My work contract with InterComponentWare AG has been cancelled as of April 1st 2010. The company has closed its office in Bulgaria and fired more than 60 people. First half in December 2009, the rest at the end of March 2010.

I've worked for ICW for two and a half years, with majority of tasks being on software build management. While I've enjoyed my job, the management in the company has been awful.

Several facts:

• The main investor in ICW is Dietmar Hopp - a SAP AG founder
• ICW used to have about 700 employees worldwide
• The company business model was quite strange - someone was paying money to a large group of individuals doing different tasks with no particular purpose.
• The annual expenses were about 10 times higher than the revenues
• It appeared that no one from the upper management cared to look what was really going on
• Probably one of the companies with the longest start-up period - more than 10 years
• The Bulgarian outsourcing office existed for about 10 years

Other than that:

• Bizarre management decisions were taken all the time
• People were put on positions they were totally inappropriate for
• The information travelled between the departments in a "broken phone" manner and I guess the line was noisiest in the management area where everybody was telling his own fictional story of what was "really" going on

The perspectives for the company does not look good at all to me. Even worse - I see no hope for it. I expect the leftover parts of the boat (headquarters in Walldorf, DE) to be declared "missing" in about two years. That of course if the investors care to take a look at where their money are going.

On the bright side:

• Most of my co-workers have already found a good replacement job. The demand for IT specialists in BG looks quite high
• I guess I have too great enthusiasm to do the stuff in the right way as the above mentioned facts did not succeed to kill it till the end
• This end only came to show us that better opportunities exist

Тази събота и неделя пак се занимавах с пролетно почистване около блока. Неделята беше дъждовна и можах да посвърша малко работа чак привечер.

Докато валеше, реших да свърша едно добро дело - като за цветница, и да накажа лумпените, които паркират върху зелените площи до блока и ги съсипват. Потърсих в нета на кой телефон да се обадя и попаднах на:

02/9875555 - Столичен инспекторат

Съобщих им за неправилно паркиралите автомобили и дежурния ме убеди че ще изпрати инспектор. Обясниха ми, че нямало да дойде паяк да ги вдига. За съжаление до вечерта не видях да има някакъв ефект - нито колите бяха преместени, нито имаше някакви фишове лепнати на предните им стъкла.

Проблема с паркирането

5, 10 или 20 паяка не могат да решат нищо в милионен град. Предложението ми е да копираме западния модел и да пуснем инспектори в града. Един единствен човек ще бъде ефективен колкото няколко паяка. Ходи, пише си фишчета и евентуално щрака с фотоапарата. При сегашния начин на паркиране ще има малко ходене, много писане и много пари събрани от глоби. Броят на инспекторите може да бъде достатъчно висок за да се покрие града изцяло. Те сами ще си изкарват заплатите и ще ни учат на ред. А ще има и нови работни места.

За гражданското общество

Време е пак да откраднем от западния модел и да почнем да се самоконтролираме. Ние трябва да съощаваме за всякакви нередности които ни вълнуват. И в последствие да контролираме дали са взети адекватни мерки от страна на съответните органи. По няколко граждански репортажа от хора с камерки и малко подкрепа от медиите и службите ще бъдат притиснати да си вършат работата.

Кога възрастните хора се отказаха да учат младите на култура ? Кога спряха да им правят забележки ? И тяхната култура ли изчезна изведнъж ? Или страхът в следствие на анархията и безнаказаността в последните години ги обезвери ?

Мисля че възрастните трябва да дават пример на младите. Не помня кога за последно съм видял някой да се наведе и да вземе чужд боклук от земята и да го изхвърли в коша. Не помня и кога съм видял някой да прави забележка на друг, че си изхвърля боклука на земята, или прави нещо нередно. Не помня някога да съм видял някой да вземе изпражненията на кучето си и да ги изхвърли в коша ..

Въпреки отиващата си зима и пролетното почистване на зелените площи около блока (през целия уикенд!) кантара твърдо върви нагоре.
Нов личен рекорд - 84.2 кг !

Поздрав - Ша-Ша - Няма да Ядеш

Тази година видях Щъркел на 7^ми Март. Не ми се е случвало толкова рано да го видя като че ли. Обикновенно си влача мартениците до края на Април че и до Май.
Проблема ми сега е къде да ги закача. Няма цъфнали дървета, още по-малко пък и плодни ..

I've just tried to watch an embedded youtube video and the flash reported an error.
Going to the http://www.youtube site reveals the friendly:

Http/1.1 Service Unavailable

Today we were working with a partner company on a common project. I was sitting behind a colleague's back when he wrote a message to me with several notes and sent it. He used an email at Gmail and sent it to my mail which was also at Gmail.

When I got in my office his mail was not in my inbox. I just asked him to verify he did hit the Send button and he confirmed that the message was in his Sent folder.

At this point I suspect the Gmail IMAP service which I was using with Kmail. Logging in via the web interface gave me no different results.

