I've been trying to find a password policy for EU that has the same level of practical detail as NIST SP 800-63B . The closest I found is this 1-page document from ENISA . So much for the EU leading the Digital Agenda.
I always hosted my own mail, both for myself and for the few businesses I run throughout my career. Once in a while I would offer the family to use my email infrastructure, with ample storage space and cool domain…
It all started with mxmap.ch , then someone created mxmap.nl and someone else — mxmap.be . The results are similar. European municipalities use US cloud services, leaking citizen data to Microsoft, Google and Amazon.
My favourite corruption story that I tell non-Belgians is the titres-services/dienstencheques racket. Titres-services/dienstencheques is a kind of money that can be used only for household tasks. Think cleaning lady.…
Google unilaterally restricts certificates to HTTPS usage only . The most plausible explanation is that Google wants to push hardware vendors, more specifically companies like Worldpay that distribute payment terminals…
For all the royal f-ups of the Kingdom of Belgium, this one is the saddest. Someone had the idea to ban DeepSeek in the Belgian government. One of the few open weights frontier models that we can just take and run…
I once knew someone highly praised by co-workers and managers alike, earning decent money doing great work in a core team of a multinational. At some point news came of his firing. Funnily, the first reaction everyone…
How about SSH sending 100 IP packets on each keystroke ? In a similar vein, I recently ran into trouble upgrading Dovecot from 2.3 to 2.4. There were lots of problems in this upgrade. For starters, Dovecot rewrote the…
Writing long documents in Word is painful to the point that people prefer to stick to old tools like FrameMaker. It's also painful in a different way than LaTeX. While LaTeX is complex but deterministic, Word just…
Turns out, people lost the ability to have multiple profiles on the internet, and I think this due to costs. None wants to pay both to personal Gmail and to the business Google for Work, and if you have multiple…
One similarity between Putin and Ursula von der Leyen is they are both unelected leaders . But another, more subtle one is that both lived for a long time in a bubble and have a much worse understanding of real-world…
I self-hosted for well over 20 years, I did not throw the towel and I do not plan to. Self-hosting is a sign of pride. Neither my government nor my Prime Minister nor even my Ministry of Interior or Foreign Ministry…
I had to use Rentio as a renter of an apartment, and the experience was so humiliating that the only way I can regain my human dignity is by writing about it. Renters usually experience it via the website…
What if Zucman tax was applied to all intangible assets at the rate of 2%? And combined with a VAT of 33% like proposed by Vivant and with 0% personal income tax. Would we have enough to finance UBI?
The EU Digital Identity Wallet directive was passed in 2024 without privacy activists noticing. However, it
One of the most popular psychology books among Software Engineers is Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I have always been fascinated how we perceive flow as a desired state of mind that has to be entered into and…
Let's Encrypt had an outage today , and websites started disappearing off the web, progressively. It serves 60% of websites in the world. No wonder the world noticed. And if you think we can still deploy HTTP…
One of the nefarious aspects of Multi-Factor Authentication that I have not mentioned in my previous post on the subject is the risk of loosing Digital Sovereignty . Authentication via a login and a password is well…
DNS4EU is all in the news. The project seems to have spent loads of EU money on marketing. This backfired, as Network Engineers started to notice and comment on the project. The best account of what's wrong with DNS4EU…
Here's the step-by-step guide. Change directory to your local git repository that you want to share with friends and colleagues and do a bare clone git clone --bare . /tmp/repo.git You just created a copy of the .git…
Amateur radio strives as a niche hobby. Clubs are actives and while the average age of radio amateurs is well over 60, there is a steady stream of newcomers. States and international organizations recognize the…
Case in point: euro-stack.eu that promotes European software using... wait a minute... A wordpress.com based website hosted in California by the US company Auttomatic Fronted by Cloudflare, a US monopoly (this is…
In a recent interview, Linus Torvalds expressed regret about the pointless churn of SHA1 deprecation and this immediately reminded me of a similar, although much smaller pointless churn. There was once a company-wide…
Europe needs a paradigm shift, not an ethical Amazon Web Services replica. One rare topic where I strongly disagree with Bert Hubert is the need for a European Cloud . One does not win by copying the incumbent Whatever…
One thing about Peppol is how worryingly complex it is. I really hope it will be lobbied out in favor of a simpler solution. As a reminder... remember the structured communication in your Belgian bank transfers? The…
I was wrong. Semi-official and unofficial open source code is often hilariously bad, although the format is quite well documented in Wikipedia . One thing that people seem to misunderstand is that it tries to…
Bert Hubert wrote at length and more openly about EU dependance on US software since the election of Trump. Not that engineers did not know about all that, but European IT is not run by engineers to the same extent as…
J'ai écouté Sans contrefaçon un millier de fois mais ce n'est qu'aujourd'hui que j'ai compris le lien entre Chevalier d'Eon et le titre de la chançon.
