The Law of the Instrument

"Give a small boy a hammer,
and he will find that everything
he encounters needs pounding."

Abraham Kaplan

From a fortune cookie...

"Trust is earned by many deeds."

My view of the USA / A minha visão dos EUA

After living 100 days in a medium sized town in the USA and visiting a big city (the size of a Big Apple ;-), I had a chance to form some opinions. Here they are.

Land of business

In America, everything is a business. Be sure that where there is a need, there is a business.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Good Ramadan, etc

America is a melting pot of different cultures from all over the world. Instead of trying to make "all the different, all the same", in the US there is a more pragmatic approach: "have a good X", where X stands for the religious holiday of your choosing. Now, let's make business selling you stuff for it!

L=XL

Large in USA equals Extra Large in Europe.

This is true for almost everything, like people, television sets and food.

cal x 2

Calories times two.

Not only is the food larger, it also has more calories (though not the double). However, the labeling is standard for all products and therefore is easier to read and understand. Now, if only you could resist those burgers with bacon and cheese and those huge muffin deserts with cream, chocolate and peanuts on top...

Car-based living

No car, no life, at least not a very healthy one. One example, if you don't have a car, you have a hard time buying fresh produce. You also have little chance to exercise. Everything is further away than you feel comfortable walking, especially in the cold.

1 dollar plus tax

Taxes are not hidden away. Actually, they "jump" at your wallet in every purchase. This means people are very aware of how much they spend on taxes. For this reason, it's almost always an issue on political campaigns and people demand more from their government.

It's the law

In general you feel there is more trust in people, for instance, stores let you walk in and out with stuff more freely. However, if you break the set rules, you will pay for it. It's not just an ethical issue; it's the law, and the way it is enforced. Sure, the system is not perfect, but it works most of the times. People know it and behave accordingly.

Can-do attitude

People are more relaxed and more open to new ideas. There is less formalism in professional relationships. People work very hard and are also very practical. Their "can-do" attitude is stimulating.

College is an opportunity: seize it!

Students have a clear notion of the value of college education (tuitions are very expensive), so they try to make the best of it. Before classes everybody reads-ahead so in class you get to discuss the interesting aspects of a subject, not the obvious ones. Also, students have many tasks at the same time and they learn to organize their work by themselves.

There are frequent talks between colleagues and it’s easier to collaborate and be more open to outside input. This also works as an informal evaluation, complementary to the formal processes.

Self-made men (and women)

Life in America is like a board game, where you can get rich from your work, turning your ideas into products, and products into money. The continental scale of the market and the quality of infrastructures makes it possible. However, to play the game properly, you have to know your duties as well as your rights, and be prepared to work! A lot!

/ This post is bilingual: English (U.S.) and Portuguese (Portugal) /

Depois de viver 100 dias numa cidade media dos EUA e de visitar uma grande cidade (do tamanho de uma Grande Maçã), tive oportunidade de formar algumas opiniões. Aqui estão elas.

Terra do negócio

Na América, tudo é negócio. Podem ter a certeza de que onde existe uma necessidade, existe um negócio.

Bom Natal, Feliz Hanukkah, Bom Ramadão, etc

Na América existe uma grande mistura de diferentes culturas de todo o mundo. Em vez de tentar fazer "todos diferentes, todos iguais", nos Estados Unidos adopta-se uma abordagem mais pragmática: "feliz X", onde X é uma festa religiosa à escolha. Agora, vamos fazer negócio a vender coisas para a festa!

L=XL

O tamanho grande dos EUA é igual ao extra-grande da Europa.

Isto é verdade para quase tudo, como as pessoas, ecrãs de televisão e comida.

cal x 2

Calorias vezes dois.

Não só a comida é maior, mas também tem mais calorias (apesar de não serem o dobro). No entanto, as etiquetas das embalagens são normalizadas para todos os produtos e portanto a informação alimentar é mais fácil de ler e compreender. Agora, se ao menos fosse fácil resistir aos hamburgers com bacon e queijo e aos queques gigantes com natas, chocolate e amendoins por cima...

Vida baseada no carro

Sem carro não há vida, ou pelo menos não há vida saudável. Por exemplo, se não se tiver carro, é difícil comprar produtos frescos. Não existem também muitas oportunidades para fazer exercício. Tudo é longe demais para ir bem a pé, especialmente no tempo frio.

1 dólar mais impostos

Os impostos não são escondidos. Na verdade, eles "atacam" a nossa carteira em cada compra. Isto significa que as pessoas têm muita consciência de quanto gastam em impostos. Por este motivo, os impostos são sempre um tópico de discussão nas campanhas políticas e as pessoas exigem mais do seu governo.

É a lei

Em geral sente-se que existe mais confiança nas pessoas, por exemplo, as lojas não chateiam quando se entra e sai com outros sacos e mochilas. No entanto, se se quebrarem as regras, paga-se por isso. Não é apenas um dilema ético, é a lei e a forma como é aplicada na prática. É certo que o sistema não é perfeito, mas funciona na maior parte dos casos. As pessoas sabem-no e comportam-se tendo isso presente.