My colleague confirmed my address was correct by sending it to me. I even wrote this one liner to verify the address was spelled correctly with e.g. no Cyrillic symbols in it:

perl -we 'my $a="deliank\@gmail.com"; my @a=split("", $a); print($_ . " - " . ord($_), "\n") foreach @a;'
d - 100
e - 101
l - 108
i - 105
a - 97
n - 110
k - 107
@ - 64
g - 103
m - 109
a - 97
i - 105
l - 108
. - 46
c - 99
o - 111
m - 109

A minute later he decided to forward the message once again. No success this time too. He also suggested to try searching for the message in my Spam folder at which I replied s.t. like:

You must be kidding me. From Gmail to Gmail in Spam ?! You've made a big amateurs out of Google ...

I was quite amused when only the second message arrived several hours later and it was indeed in the Spam folder !

Up-to this point I had confidence in Google's services. From now on, I don't.

I've been following Australian Open recently and watched the coverage of the semifinal between Murray and Cilic today. At the same time I thought what will happen in the other semifinal between Federer and Tsonga tomorrow.

At this level most of the matches are won by the player psychology. Not by his tennis skills. Sure the skills play a role when the time comes to hit certain trick shot, or to catch a tough ball. But the outcome comes from what happens in players' minds.

All this mental pressure. All these guys being so serious. Is it for the money ? Is it for the glory ? Is it for the victory ? Sure its different for each player but in the end it's just a game.

When I thought about all this a curious question came to my mind.

Hey Roger, what if I give you the tournament prize before it starts ? I would just ask you to play for fun. To show us the best of your bag of tricks.

How do you think, will we enjoy the game more ? Will Federer still be able to win ? ...

java.net.SocketException: Network is unreachable

I hit this about a week ago . First time I saw it was on my office desktop running Debian unstable. Since I was not doing too much Java on it I decided it was a problem with JConsole. I nearly lost a bet out of this:

I was pretty sure JConsole was able to attach to local processes even when they were started without any JMX options enabled. Borislav Tonchev was pretty sure it wasn't. I quickly wrote a Java class with its main method sleeping for 100 seconds and tried to attach to its process. Unfortunately I wasn't able to do so. At that point Borislav walked away with 10 bucks coming out of my pocket.

I was curious enough to check this stuff and at first appeared that Java didn't like the bsdgroups option my ext3 /tmp file system was mounted with. Trying the same thing on my home PC, with bsdgroups disabled showed this java.net.SocketException: Network is unreachable. At this point I was starting to loose ground. I decided to check the docs ( http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/management/jconsole.html ) and they confirmed my point. I checked the documented behavior in a JVM running inside an Windows XP installation I have ( VirtualBox image for the corporate stuff in the office ) and Borislav unhappily brought my money back.

At this point I decided the exception under Debian was caused by a bug in JConsole - probably it was not maintained too much in recent releases as a similar tool appeared - VisualVM.

Several days after this long background, on Saturday, I've also hit the same exception on a production server running Tomcat. Pretty damn strange. I was not able to figure it out immediately. The actual problem was introduced in Debian in the beginning of December last year, with the netbase package setting:

# cat /etc/sysctl.d/bindv6only.conf
net.ipv6.bindv6only=1

This did not showed up on the server immediately, since the netbase upgrade did not apply the new setting. The exception appeared after a restart almost two months after the upgrade.

The workaround is to set the above to "0" as it was before, or to add the option -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true to each Java process you start. I prefer the former as I did not want to configure every Java program (e.g. I use azureus/vuze) manually.

More information could be found in Debian bug #560044

I was unable to access my E-banking at https://e-fibank.bg. It first happened on my Debian unstable box in the office. A few weeks later it also showed on my home PC running Debian testing.

My observations also showed that all the browsers stopped working at once. I'm using Iceweasel (Firefox) for the e-banking itself. Google chrome also showed some weird (unknown) SSL error.

This was enough for me to decide that the problem has been caused by recent package upgrade. I was pretty sure this was caused by the SSL libraries, especially with some recent Bugraq posts about SSL vulnerabilities.

So what I did was:

• remembered when was the last time I successfully used the e-banking
• checked which packages I upgraded recently (only one date showed after the last successful e-banking use - 2010-01-02 )
• looked at browser dependencies ( google-chrome-unstable deps were easier to use since iceweasel is deeply integrated within Debian with many chained dependencies )
• and put the results against each other

So the command I came up with was:

ls -rtl /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.list | \
    grep 2010-01-02 | awk '{print $8}' | \
    cut -d / -f 6 | \
    cut -d . -f 1 | \
    sort | \
    egrep \
       `dpkg -s google-chrome-unstable | \
          grep Depends | \
          tr ',' '\n' | \
          grep '^ ' | \
          awk '{print $1}' | \
          xargs echo | tr ' ' '|'`

So this showed two things only:

libfontconfig1
libnss3-1d

I was not familiar with libnss3 but looking at its package description(SSL related) was enough for me to blame it. So I've checked the aptitude logs:

# grep libnss /var/log/aptitude
[UPGRADE] libnss3-1d 3.12.4-1 -> 3.12.5-1

and have seen which was the older version I used. Then checked /var/cache/apt/archives and it was just sitting there waiting to be restored:

dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/libnss3-1d_3.12.4-1_i386.deb

Then restarted Iceweasel and voila ..

I've then also checked the Debian bug reports to see if this has already been reported or was waiting for me to do that. This bug report showed up:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=561918

Hope this saves you some time ..

Бая отдавна се каня да си инсталирам Wiki.

Играя си сега с [[ikiwiki]] и се питам: Временните работи най-постоянни ли са ?