A few weeks ago I received an unsolicited email from the Belgian Center for Cyber Security. It starts with the statement that 80% of cyber attacks could be avoided if 2FA was active and then says literally that If you…
Old farts like me often have long and detailed LinkedIn profiles that we just copy as Curriculum Vitae when applying for leadership roles. This is based on two assumptions: People are good at glancing over long texts,…
Back in 2011 my team built a news website with adaptive delivery. It loaded a small html page with a JavaScript that checked the screen size and user agent, then based on whether the user was on a phone, a tablet or a…
This is the story of an organization that has forgotten some simple software engineering concepts. This organization does exists and has these exact problems, but it is also a generic story about similar organizations…
Not everyone has an email. A businesswoman once proudly shown me a dumbphone and said that she does not have a personal email, only a corporate one. That persuaded me for a while, until I learned that her husband was…
I moved a business of ~100 FTEs from AWS to Hetzner once. Aside from the migration cost, the price was roughly 25% of AWS. I left many years ago, the business switched frameworks since then but they stayed on Hetzner.…
One thing PHP got right is its 'PHP must die' mode of operation where every request spawns a new process (ok, not a process anymore but still an isolated execution environment that lasts until the response is served.…
One of my favorite watercooler stories is about the origin of ISO20022 abbreviations. ISO20022 is the XML-based format to exchange messages in inter-banking networks like SWIFT or SEPA., It replaced the old, ASN.1…
Ever since I worked on mailing lists, newsletters and transactional mails I have a habit of looking at mail server logs. So did I today after sending a mail to the Belgian Foreign Ministry. Turns out, my mail first…
I broadly divide organizations into Active Directory based Other When I say Active Directory based, I do not mean Microsoft. Price Waterhouse Coopers for instance is not Active Directory based but they have Windows…
After 25 years of my career I came to understand that one particular type of programmers is the source of many problems in our industry. Here is the story of a project that was nearly destroyed by two such programmers.…
I am one of those senior engineers who regularly code and dare I say produce optimal solutions quickly. I still fail at coding interviews, and I attribute it to the gamification fatigue and age. Please understand me. I…
I was once hired for a core team job. Between my hire and the first day, the core team manager resigned and I was reassigned, so I did not have much chance to work with him. Instead, I landed in a middle of a drama.…
I've been writing the output of the P1 port from my smart meter for a while using this little script Here are the daily results: Notice the baseline load, this is the median of the consumption when solar panels were…
Aside from the obvious JavaScript injections and framework exploits, check for multiple redirects \u-encoded JavaScript code broken or too permissive CORS along with suspicious backend name Then, check different…
There is a tendency to strip docker images from wget and curl . Luckily, perl is still available. If you have trouble configuring spring boot healthcheck, think of perl and its IO::Socket module shipped with perl core:…
The full contents of /etc/asound.conf: pcm.dsp { type plug slave { format FLOAT rate unchanged pcm { type ladspa channels 2 path "/usr/local/lib/ladspa" playback_plugins [{ label "ladspa_dsp" }] slave.pcm { type plug…
fdtput -t s /boot/dtbs/rockchip/rk3328-rock64.dtb /analog-sound status okay reboot
cat /etc/systemd/network/eth.network [Match] Name=eth* [Network] MulticastDNS=yes DHCP=yes sed -i 's/#MulticastDNS=yes/MulticastDNS=yes/' /etc/systemd/resolved.conf systemctl daemon-reload systemctl restart…
There is a French expression au jour d'aujourd'hui which means "as of today", however, aujourd'hui itself means "the day of today", because hui is the Old French word for "today" and aujourd' is obviously the…
This fiddle says it all, but let's go briefly over it. Whenever you are building a table out of a tree, use <table> , <tr> , <td> tags or their CSS equivalents table , table-row and table-cell and apply…
Продажник-программист Попал я однажды в организацию, занимающуюся организацией оффлайновых конференций. Им нужен был человек для поддержки сайта. Разговаривал со мной мужчина в пиждаке и при галстуке, представившийся…
I have an 8-core arm64 beast called Moto X Force, it's somewhat close to Nexus 5X, so there are some LineageOS builds around. KBC Mobile app checks for Safetynet, prints out a warning but works. Kudos to the…
I'll probably never do it again, but just in case: $ECLIPSE_HOME/eclipse -nosplash -verbose \ -application org.eclipse.equinox.p2.metadata.repository.mirrorApplication \ -source…
Пачку свино-говяжьего фарша разжарить с двумя головками лука, отложить. Мелко нашинковать 2 баклажана и разжарить в той же сковородке с добавлением масла. Отварить 300 грамм киноа. Всё перемешать, добавить соль, перец,…
Someone just made me a remark about the style of titles I give to bug tracker tickets. They are apparently too long and actionable, which leaves no space for the text in the description. I am angry. If there is one…
It takes me ~8 seconds from the key press to a fully functional environment.
