Peter Vandenabeele

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

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

Update: I have put the site in "sleep mode" in Sept 2008.

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

mysqldump for utf8 data

Update:

Upon further research, the real solution seems to be to add the following in the /etc/mysql/my.cnf file:

[client]
default-character-set=utf8
...

[mysqld]
default-character-set=utf8
default-collation = utf8_general_ci
...

Microsoft Office will suport ODF 1.1

Ha, thanks to rovin for pointing me to this article: "... Microsoft announced [that] ... Office 2007, Service Pack 2 will add native support for OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.1, ...".

I bet that will make it a lot easier to implement the Belgian directive for ODF exchanges between federal agencies. Also, it will make it a lot easier for me to convince partners to communicate with me in a ODF file format :-) (and not in .docx that I recently had to refuse)

Program ThinkTomorrow announced

The program for ThinkTomorrow was just announced.

ThinkTomorrow is a new European Conference about how companies have successfully implemented Web 2.0 elements into their online recruitment campaigns or sales & marketing departments.

At the end, there is a session with 8 start-ups bringing their "Elevator Pitch":

• Allejobsinleuven
• Synergetics
• Read more