kamme

I always got jobs through tips from friends, I don't like recruiters and such to be honest.

I always feel they don't care for my jobhappyness, while friends won't advice a bad job (or at least not on purpose).

I think you're looking at woman as they where a computer. There is no logic, there are feelings. I know it's pretty hard to explain, but look around you. I know quite a few normal guys, better looking then me who never have girlfriends, not because they don't want but just because.

Trust me on this one, it's not logical, but hey, love just isn't...

For my personal development at home I use an old asus eeepc 900 as my tiny server. I've taken it apart to remove the screen and used ubuntu mini.iso to install CLI mode + apache2, MySQL and php5. I use apache with mod_vhost_alias to map a directory structure to hostnames automatically so developing/testing a project is very easy. My apache webroot folder is actually a folder in my dropbox, so my code is automatically backed up too.

I have a macbook (a 13" unibody) with the dropbox account and MAMP to develop on (type the code). I usually mount the folder of the project I'm working on, on the macbook and turn off dropbox to go easy on the syncing.

Lately I tend to go more to my linux roots (I was a linux only user for quite some years before I bought the macbook) so I bought an asus 1005P and put ubuntu on it, again with mod_vhost_alias and dropbox. I must admit it's a great little machine and it has almost 8hrs of battery time, wich is a real plus.

For me developing is something I should be able to do anywhere, at all time. Hence the rather unconventional development environment...

1) I started with BASIC/QBASIC, assembler, some C, html/css, javascript, php and then some python. Later at school I got C/C++, Java and VB.NET but by then I was already web development for quite some time. 2) At first I only had old books from my local library, hence the BASIC/QBASIC, assembler and C. Later they ordered new books on the 'new HTML 4.0' and soon I started doing js and php as well. 3) no not really, although I did have projects of my own most of it was purely for fun. To be honest, it only struck me after a year or so I was programming, before that I was only trying stuff out. I think that's an important part of the deal, having fun and just trying new things. 4) I was on my own, I didn't have anyone behind me to teach me... 5) To be honest I think should have focused more on C/C++, but I absolutely don't regret being a web developer, I would hate being a C/C++ developer I think. I don't know why, just a feeling...

About helping your nephew, try to make him see it as a game and have some fun. Explain that the computer does whatever he wants, he only has to program it himself. If the application, in whatever language it is written, doesn't run, you have a 99.9% change it's your own fault.

This probably sounds strange, but for me it would be as from the moment the sandwiches aren't free anymore.

Let me clarify: I don't think it's something measurable, it's when you start noticing small things like, for example, sandwiches aren't free anymore or drinks after work with the whole team are cancelled because the founders have to go to meetings with clients/investors for the 4th time in a row. It's just small things...

Emakina in Brussels, Belgium is also having various jobopenings: http://emakina.com/company/career.cfm

They include flash, php, designers, PM's, ... You can mention them k ausloos send you.

It's interesting but also very logical when you think about it. When people are hesitating to invest in products, bad idea's are more likely to not get past the initial funding rounds and die.

Wealth breeds losers, tough times make winners.

I'm one of those few Belgian visitors too.

There is also @hkrnws ( http://twitter.com/hkrnws ). It posts 1 update every 10 minutes.

Great idea, but as I suggested on your website, you should have a favicon. It's part of the identity of a website. If you don't have it, it feels like something is missing.

I don't see why they shouldn't replace the battery. To be quite honest, everytime my girlfriend or I had trouble with an apple computer it was fixed without any cost. I do call tech support myself, I ask the telephone number and take care of it. The way I see it, direct communication leaves out more space for errors.

I don't know if this has anything to do with the fact I live in Belgium and warranty is 2years, I've had issues with my battery a couple of times but batteries don't fall under the 2year warranty so they aren't forced to replace it.

Emakina, one of the lead interactive agencies of Belgium, Europe is hiring too:

http://emakina.com/company/career.cfm

developers, testers, editors, motion designers, webdesigners, ... They are based in Brussels, but have jobs for Antwerp, Ghent, France and the Netherlands!

OT: some feedback, I'm on a 1200x800 screen and there is a scrollbar that serves no purpose. I changed the margin of #container to margin:50px auto auto; and the scrollbar is gone. Or you could make the top margin like 5% to behave better on bigger screens. Not much else to say except nicely done!

Lately I've become a big fan of AIR, they make great instrumental tracks, as well as songs with lyrics. I tend to listen to the soundtrack of the virgin suicides quite a lot. Many people don't like the atmosphere of their music, but I feel as if I get their songs. I also like the soundtrack of donnie darko, the mood is quite unique, haven't discovered it anywhere else. I don't know why but that kind of music doesn't distract me at all and makes me calm and more productive.

I've been thinking about buying a X25-M, but prices are a bit too high for me at the moment. I'd better go to the US for a day and buy all the gadgets/computer equipment I want and go back, it will be cheaper then buying everything here in europe (plus it's good for the US economy!)

My personal top 3 is:

- getting into shape (it's needed, but I'm starting that tomorrow)

- persisting (in everything, 2years ago I was getting in a better shape, but see #1)

- live greener (we already use 1/2 of electricity a normal family uses, but I know we could do better)

That's it. And the best part is I can do all 3 things, it's not something I will never be able to do. Better start working on them!

Here (Belgium, Europe) it's also unbearable slow most of the time. It even made me use imap to fetch mail. That seems to be unaffected by the slowness, so I guess they are only having issues with the front-end. That or they are re-factoring/changing the way it works.

I'm having the problem for a couple of weeks now by the way.

-- Edit: Just thought of it, wave could have something to do with it...

I use slitaz mainly, works great and fast... Smallest distro I know that is still very usefull (better then dsl imho).