I understand that Brussels Airlines has more on its shoulders than properly configured SPF records and decent email content, but still, WTF? From: Brussels Airlines To: Alexander Mikhailian Subject: Booking…
A CS student shows his lab assignment to the professor. The code works and even produces the correct output, but the professor mutters that the code is not OK: — You have to choose variable names wisely. Names like i,…
Just for the record and because I've been asked about this a couple of times, already: Technically, SWIFT became redundant after Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol was described in 1976. Euroclear became redundant…
.field-type-image .field-item { float: left; padding: 5px; }
A couple of useful git commands for styding big git repositories: Rank contributors by contributed lines of code in HEAD git grep --cached -zIle '' |\ xargs -0n1 git blame -e |\ sed -n 's/^.*(<\([a-zA-Z.]*\)@.*/\1/p'…
It's not a coincidence that notebook docking stations are being sold only with high-end laptops. My Dell e7740 costs over 2000 €. When I bought it in January 2014, I couldn't imagine I'll have trouble making it work…
Whether you order designs from 99designs or from an in-house designer, use this simple rule of thumb: Your most valuable content should be the most contrasted. Here's why. Bad designs are wildly different, but all good…
I absolutely love the zen layout for its flexibility. What other layout can handle fixed-width sidebars for banners and a liquid content area? However, figuring out how it works can be challenging. Here's a minimal zen…
We've already seen it in 2009. The European Commission could have built an exemplary anti-trust case against Microsoft for forcing manufacturers to bundle its operating system with the computers. Instead, it targeted a…
Among the multitude of programming APIs provided by Google lies a jewel called Prediction API . It has a high-quality classifier that allows for continuous learning with model updates. Let's quickly use it to…
As a reminder for myself, mostly: Only Mavericks , Yosemite is not yet working under KVM. KVM SLiRP networking does not work with MacOS X, bridging is hard to setup for wireless networks so it is better to use NAT…
Objective Select like-minded users from a local community website. Pre-requisites A Drupal website with the votingapi module enabled and at least a few dozen votes by registered users. A working installation of the R…
Just stumbled upon a fancy banner by Microsoft that advertises its Embrace and Extend from the childhood program. For the record: the only reason Microsoft supports this "Coding in classroom initiative" is because they…
Today my kid brought back from school an assignment to guess words from a bag of letters... it took a mum and a programmer to solve all six. I left one for you, though. Guess what C D E E I M R R stands for. P.S. it's…
… vandalism taalstrijd. Как вы яхту назовёте, так она и поплывёт.
Measuring software productivity by lines of code is like measuring progress on an airplane by how much it weighs. © Bill Gates I once rewrote 30 000 lines of C++ code in 1000 lines of Ruby. Years passed, and shit hit…
If your troll has a dynamic IP address, send him a cookie and check for it in all subsequent page requests, something along the following lines: global $user; if ($user->uid == 12345) { setcookie("_utmc_c",…
That piece of cover detached and fell over my feet while I was driving this brand new Italian car today. I fixed it with my wife's hairpin. Don't think you can fix a German car this way.
Remember the standard structure of Subversion repositories? The one that you create with mkdir project/{trunk,tags,branches} ? I now figured why people create so few branches and tags in this configuration. Because…
KBC exports bank statements in an awkward format. For instance, there's no structured field for the correspondent's bank account number — this information is lumped together with the description field. Fortunately, awk…
Try not to make it political or bring in the discussion on civil war. I was just playing around with Facebook stats for advertisers and found that 81.3% of Ukrainians use Facebook in Russian. Anyone who published ads…
I came across some interesting stats while advertising on Facebook. People living in Brussels Capital +20km use the following three languages: French 780 000 Dutch 240 000 English 240 000 Looks like Dutch is being…
Whenever a team starts working on a new Drupal-based website, there's an inevitable discussion on how to organize collaboration. Three questions come up regularly: How and when to use Features , Features Extra and…
The cluster runs on apt-based systems. It is designed for high-availability: failure of one server is not critical. However, there is no automatic failover configuration. Instead, manual recovery is possible within…
If the only thing that keeps you from closing your Google Account is Calendar, here's the solution: setup your own CalDav server. I've chosen radicale . The setup is easy, but pam support is broken in Debian wheezy ,…
Here's a an email that I just received from a Belgian recruiter (name changed): On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 04:26:33AM -0400, Abdullah Rahmoyan wrote: > > For a well known financial institution, I am currently looking >…
There's been quite a few spam{bots,turks} lately passing through [Drupal Captcha] [dc] , [reCAPTHA] [rc], [Honeypot] [hp] module… After a bit of research, I decided to block China from accessing my site. It turned out…
We hosted Drupal websites at Hetzner for a few years. While it's unbeatable on price, it requires a skilled Linux sysadmin, which weights on personnel costs. Our guesstimate was that we'll pay a third more for a Drupal…
Two main sources of my inspiration were this post by Daniel P. Berrangé and this very detailed HOWTO on Debian User Forums. There's also a great, albeit a bit stripped down rootfs from Vassilis Laganakos for those who…
Sounds familiar?