Atitude de conseguir fazer

As pessoas são mais descontraídas e mais abertas a novas ideias. Existe menos formalismo nas relações profissionais. As pessoas trabalham muito e são normalmente muito práticas. A sua atitude de "conseguir fazer" (can-do) é entusiasmante.

A Universidade é uma oportunidade: aproveita-a!

Os estudantes têm uma noção clara do valor da educação universitária (as propinas são "a doer"), por isso tentam aproveitá-la o melhor que podem. Antes das aulas toda a gente lê o livro em adiantado, para que nas aulas se possam discutir os aspectos interessantes de uma matéria e não os óbvios. Também, os estudantes têm muitas tarefas ao mesmo tempo e aprendem a organizar o seu trabalho por si próprios.

Existem apresentações frequentes aos colegas e é mais fácil colaborar e acolher opiniões externas. Assim existe mais avaliação informal, complementar aos processos formais.

Homens (e mulheres) que se fazem a si mesmos

A vida na América é como um jogo de tabuleiro, onde se pode enriquecer a partir do trabalho, transformando ideias em produtos, e os produtos em dinheiro. A escala continental do mercado e a qualidade das infraestruturas torna-o possível. No entanto, para jogar o jogo como deve de ser, é necessário conhecer os deveres tão bem como os direitos, e estar preparado para trabalhar! Muito!

NBE55 videos

"A picture is worth a thousand words"
I guess this also applies to software tools :-)

Netbeans.org has some very interesting videos on NBE55.

NBE55

NBE55 is my acronym for Netbeans 5.5 Enterprise

I've been testing this IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for Java and BPEL development and so far I can say I'm positively impressed.

You can see the Netbeans team has invested great effort in improving their product. They have been able to survive Eclipse's offensive and now things are simpler and make more sense. I particularly liked the Ant integration. Everything is done with Ant and can be customized.

CFP - Call For Papers

Recently I collected links on journals and scientific conferences, in particular, about distributed systems, information systems and software engineering.

The index is available at:
http://mega.ist.utl.pt/~mflpar/cfp/

Please check journal or conference web page for up-to-date and accurate information.
Feel free to send corrections or suggestions.

WS-Map

The Web Services survey from my MSc thesis has been converted into a web site. I think it is a useful resource for people interested in Enterprise Applications with Web Services technology. The references are accurate as of July 2006, but will be updated in the near future.

The site address is the following:
http://mega.ist.utl.pt/~mflpar/ws-map

Bookmarks update

Hi,

Today I finished an update of my collection of web bookmarks / favorites.
You can check them out at: http://mega.ist.utl.pt/~mflpar/MFLP/links.html

I created 5 bookmark categories:
- useful pages
- news
- science & technology
- software
- fun & games

I was starting to have too many links for one page. This way I think things got more organized.

How do you store yours?

Organizing scientific research files

Until now, most of my scientific papers were written in a background context, like my MSc thesis or a course. So, all the conference and paper related files were stored in a subdirectory of the broader subject.

Now, I want to advance to a more research-centered approach to my work, so I need to organize my files in a more structured way for this purpose.

After some thinking and experimenting, the outline of the directory structure I’m using is the following:

/Research

-/ Conferences
-- disapproved.doc (list of disapproved conferences, for their questionable scientific merits)
--/
--- agenda.doc (list of incoming conferences for the year, including all relevant dates, including, sorted by submission deadline)
---/ (ex. IEEE ICWS)
---- url.txt (web address of conference web page)
---- desc.txt (conference name and topic keywords)
---- … (other conference related files: forms, rules of submission, templates etc.)

-/ Journals
… (similar to conferences)

-/ Researchers
--/ me (my research)
---/ presentations
----/
---- …
---/ publications
----/
---- … (my papers)
--/ other
---/ ,
---- …

I hope this way I can more easily store my files, helping me to work in a more practical approach, similar to what happened in the final stages of my MSc. If I target specific publications, I can use the conference’s deadlines as Occam’s razors for my work – keep it simple, keep it focused, reach results!

Let’s see if it works ;-)

Starting LaTeX

I wrote my MSc thesis in Microsoft Word, and took great advantage of Word’s easy to use features, especially the Outline view, that allowed me to hierarchically structure my document and to view it at a glance, during the writing process. However, the handling of references – a core aspect of scientific writing – was cumbersome, to say the least.

So, I decided to try the most used tool for writing scientific papers: LaTeX. Actually, LaTeX is one extension to the basic language TeX. Whereas TeX specifies basic text and math expressions formatting, LaTeX adds capabilities to structure documents, with indexes. Also, there is BibTeX to handle references. There any many library packages for TeX. In fact, its extensibility is one of its key features. You can find lots of information about these widely used tools on the Internet. However, beware; they are not in the same difficulty level as Word, because they require the use of the command prompt.

There is a myriad TeX variants, for different platforms. The most complete I found out for Windows is MiKTeX. The main command line tools are latex and pdflatex. The latter one produces output directly in PDF format.

I still haven’t actually written any full document, just a couple of tests, but I plan to do so in my future papers.

Best regards!