Archive for the 'mypast' Category

Five Things You Probably Don’t Know About Me

Published by Peter on December 17, 2006 in mypast. 5 Comments

Tom & AndreaAt the awesome LeWeb3 party at Paris Bodega, I took some pictures of Tom while he was dancing (not that hard, as he practically didn’t stand still the whole night). At some point he was showing off some steps with a lovely girl, I put a picture of them on Flickr and now she tagged me with a meme. Ouch!
So Andrea, (via Susan, Mary and so on), here I go: Five things you probably don’t know about me.

  1. When I was a toddler, I was blond; I had long curly almost white hair. I must have turned to auburn around the age of 10.
  2. I am often diagnosed with a light form of ADHD by people familiar with other ‘cases’. I have these hyperactive moments, even spurts of hyper-concentration, and I must say I enjoy them. I get loads of stuff done while I should be doing other stuff, i.e. I practise structured procrastination. In my line of work, I think the advantages and the drawbacks of this personality trait even out. On the other hand, you wouldn’t want me as your accountant.

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Database war stories: DB vs ’square’ files

Published by Peter on May 5, 2006 in Belgium, bandwidth, hardware and mypast. 2 Comments

Plug and PlayI’ve been following the Database War Stories of O’Reilly Radar: how companies use text-based alternatives to classic relational database systems in order to cope with huge volumes. Check out the stories of Findory/Amazon, Google File System, Flickr and Second Life. Anyway, this seemed like a good moment to share some of my database war stories. Let me take you back to the early nineties.

1993 @ Ukkel
I arrive at Sopres, one of the larger direct marketing / database management companies in Belgium. Fresh from university (and 1 year of military service), I expect to see RDBMS everywhere and dive into SQL. Imagine my surprise when I see that, yes, there are a lot of Sybase SQLServer databases around, but the bulk of the work is done with something they call ’square files’ (see below). They have built a whole set of tools to work with those and by using them myself, I learn to appreciate the advantanges of the system (speed, mainly) and grow a fairly accurate intuition for things like queries, indexes and outer joins.
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Biometric spielerei: Applied Minds

Published by Peter on June 23, 2005 in Belgium, mypast, science and technology. 1 Comment

Reading this article on Applied Minds sure brings back memories:

Co-founder Danny Hillis escorts me down a hallway that dead-ends into an old-fashioned red phone booth. The phone rings. He places receiver to ear.
“The blue moon jumps over the purple sky,” he says, and hangs up.
Suddenly, the booth becomes a door, swinging out to reveal a vast, open room filled with engineers, gadgets and big ideas.
from Applied Minds Think Remarkably (Wired)


I remember Maarten, Henry, Frederik and me, in the early days of Keyware (in 1998, I think), preparing a demo for Walter Debrouwer’s Riverland company. The latter wanted to impress his prospective client BP, and so he wanted a biometric access control to his ‘labs’.

We hacked something together with a hastily purchased badge-reader-annex-intercom, linked to a PC’s soundcard, running the first beta demo of our speaker authentication software (based on a Lernout & Hauspie technology). I think we even added the Visionics (now Identix) face recognition software we licensed, linked to a QuickCam webcam. So the system would recognize your face, recognize your voice while you pronounce your passphrase and then let you in when it was sure enough it was actually you. Wonderful when it works. And when it doesn’t, you can always explain about false rejection, false acceptance, and equal error rate. Maarten and me even wrote a white paper on the subject, but I can’t find that document back, only references (PDF) to it.

Frederik is now at Vasco, Maarten is at Imec, Henry has set up Broncoway. But I have no idea what happened to Veronique, An, Anke, Rudy and the lovely Julia. Maybe it’s time for a reunion.

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LovePangs - Pain-Rage-Resent-Over

Published by Peter on February 13, 2005 in Society and mypast. 0 Comments


Anyone knows what a “Love Pain Congress” is? Neither did I, so I yesterday I went to LovePangs in Ghent.

When you get in, you are screened by the “Pain Commission” to see in what stage of the process you are: Pain, Rage, Resent or Over. I got the black ‘OVER’ badge, because actually, yes, I’m over it. You also get 20 Pain Euro that you can use later in the event. The most important part of the Congress are the one-on-one conversations you can have with ‘pain experts’. These are an mix of 25 well-known (Jos Geysels, Pascale Platel) and lesser known people that you can have a 30-minutes conversation with on some aspect of love, pain, regret, guilt, … you name it. These experts also belong to one of the 4 groups mentioned above, and you can only book a time slot with a person of your colour. If you want to, you can however use your pain euros to sell your badge and buy one of another colour at the “Pain Stockmarket” (in some cases, you get paid for this, in other cases you need to pay: supply and demand and all that jazz). There was also some karaoke theatre going on, but I never got to that.

Mieke DebruyneSo how did it go for me: I got in and booked a ‘black’ date with Mieke Debruyne, journalist (on “missed opportunities” - how prophetic this would be) and another ‘black’ one with Mieke Deley - dancer (on “guilt” - no picture, sorry). At 21h30 I got asked to fill in a vacant spot, but that turned out to be double booked. At 22h00 I was supposed to have my conversation with Mieke Deley, but since our table was double booked, we waited for 15 minutes and then just started talking while sitting on the ground in a corner. The conversation was great fun, we lost track of time and since no one told us our time slot was over, I only got to Mieke Debruyne 20 minutes late, at which point she was already talking to some one else. The organisation was rather clueless (yes, using Excel sheets can be something of a black art). When I asked to maybe book Ms Debruyne at a later time, the lady in question seemed to have disappeared. But since talking to Mieke-the-dancer was so much fun anyway, we told every one of the Love Pain hostesses who interrupted us - and there were quite some - that we just started our session, which gave us a load of free drinks, half a dozen of different locations and about 2 hours of off-and-on sparkling and very open conversation.

End conclusion: there’s still some work in the details, but the idea is brilliant. The general mood amongst visitors is something between openheartedness, amusement and genuine interest in what’s going on in the minds and hearts of the other person. That goes for most of the conversations I had that night, not only the 1 ‘pain expertise’ that I managed to arrange.

If there is a new edition in 2006, I’ll be there! Oh, and if Mieke Debruyne would be so kind to drop me a line so we can finally have that session, I’d be so grateful.