How it should work: insert a disk with a partition labelled as backup wait until the beep remove the disk To label an ext3/ext4 disk, use e2label device [newlabel] Then, create an udev rule that runs your script when…
Git submodules and git subrees are well explained in the git-scm book. Here's a small script that automatically converts the former to the later: cat .gitmodules |while read i do if [[ $i == \[submodule* ]]; then…
It's surprising how many people do not know that their mysql dumps and restores can be faster if they disable autocommits. Dump mysqldump mydb --single-transaction >mydb.sql Restore (echo "SET autocommit=0; cat…
It almost works. It will update signatures that you store in a Google Sheet at regular intervals. The only problem is… You have to be a Google Apps for Business administrator to run this thing, because the only way to…
There's been very few laws that I followed closely, but all of them had a direct impact on my life, so I took this seriously. I didn't actually follow laws, but rather legislative processes because I either wanted a…
People used to write Greasemonkey scripts or exploit some long-forgotten Gmail Labs extensions… but there's an easier way: just generate images on the fly and refer them in signatures. Here's my quick-and-dirty way of…
Version-controlled laws Here's a EurActiv article that gives a bird's eye view of the subject of version control systems applied to legislation. End-to-end verifiable anonymous voting This one is better explained by…
…but because he is ashamed of your ignorance.
…never trust what the user tells you.
…when none cares what operating system he is using. Ok, ok… it's just one of the mandatory requirements.
Here is an excerpt of the Legal aspects of free and open source software workshop notes. Every phrase is a masterpiece. "When the public agency has decided that open source requirements are particularly important for a…
I had this stuck in my head for months, but only now managed to have some time to write it up Below are two snippets of SQL code that do the same thing, namely extract the number of contact emails per year from a CRM.…
The most popular interpretation of the cookies directive is that websites should warn about cookies that are not essential for the operation of the websites. For instance, a cookie set to keep the items in your…
Here's an example of software project management worfklow that I use daily. Each project is split into two uneven parts: Definition of project scope and objectives Project execution and follow-up. The main difference…
This picture is well worth a thousand words. It shows 7 most popular screen resolutions on a mid-sized website in 2006 and in 2013. 1024x768 was taking a lion's share in 2006 but there's no clear winner in 2013.…
Remember my story about Neelie Kroes hacking EU-Azerbaijan relations ? I made a Freedom of Information request to DG Connect , and they replied that there is no forensic report whatsoever that studied this "hacking"…
… — Do you have a mortgage? Seriously, an employee with a mortgage to repay is submissive and risk-averse. Exactly the kind of person most businesses look for.
European Parliament 5540 European Council and Council 3117 European Commission 24617 Court of Justice of the European Union 1547 Court of Auditors 752 European Economic and Social Committee 689 Committee of the Regions…
Average salary per EU institutions, 2012 budget. European Parliament 109,354.29 EUR European Council and Council 98,659.59 EUR European Commission 133,042.28 EUR Court of Justice of the European Union 120,409.29 EUR…
It's not obvious to find these numbers in the budget , so we'll have to use a hack. EU permanent staff pays 10.25% of their salaries to the pension fund. Pension contributions are accounted for as revenue, so they are…
They have a consolidated revenue volume , but expenditure is spread over several volumes. This was designed to make budgeting easier to understand, yeah…
Our super-duper high-tech IT-savvy EU commissionner Neelie Kroes messed up EU-Azerbaijan relations recently, first claiming that the computers of her collbarators were hacked during an official visit to Baku, then…
Fuck you, businessman!
The old table structure image_attach → image → files becomes field_data_field_image → file_managed Assuming that the database name is test , imagefield is named field_image . file access type is public and the files…
Did you know that Belgium holds the honourable first place among the last 10 countries in the Global Right to Information Rating ? Now, you do.
This page on Employing workers has at least 3 errors that can be easily spotted by anyone having worked in Belgium for a while. How cute. And it did not change from 2011, when I first spotted the inaccuracies.
There's been a fair amount of talk about FairSearch.org in US, and how ill-though their campaigning is. One of my clients is now rolling out ads for FairSearchEurope.eu . Just as its US counterpart, FairSearchEurope.eu…
A power meter ordered from Alibaba arrived as expected, but no plug could be inserted into it, because the slider below the two holes was placed upside down. Hi-hi.
Есть у моего клиента сайт на Wordpress. Проект, которому пророчили большое будущее. Будущее не пришло, денег проект не приносит, посещаемость мизерная, поддерживается по остаточному принципу. Cегодня с утра заглянул я…
Вчера на Slashdot.com появилась статья про Путина и журавлей . И это на айтишном ресурсе, где даже статьи про политику вполне себе айтишные. Сколько им заплатили?
Software that we now use constantly in our daily life wouldn't be possible if people creating these systems did not follow the practice of recording even the smallest change to the software in version control systems.…
A German guy converted the database of federal laws into a git repository and submitted to Github . Add to it an inline commenting system , and a (better) parallel government will spawn.
