripts on console things
• A nice (booklet-length) essay about CLIs, geek culture, and the different approaches to computers: In the Beginning it was the Command Line, by Neal Stephenson (html with notes).

September 11, 2001 - the inevitable happenned in an oh so glorious way
If you treat everybody else as an enemy you get an ulcer.
The American ulcer is bleeding (in the form of the falling of the twin towers), and it is no longer possible to just take a pill, find something external to blame, and forget about the problem.

(By the way: The seven levels of despair, by John Berger.)

2003mar20: Oh, no - they're destroying another country -
What we need is a world without the United States.
What have you been doing for that?

(More about this)