I also have an ubuntu laptop, still running 8.10 but I'll be upgrading soon. And my main machine is a macbook running X.6.

Thank you in advance!

http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/d?k=01PIo-BeYPi2cB-yIcwtz8hA==...

There are also quite a number of jobsites in Belgium, but most of them are for one language, so dependent on witch part you live:

In dutch: http://www.vacature.com - http://www.vdab.be - http://monster.be - http://stepstone.be

In french: http://www.references.be - http://www.leforem.be

Hope they are usefull!

My girlfriend ordered some cards from moo as well, they where very good quality (non glossy) and delivered pretty fast too. Probably they are not the cheapest one around, but all in all she was very pleased with them...

First of all, we have coffee places, just like in the US. But as far as I know, we tend not to bring our laptop along. I certainly never did it and I never saw it either. I must admit I'd rather read a book then take my laptop along...

Now, about the politics, yes it's true there where a lot of political problems concerning the separation of Belgium into 2 separate countries. Today (almost) nothing has changed. The issues the news reported about back then are still not 'solved'. It's just old news for the media and the people got tired of it so nothing happens anymore. But to give my personal opinion, there never was any problem. To me all the fuss was just to get some media attention for the elections back then and things got a bit out of control. The big problem should be between flanders and walloon, the 2 big parts of the country. But many of my colleagues are walloon and I have absolutely no problem with them at all, why should I? So my opinion about the whole issue is: it was just some publicity stunt. Sure we hear all the time there are 'issues' and flanders is giving (some politicians even call it wasting) a large sum of money to the walloon but I see it in a bigger picture. And as far as I know, that's the main issue about politics.

The last answer, the startup culture. To be honest, as I see it, there are 2 big cities with startups at the moment in flanders: Antwerp and Ghent. You also have Brussels but it's really expensive to live there, if you want to live in a 'better part' of the city. Starting up is not so hard, just get a BTW number (it's a special tax number), fill in some papers and you are working for yourself. The thing is, taxes are rather high so you tend to have less money left. Of course you have an upside too, if you should fail, you can apply for unemployment benefits and even take courses for free (they even pay you to do it in some instances). The typical startup here is different in the sense that here you don't make a web application that attracts a lot of people/investors, you make applications for clients. A group of people I worked with recently started their own little company ( http://1md.be/ ) and as you can see they follow that principle. I guess Belgium is just too small to do it the US way, it's even worse if you know websites from flanders who are immensely popular are not popular at all in walloon and the other way around. So in conclusion, I don't think we have the same startup environment as 'you guys'. If you should move only for that, I think you're in for a bit of a disappointment. Of course that's from my point of view!

Hope this answers your questions, if not let me know!

There are a lot of different ways to help. Most people think the best way to help is to fix bugs or do code cleanup. While this is true, it's also very important to help other users. I send quite some time on a Linux distro forum and helped other people there. Same on IRC, I tried to help a lot of beginning users start mIRC scripting. It might not have been the most exciting things to do for most people, but I've been thanked a lot for doing simple things like giving a kind response and doing some effort to help other people. And after all, I'd rather work with some software if I know there is a good community of users to help.

Well, I guess it depends on your situation.

Let me take my situation to explain: I see myself as a non-traditional web developer during my own free time. I like to work at various locations (my desk, sofa, bed, outside, library, ...). But at my normal, regular work, I'm just a traditional developer who demanded a dual screen set-up at the job interview.

So you have to ask yourself, are you the more traditional type who does work at a desk? You're better off with a large screen area/desktop. If your desk doesn't matter for you and you're just going to work on a lot of various locations I'd say, go for the laptop. Just for the record, you will notice some people said they used laptops with external monitors. You should ask yourself if you will ever use the machine as a real laptop, because if you don't, you'll probably be off cheaper with a regular desktop due to better upgrade opportunities/longer life in general.

It depends on how you want to work, user based or just in general.

You can get all tweets from a specific person (this would be handy for a website where you sign up for) with a certain keyword, or just get them all and scan server side.

On the other hand, you can for example scan for popular developers hashtags (like #ruby, #php, #linux, etc) or just request recent tweets and scan for what you need. These 2 solutions would be perfect for a general scan.

I'm currently working with the twitter api for a small personal project and it's pretty flexible, you have quite a lot of possibilities...

They explain it here:

http://www.shedsforliving.co.uk/

Choose options => FAQs => 05 How do we connect to the services

Basically they say it's easy + for a cost you can make it independent of any services.

I've always been very interested in this kind of housing. To be honest, I have the feeling I will build myself a house like this one day. I can probably find a small patch of land at a reasonable price about an hour driving and take a small loan to build it. I lived in a 12 square meter studio for 3 years, this seems heaven in contrast to that. Mix it with solar panels and you have a very nice place to call home...

This is very interesting, it shows there is much research to be done in this field.

A windmill is not just a windmill, if you see some can offer the same results with far less numbers it's twice as good since you don't need all the extra resources and maintenance!

Some people tend to forget that in order to create a windmill you ask a lot of nature too, so just placing a lot of them doesn't help, you have to place the correct one on the correct place.

I must admit I like having some time off too, away from all those distractions. But on the other hand, if I don't have my cellphone, emails, meetings, ... I often feel out of control because I don't know the status of issues.

I like to think there is a time for everything, and as said in the article, I think people with ADD sometimes just don't manage that time correctly. Of course I'm not saying ADD doesn't exist, but sometimes I do think it seems to be(come) a real buzzword for some people.

And it seems logical to me people tend to find it hard to be focused, we are living in a fast world, maybe sometimes too fast and demanding...

Personally I wouldn't use UPX for distribution, it generates quite a lot of (false) virus warnings because it's immensely popular in that scene...