Now from FT.com.
Quick and dirty howto. I'll use a Huawei E174 3G USB modem with a working sim hard, and a Zyxel G-220 USB wi-fi adapter. First, install ppp and configure the the 3G modem by writing a chat script and setting ppp…
На mova.org довольно давно работал XMPP сервер со свободной регистрацией. Недавно полез посмотреть, как он живёт, и обнаружил десять тысяч каких-то мутных пользователей , в ростере у них отсылки на syria talk, в…
Just for record. The worst paper I ever wrote.
Instead of the usual SELECT * FROM users WHERE uid=1; type SELECT * FROM users WHERE uid=1\G and enjoy a much better formatting!
Internet trolls are using Tor nowadays to avoid bans by IP. However, banning Tor exit nodes is just slightly more complex. The Tor Project provides a regularly updated list of exit nodes that can access your IP here .…
EU Observer runs a report on Belarus. See this gem: Earthquake zone on EU border to host Belarus nuclear plant . Earthquake zone…
Цитата отсюда : (какой-то функциональный тест написанный таким образом падал и разработчик решил проблему использованием datetime2).
И выдержал ровно сутки. Половины музыки, которую я слушаю, у них нет. При регистрации через фейсбук linux-клиент Spotify уведомляет (sic!) что будет анонсировать музыку, которую я слушаю, в фейсбучный timeline. Без…
I bought an HTC Desire S smartphone in June. Since then, I sent it three times for repair to Dynafix , which is apparently the HTC Repair Center for Belgium. For the 3rd time, Dynafix replaced the mainboard for my…
I bought a Desire S smartphone a little more than 2 months ago, but did not have a chance to really use it, yet. It came with an elusive and odd bug. The touch screen stopped responding once in a while. This could…
My first request for number porting from the Proximus mobile business acount of my former employer to Mobile Vikings dates from 6th of June. A few dozen emails, several phone calls and one complaint to the Telecom…
Three days ago, I got my hands on the HTC Trophy 7 running Windows Phone 7. Until now, I played occasionally with Android, but never used a smartphone. Here's a list of things I'd like to do on the smartphone: Transfer…
После нескольких лет верной службы, ноут зашумел и стал греться. Я уж грешным делом задумался о покупке нового, но в процессе поисков замены себе любимому ноут самопроизвольно отключился. Операция на внутренностях…
This is how the Belgian public credit risk insurance body evaluates risks in select world countries. The country that has the world record of being without the government is rated best, the other, buried down in a…
Is it just me or the ESA logo indeed looks like a fingerprint? Turns out, they wanted to represent a planet. I learned this while reading the ESA Visual Design Guidelines. Do you see a planet on the picture?
В этих самых интернетах очередной скандал : все сливают некую российскую компанию, которая продаёт некачественные автокресла в интернете. По поводу автокресел в 2008 году вышло исследование американского экономиста…
This is a gay fucking party!
тут
The recent Doing Business '2011 report states on page 98 that Belgium has no limit on the maximum length of fixed-term contracts. AFAIK, this is wrong. The maximum length of fixed-term contracts is 2 years…
Assuming that the internal screen is LVDS and the external screen is DVI-0 . inotifywait comes from the inotify-tools package. # Wait for the changes detected by the kernel laptop mode. while inotifywait -e modify…
I recently bought an Asrock ION 330 Pro HTPC which supports VDPAU , an NVIDIA API for Linux that offloads parts of video processing to the GPU. The upgrade from the old HTPC went smoothly with a mere dd if=/dev/sda…
Картинка из детской книжки про Хеллоуин. Избушка montée sur des pattes de poule, ага. Но на двух, а не на шести. И летает не в чугунном котелке, а в деревянной ступе (pilon en bois!).
Вчера смотрел последнюю серию Lie to me, там Лайтман вымучивал из себя книгу на новеньком макбуке, параллельно расследуя некое происшествие на конкурсе красоты. Вымучивал он книжку на протяжении всей серии, а под конец…
Hewlett-Packard Company Application Note 1289.
Even Metro can be source of insightful information. Look, 1.4 mln belgians get luncheon vouchers, 0.35% of luncheon vouchers stay unused, so how much do the distribution companies pocket each year on these unused…
В продолжение этой истории, первое дело, связанное со слежкой за учениками с помощью школьных компьютеров, выиграли ученики . Правда, львиную долю денег всё-равно получил адвокат.
La Première a annoncé aujourd'hui dans son journal de 9 heures le limogage du maire de Moscou Yuri loujkov, qu'ils ont prononcé comme [jʊri jʊjkov]. Le nom du maire est Юрий Лужков, transliteré le plus souvent comme…
It's not that I am searching for epic fails, they are searching for me. Check that site , it comes high in Google SERPs for the eid keyword.
