Something I saw at “Doing a Project or Thesis at the PADX lab”:

A good attitude is necessary in every working environment. We also noticed that differences in culture make it necessary to explicitly state what we expect. Moreover, this works in both ways. We feel highly responsible to guide you in your work, but only in a correct relationship!

• Teamwork, ok! but how? It is all about communication, respect and fairness!
• Respect any agreement, stick to it, otherwise inform the person! If you have for example an appointment and you can’t come, inform as soon as possible. Similar, if you’re asked to do something, it’s better to admit you didn’t do it than to try to conceal it.
• In some cultures it is inappropriate to say no or to explicitly disagree. Bear in mind that this is totally the opposite in western modern professional culture: we expect people to say no if they disagree, it is almost impolite not to do so!! We think that a good relationship only works if we know what the other really thinks. So, don’t be surprised if you are criticized: we want to be honest and we belief criticism is the only way to learn from your mistakes.

It’s late as hell, my eyes are almost in blood and all I can remember is this poem from dhartmei’s page:

The computer center is empty,
Silent except for the whine of the cooling fans.
I walk the rows of CPUs,
My skin prickling with magnetic flux.
I open a door, cold and hard,
And watch the lights dancing on the panels.
A machine without soul, men call it,
But its soul is the sweat of my comrades,
Within it lie the years of our lives,
Disappointment, friendship, sadness, joy,
The algorithmic exultations,
The long nights filled with thankless toil,
I hear the echoes of sighs and laughter,
And in the darkened offices
The terminals shine like stars.

— Geoffrey James, The Zen of Programming

Via Bitaites I’ve been reading about the Intel Developer Forum (IDF). What really catched my attention was the video demo (find it on YouTube) of the game Alan Wake, sucessor of the well-known Max Payne.

Running on a overclocked Intel 2 Quad processor and with a Nvidia Geforce 7900GTX, the graphics and effects are truly mind-blowing. When they turn On the “tornado feature” you just can’t keep your eyes from the video :)

Just check it out and be amazed!

The other day I was surfing through del.icio.us (a social bookmarking website) and clicked on a user that had a fair amount of links organized in a strange way that I wasn’t familiar with, something along the lines of this:

I then quickly found what I had been missing is known as ‘bundle tags’ and permits organizing the tags into categories (the so called bundles).

I’m now also adding friends to my ‘network’ there. It’s useful because if I find a link about X or Y and remember one of my friends I can recommend the link to he/she just the clicking ‘Tag this page’ (via the firefox extension) and write ‘for:username‘. That’s it.

If you don’t want your friends sneaking up all your bookmarks you can always turn the privacy option in your profile so there’s really no reason not to be using this already ;)

So if you have a del.icio.us user send it to me, mine is morgadinho.

I finished my graduation in computer science last year (July 2005). In September 2005 I started assisting the course of Data Warehousing at the University as a so-called colaborator, a no-so-good status quo but good enough for me since it would give me time during the week (3 hours per week) to work on a MSc. It was a cheerful experience which I enjoyed and from which I learned a lot of things. Teaching gives a whole new perspective on the material since you really have to know, you can’t know more or less.

In the semester that followed I started assisting a different course – digital systems. It certainly isn’t one of my main interest areas but as someone who loves computers and technology I found interesting and challenging problems that gave me a lot of work but also a lot of fun solving and teaching. As a professor I find the relation professor-students one of the most rewarding experiences. Making them think and pose questions. Showing how one big problem that seems unsolvable to them can be reduced simply to a trivial one when approaching it in the right way.

As the semester ended and I went into summer vacations (July 2006) my MSc work was going as expected and I had a lot of items to work on. I didn’t do almost anything useful till early September for the MSc but I had a great vacations. At least great enough to not feel they were short.

In early September I came back to Évora to catch up with my MSc advisor and to work on my thesis. I was also expecting to get payed for my work at the University (between March till July 2006) since the last payment I received from them was on March! Till today I haven’t received anything yet, which makes a total of 6 months without payment.

Me and my girlfriend in the same situation knew we didn’t want to continue living like this and both agreed on not accepting any further offers from the University. We were even advised by faculty people that the next semester would be even worse since no funds had been allocated to pay colaborators.

The plan right now is to finish my MSc thesis. Luckily my parents can support me while I don’t finish this milestone in my life but I can’t say I’m not heavily dissapointed by the inefficiency of the University as an institution. But running through my life right now I don’t regret a thing.