Peter Vandenabeele

The "Rails Hotel" on AirBed&Breakfast

Thanks to a hint from @fotograaf I discovered the site AirBed&Breakfast. The idea looked great, analog to the "fosdem hotel" we had in the early years 2000 at Mind (*).

So, I subscribed to the AirBed&Breakfast and because I had to give it a name, I choose the "Rails Hotel" (well, my home is near the train station and by train, we are only 30 minutes of direct traing away from Brussels centre).

Welcome to the "Rails Hotel"!

Trapeze

Terug van Bombannes, vlakbij Bordeaux. Een stage
Catamaran Perfection 2-3 gevolgd en voor de eerste keer trapeze gedaan op een Catamaran. Soms met 2 wanneer er volop wind was. Spijtig genoeg geen foto's beschikbaar (in het midden van het meer bij strakke wind op een Catamaran was een fototoestel niet echt aangewezen, mijn horloge ligt nu al ergens op de bodem), maar het ziet eruit zoals op deze video:

New version of allejobsinleuven.be (9 July 2008)

On July 9, 2008 I published a new version of the http://allejobsinleuven.be site with some new features:

• full text search in 700+ jobs at employers in high-tech and ICT
• search 100+ employers in high-tech and ICT in Leuven
• search in job_location: that is the location of the effective execution of the job
• first jobs outside Leuven
• semi-automatic follow-up of jobs published on the job pages of employers in the region

Aandelen: de juiste tijd ?

De kogel is door de kerk. Na een paar jaar wachten aan de zijlijn zonet terug ingestapt in aandelen. Pakketten gekocht van Fortis (aan 9.75), Dexia (aan 9.67), een BRAZIL fonds van KBC (aan 897 EURO/stuk) en een UK fonds van KBC (aan 249 UK Pound/stuk).

Workaround for an REXML bug in 1.8.6 (does not find non-namespace qualified attribute names)

I was fighting for some time with the problem that a certain type of XPath query did not work correctly in REXML Ruby 1.8.6. Specifically, this type of query

top_pattern = "//*[@id=\"content\"]"
REXML::XPath.each(xml_body,top_pattern) do |xml_entry|
...
end

did not yield any results if top_pattern selects based on attribute names. It did work when top_pattern only contained descriptions of the style:

top_pattern = "/html/body/table/tbody/tr[2]/td"

AllejobsinLeuven 2.0 => AllejobsinVlaanderen

Below is my current vision for AllejobsinLeuven 2.0 => AllejobsinVlaanderen. I would very much appreciate your feedback, preferably as public comments below, but private comments are welcome too.

What is the problem?

I want to solve two problems for job seekers, initially focusing on the high-tech and ICT sectors:

1. while we all know there are lots of jobs available, there is currently no way to get a clean, complete list of all relevant jobs and employers in a certain area (like a "telephone directory of jobs")
2. and even when we do have a complete list, there is no organized way to know upfront (optimally before sending out the CV) how well the employer's company/management style will fit with the expectations of the job seeker.

Shallow string copies in Ruby

I got stung today by the shallow copies in Ruby. The problem is demonstrated in this snippet:

a="raam"; b=a ; b.squeeze!; puts a # --> ram
a="raam"; b=a ; b[0..1]="tr"; puts a # --> tram
a="raam"; b=a ; a[0..1]="tr"; puts b # --> tram


What seems to happen is that b is only a shallow copy of a. Actually, this behavior is much closer to the string behavior that I know well from C/C++ programming than I had expected for a "pointer-less" language. So, it seems still usefull to understand pointers (and strcpy for that matter), even for Ruby...

Presentations thinktomorrow.eu online

The presentations from thinktomorrow.eu are online. This also includes my short presentation on allejobsinleuven.be among the elevetar pitches of Allejobsinleuven, Synergetics, Xpertize, Paladares, Wwaow, Wygwam, Whatever/Knowledge Plaza, iStockcv, IntroNiche and Winkwaves.

Hoe best Sociale bijdragen betalen in je eerste jaren als voltijds zelfstandige (en het nut van een "reset")

Op een vraag van Serge, net even dit geantwoord, wat vermoedelijk voor meer mensen nuttig kan zijn als inzicht:

Placing the "allejobsinleuven.be" experiment "on-hold"

Update 2008-06-21:
I just posted my ideas for the 2.0 version of allejobsinLeuven, which are seriously based on the experiences from version 1.0 and the many nice feedbacks I got on this message, both in public and in private. So, this is churning, churning, churning : killing one idea and let it be the start of the next idea, hopefully better than version 1.0!
End of update