My name's Paulo Ricardo Paz Vital, but all my friends call me only Paulo. I born in 1980 in Pirassununga, SP, Brazil, when my father was working there in the Brazilian Air Force Academy (AFA). After some places where my family lived, I finished my high school at the Military School of Campo Grande (CMCG) in 1998.

In 2003, I obtained my BSc graduation in Computer Engineering from Dom Bosco Catholic University (UCDB). During my graduation ceremony, I was congratulate with a award offered by Brazilian Computer Society (SBC). The award is called "Aluno Destaque" (Best Student), and more informations about it can be find here.Unhappyly the pictures of the awarding, was accidentally deleted by the photographer :-(

At the moment, I'm living with my wife in Campinas, SP where I am working as Software Engineer at IBM Linux Technology Center (LTC).

About me and GNU/Linux

When I started my BSc program (1999) I discovered the GNU/Linux operating system and the Free Software reading a maginze. So I liked what I read and decided try to install and use the brazilian distro Conectiva Linux.

In November, 2002 I installed Debian GNU/Linux in my machine, I really liked this distro. In January, 2005 I tried to install Gentoo GNU/Linux, to learn a little more about this nice distro. I liked this distro, there is a good package system like Debian, but because some performance problems in my machine, I came back to use Debian in January, 2006. Today I'm using the testing release of the Debian, called lenny.

In the most Unix-like operating systems, there is a space in the file system tree called /home or simply ~ (til). This space is used for all users system to save their personal files, making the file system tree more organized and clear.

So, the ~pvital or /home/pvital, is the special space for the user pvital (my nickname since I started in computation).

Using this idea, I decided to denominate my website name as "~pvital", the space where I can save some files in the Internet.

• GRÊMIO FOOT-BALL PORTO ALEGRENSE (in portuguese)
• Tupi or Not Tupi, That's Not the Question (in portuguese)
• REPETITIVE STRAIN INJURIES: What You Absolutely Need to Know (PDF)
• News of my awarding (in portuguese)
• The Lenna Story (the story of the picture most widely used in standard tests for image compression algorithms)
• My Google Pages Web Site
• More pages

See the ChangeLog of this site here.