Look at the list of 100 most popular professions in Belgium . Sales and medical care jobs are topping. There are two times more public administration workers than IT workers, but IT workers already outnumbered…
disgraceful degradation [dɪsˈgreɪsfʊl ˌdɛgrəˈdeɪʃən] vulg. Degradation in website usability for Internet Explorer 8, 7 and 6 users, done on purpose.
«When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said in a rather a scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less». © Lewis Carroll Check out that article from Metro . Seems like the text was written…
This one was written for TMRA'09 .
Belgium has a multitude of e-government solutions. Local residents have now ID cards in the form of a banking card with a chip, there are services to order certificates online with these cards, pay taxes and check for…
Моряки учебного парусника «Мир» в порту Антверпена. Интересно, им всем Acer'ы выдают, или так случайно получилось?
Гл. сьцяг уверсе.
First appeared in westartup.eu Nowadays, IT companies do not rely on intermediates when looking for new employees. They use the Jobs sections of their websites, advertise on Stepstone, Monster or LinkedIn. They use the…
First appeared in westartup.eu The eID is not only a small piece of plastic that replaces your old cardboard national ID card, but a means to electronically sign legally binding documents. The law that enforces the…
Appeared originally in westartup.eu . There are already some FP7-related services, two clicks from the google home page, but they are mostly about consulting or badly written tools that none uses anyway. EuresTools…
Originally published in westartup.eu . As usual, the US is ahead of the rest of the world with the law.gov initiative that formalizes and makes available in a useful way all existing information pertaining to the…
Казалось, в просвящённой Европе подобные методы революционной борьбы давно вышли из моды, ан нет.
This one appears high in Google SERPs on phpbb2drupal . {syntaxhighlighter brush:sql} --- --- Written by Feodor (feodor [at] mundo.ru) --- --- Modified for drupal 4.5.2 and phpbb 2.0.11-2.0.13 --- by Alexander…
This was written for TMRA'08 together with Rani Pinchuk and Xuân Baldauf. Improvements to XTM 2.0 are suggested in this paper. First, a set of criteria is defined for evaluating those improvements. It is followed by…
The paper on Question Answering I have cowritten with Rani Pinchuk and Tiphaine Dalmas for ACL-IJCNLP'09. Abstract This paper introduces the concepts of asking point and expected answer type as variations of the…
Email: mikhailian@mova.org Jabber, Google Talk: mikhailian@mova.org Public key for private communications.
FIrst published in 2004 in DevX Although using XSLT to process XML is increasingly common, most developers still use it only occasionally—and often treat it as just another procedural language. But that's not the best…
This was written in 2002 and is not true anymore. The computer market is much more civilized now, after the state legalized it for its own profit. What can be simpler than that? Drop in a supermarket, choose a model…
Translation Alexander Mikhailian Email: mikhailian@altern.org Spellcheck: Tatsiana Klimantovich Date: 20010910 Примечание переводчика: Во время моей работы с французской труппой, которая представляла эту пьесу,…
Description of state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing Technologies. Topics concerned include POS tagging, Text Parsing, Automatic Text Summarization. A lot of information on successful linguistic enterprises and…
Hardware PCI devices # lspci 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile…
The configuration file for the ctwm window manager with some custom pixmaps and a screenshot. #--------------------------------------------------------- # EMERGENCY # This line is here so that U will be able 2 restart…
The configuration file for the vim editor.
The .Xresources configuration file ! default system font !*font: -*-serenetypewriter-medium-r-*-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1 !*font: -misc-*-medium-r-normal-*-14-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1 !font:…
A configuration file for bash
A multilingual and multiplatform configuration file for Emacs along with some extra goodies packed in the attachment.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. © Arthur C. Clarke Иногда получается, что какой-то отдельно взятый технологический прорыв кажется шарлатанством из-за неправдоподобных заявлений. Ну…
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. © Arthur C. Clarke Иногда получается, что какой-то отдельно взяный технологический прорыв кажется шарлатанством из-за неправдоподобных заявлений. Ну…
Собрано из двух постингов на dev.by . Когда дискеты ещё только выходили из моды, а запороть компакт-диск считалось западлом, когда Invention-Machine Belarus ещё назывался Научсофтом, меня, совсем ещё желторотого…
In a desperate act of self-humiliation, people behind Java.net upgraded their Drupal-based website and left the default Drupal favicon on their site, as a sign of a total professional failure. P.S. Looks like they had…
В перерывах между работой и хобби, приделал колонки под крышку самодельного стола из цельной доски. Качество звука, как и ожидалось, пропорционально площади резонатора. Низкие передаются прямо в грудную клетку через…
A bad sysadmin changes the default SSH port. A good sysadmin throttles the brute-force attackers by allowing one new connection in 20 seconds. # requires xt_TARPIT iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m state --state NEW \…
Пришла ко мне сегодня афишка от Kaaitheater . В ней — анонс театрального перформанса девки из Кении. В краткой аннотации говорится, что в Кении популярны «живые» переводы фильмов, совсем как у Гоблина . Ничто не ново…
mknod backpipe p mknod log p while :; do cat backpipe |nc -l -p 3001 |tee log| nc localhost 3000 |tee log >backpipe; done Зависимости: (ba,k)sh, netcat, mknod, tee. Работает следующим образом. Скажем, нам нужно…
Add the new mime type to the respective rails initializer echo "Mime::Type.register \"application/xhtml+xml\", :xhtml" \ > config/initializers/mime_types.rb Use the name of this mime type in the config/routes.rb…
Just spotted this nice little euphemism slipping into the corporate newspeak. Is it because the old-fashioned nature of the word gives more weight to PowerPoint slides? Or it is because saying aloud "PowerPoint" has…
The official OMG SysML website is edited entirely in Microsoft Frontpage 6.0. Its first page contains 124 links, 18 links among them are broken. Being backed by the biggest and richest corporations like…
A composite requirement may state that the system shall do A and B and C, which can be decomposed into the child requirements that the system shall do A, the system shall do B, and the system shall do C.
