Yesterday I was talking to a friend of mine about human resources (HR), team management and human handling. She has a degree in education and was talking about some seminars she attended about those matters. The speakers were mostly HR leaders of new technologies driven enterprises. The conclusion of our discussion was that unfortunately in many companies there are still inadequate HR staff, policies and management. I decided to put all our discussed ideas together and write down this little mash-up with the goal of helping some confused minds that may randomly end up at this post.

I will catalogue the tips according to 2 different approaches: "Choosing and Hiring People" and "Managing and Handling People".

I am deeply shocked with such attitude. No words. I am such against traditional bullfights in Southern Europe (Tourada in Portugal and Corridas in Spain) but I think I have found much more barbarian acts in a country which, by definition, is (or should be) more civilised than European Latin Countries. Well... I was so wrong.

Ladies and Gentlemen, you may not know but there are still Barbarian (capitalised) that have past through Middle Ages and even Modern Era. Today, 2009, there are still stupid traditions where some stupid young men have to torture to death defenceless dolphins and whales just to prove they are adults. I am sorry, what? Adults? Hasn't human insanity any limits? I can understand why such acts are still unpunished, and I think they don't either. In fact, judging the crowd assisting to that carnage, they think they must be doing something great. Killers. Murderers. Shameless living species.

This sad scenario happens in Faroe Islands which are a kind of independent country which is in fact autonomous province of Denmark. Even if they aren't officially part of the European Union, I thin it's urgent that our well paid Members of the European Parliament to do something because Danish government seems to close their eyes over this (they still have the legal responsibilities over Faroe). So please, please try to spread the word with this post or other you discovered on the Web.

It has to stop... yesterday!

[Update] I found a petition here: http://www.petitiononline.com/Dolphend/petition.html. Please sign.

I let you with some images so you can have an idea about what's going on there. Hold your breath and your stomach too. Please see it all.

Today I was installing a module within CPAN and I got systematically the same error ending as following:

Catching error: "Undefined subroutine &Compress::Zlib::gzopen called at /System/Library/Perl/5.8.8/CPAN/Tarzip.pm line 122.\cJ" at /System/Library/Perl/5.8.8/CPAN.pm line 359
CPAN::shell() called at /usr/bin/cpan line 198

After consulting my "Perl menthor" (hehe!), he asked me if I had installed the 2009-001 Mac OS X Security Update. Well it seems that this Update troubles the IO module.

Let me explain: each time you run an update with Software Update, it simply overrides your existing files. This is the main reason you shouldn't override the system Perl installation with a fresh one compiled from source, for instance.

So, getting back to our subject, let me explain how I solved that.

No I'm not talking about love pain issues or some romantic failure I had with my girlfriend. She didn't switched me! She made it: she finally is a Mac user! :)

Wtf am I so happy? Because. (only real old school mac fan boys/girls are able to understand, sorry)

Well, she always used window$ (XP and Vi$ta) until she met me. Then she began to use Linux; first Debian on my old Pentium 3, then Ubuntu on her laptop. She liked it but she didn't used it as I expected, so she didn't switched :(

As her laptop has so many problems, she decided to buy a new one. I tried to convince her to buy the new MacBook white 2.0 but she told she wasn't ready to switch. Not yet. She was interested on a pink Sony Vaio for which she felt in love. But fate wanted the story to be different. After many difficulties and upsets, three days ago she saw that she could have a pink Mac. She quickly forgot the Vaio and next day we went to the store.

Today she opened the thin white box to discover the newcomer which directly was introduced to the house elders: my PowerMac G3, my PowerBook G4 12'' and my MacBook aluminium unibody 13''.

First astonishment: the nice user configuration and the friendly welcome video. After that, I showed her the Desktop and I took her for a quick tour through Preferences panes. There was her first "it's organised, clear and just the way it has to be". She asked me how to do some window$-like actions. That's where I stopped her and told her "This is a Mac, so we just do it Mac way".

Then she began to install apps. Second astonishment: no need to have a wizard with ten (or more) boring steps to confirm you really really really do want to install it! You just drag and drop and that's installed!

Finally she played around with iPhoto. After having take a look to the introduction video she was already exploring the app and enjoying its brand new features like faces and places.

I think she's happy with her new toy. Let's see how she evolve through the Mac world :)

Antes de propor uma explicação linear, seria interessante apresentar uma citação que, após devidamente argumentada, poderá servir para orientar a resposta final:

The grammar needed to specify a programming language can be classified by its position in the Chomsky hierarchy. The syntax of most programming languages can be specified using a Type-2 grammar, i.e., they are context-free grammars.

Michael Sipser (1997). Introduction to the Theory of Computation. PWS Publishing. ISBN 0-534-94728-X. Section 2.2: Pushdown Automata, pp.101–114.

Nela surge o conceito de classificação de uma gramática. Essa classificação é -- não só -- efectuada através de formas normais que servem de moldes onde se podem encaixar as produções de uma gramática.

Formas Normais de Gramáticas