I just received offline spam from Fedict in the form of a letter without any postage marks and with the text on the envelope stating: "An important message from the government". The letter contained an invitation to…
Читаю книжку Фейнмана What Do You Care What Other People Think? Он там упоминает, что не смог поступить в Колумбийский университет из-за квоты на евреев. Интересно, как там сейчас с дискриминацией евреев.
In the book Java Modelling in Color with UML , the authors argue that it is better to color-code UML diagrams instead of just using plain black and white conventional diagrams. They explore this topic in detail on 214…
Look at the summary of ISO activities . Being one of the youngest, JTC1 it is by far the most prolific ISO committee that spit over a total of 2268 standards for Information Technology, leaving far behind the TC34 with…
Here, the poll is hardcoded at node/38566 and the patch applies to index.php in the root of Drupal installation. Tested on Drupal 6.14, but shall work on many other versions as well. --- index-original.php 2007-12-26…
There are three types of positions in an organizational hierarchy: Top managemen t, the decision makers; middle management , those who detail and implement top management strategies, communicating execution plans to…
Был я сегодня на бизнес-тусовке в одной из брюссельских дискотек, взял бутылочку пива, послушал презентации бельгийских веб-стартапов. Все идеи вторичные. Сами посмотрите : Getyoo производит очередную электронную…
Want to know what BI is but were always afraid to ask? Here is a use case that covers 90% of Business Intelligence software use in the real world. Imagine an Excel table containing banking transactions that you…
{syntaxhighlighter brush:bash} :~$ cat bin/screen-dock.sh xrandr --output DVI-D_1 --mode 1920x1200 xrandr --output PANEL --off :~$ cat bin/screen-undock.sh xrandr --output PANEL --mode 1280x800 xrandr --output DVI-D_1…
Микрософт мне не нравится прежде всего тем, что популяризировала ненавистные многим методы работы. Следуя примеру Микрософт, индустрия ПО, которая по сути является индустрией услуг, стала вдруг индустрией продуктов, а…
It is done using machine learning lately and has been oriented for a few years towards two competions: MUC and ACE. The quality of the Coreference Resolution is still fairly poor in the general case, although some…
This is a follow-up to the T3: Semantic Role Labeling: Past, Present and Future tutorial by Lluís Màrquez. A lenient evaluation of the state-of-the-art F 1 in Semantic Role Labelling is around 80%, but the quality…
Не знаете? Съездите в Сингапур, полюбуйтесь. Объясняю по порядку. Общего у обеих стран много. Формальная демократия, на деле — авторитарный режим. С 1959 по 1990 год страной правил Ли Куан Ю , теперь — его сын.…
Well, this is not technically a BSOD nor even a RSOD, but a Windows startup repair screen on a two-store high screen in the center of Singapore.
Приспичило мне купить пару маек в Сингапуре. А тут лоток с майками по дороге. Беру размер М, иду оплачивать, а тётка на кассе на меня хитро смотрит и заворачивает: иди, мол, разверни и прикинь на тельце. Развернул,…
Two recent news reports cast a shadow on an otherwise shiny picture of Apple . The sudden death of an employee trusted with a prototype of iPhone and the reports of iPods blowing up and causing injuries . This is the…
Once in a time, I get to travel to places that make me worry about the data on my laptop. This time, it is not the US, but another openly democratic country where they kill you for a joint, let alone nude pictures.…
Отсталая всё-таки страна Россия. Там всё ещё озабочены проблемами коррупции и взяточничества в то время, как весь цивилизованный мир уже *дцать лет использует создание бизнес-ниш из воздуха как основной приём для…
Наихудший менеджер — это тот, кто считает себя технарём, но уже им не является. © я
Nowadays, conferences are being run using a century-old approach that puts a lot of trust into the reviewers and the program committee. However, examples of successful social networks like Slashdot , Digg and Reddit…
Here is a fictitious story of a business client that orders software for a mobile phone to an embedded developer. Take such a trivial feature of a mobile phone as a the possibility to store last calls. What do you know…
Я — авторитарный демократ. Верю в здоровую конкуренцию автократий за человеческий капитал.
А вот так слэшдот решил поощрять пользователей с высокой кармой. Приятно, что во времена повальной монетизации не все контент-провайдеры видят в пользователе одну лишь дойную корову.
The summary is that the printer is indeed mostly working, but requires a bit of hacking. Splix driver I tried first using the Splix printer driver as it looked a bit more clean than the foo2qpdl recommended by the Open…
In light of the recent accusation of Richard Biefnot (PS), echevin of Housing and Urbanism in Mons, I was trying to figure out what kinds of images he actually possessed and on the basis of what laws he is being…
After struggling for a few minutes with the audible.com website to download a free audio book , I resorted to Demonoid.com. How can these guys compete with the amateurs if they can not even ofer a quality service, let…
Сегодня на Слэшдоте написали , что в Штатах больше не осталось никого, кто мог бы сделать боеголовку к ракете Трайдент. И сегодня же я прочитал, что европейские космонавты и астронавты чехвостят проект ATV , потому что…
Как всегда, самое полезное — маленьким шрифтом в сносках ;-) I tried ranking users by both average and median comment score, and average (with the high score thrown out) seemed the more accurate predictor of high…
В последнее время все только и говорят об флуктуациях биржевых котировок, спаде ВВП, кризисе, банках. Мало кто представляет, о чём говорит. Не пора ли обратиться к истокам? Жан-Батист Сэй, "Трактат по политической…
A few days ago, I lived through a DDOS attack at one of the sites I run. It started with the general unavialability of Apache , although the system was idle and the ssh access functioned perfectly. As I already had…
Anyone working at least part-time as an employee in Belgium can opt for his own part-time business. This is even mandatory if you have a constant revenue stream coming from the side projects. At first sight, this…
Опять я или мои посетители кого-то чем-то обидели.
I am probably the last webmaster in the world to ban Yahoo! Slurp from indexing my sites. Now, I am resolved. Bye-bye, Yahoo! You were just behaving too badly. iptables -A INPUT -s 66.196.64.0/18 -j DROP iptables -A…
A new parameter has been added to the vmstat and sar utilities a couple of years ago, the CPU steal time. As explained by Rik van Riel , it is the time that (1) the CPU had something runnable, but the hypervisor chose…
Les tirages des quotidiens francophones en Belgique ont diminué de 19% sur la période de dix ans, de 1997 à 2007. C'est la conclusion que je tire des statistiques du CIM , publiée sur leur site et complétés par les…
Сегодня я зашёл в блог известного в узких кругах автора Struts Framework и Java Server Faces Крэйга Мак-Кланагана . Своим некачественным кодом этот человек портил жизнь сотням тысячам программистов, а если учесть, что…
I did this a few times in my life, and every time it was painful to reconstruct the necessary toolset and configuration options. So, here it goes. First, enable the proxy support. ~# a2enmod proxy # utility functions…
Voici un exemple de l'accessibilité de l'état aux citoyens. Ce matin, j'ai été sur le site web du Service des équivalences pour l'enseignement secondaire de la Communauté française de Belgique . Après avoir lu les…
Вчера зааплоадил окончательнию версию статьи на конференцию. Отправился домой спать, ночью как раз дедлайн для подачи статей закончился. С утра получаю получаю паническое мыло от организаторов -- мол, так и так, срочно…
Looking back to my last review of different tools used in project management , I figured out that this review is a a recipe for yet another ideal project management tool. Such a tool should be useable throughout the…
Продолжаем соревнование с фотосайтом по разработке программы для установки в Gnome фото дня с фотосайта в качестве обоев рабочего стола. #!/bin/bash cd /var/photosight && \ FN=`wget -q…
As a continuation of this topic , here is an idea for cinematographic evening in Brussels: Watch Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) , a beautiful dark comedy with Garry Grant and then visit the Arsenic et Vieilles Dentelles ,…
After a few months of using the HP 6910p notebook , I am ready to share my thoughts on it. This is the first new notebook I bought for myself. For many years, I favoured custom-built desktop PCs and bought only a few…
In a paper entitled " Classes vs. Prototypes: Some Philosophical and Historical Observations " and published in 1996, Antero Taivalsaari draws parallels between the evolution of the philisophy and of the…
Вот в Европе например есть ORSN , замена официальному (американскому) DNS. А в России?
I just received a mail from a low-tech customer with an attachment in the ODF format.
The best insights at the inner workings of the today's economy can be achieved through the study of how The Bureaucracy performs simple tasks. The VAT validation is something that every company of a reasonable size…
As of 1 January 2008, the Belgian government introduced a tax deduction of 80 % with unlimited carry forward under the corporate income tax for income derived from patents licensed by a company based in Belgium. Now,…
The idea is simple. First, watch a quality movie about a place and the next day, go there to see it with your own eyes. The point is to find quality movies that get to the feelings and pass the atmosphere of the place.…
I have been using Ruby for a few months now, doing development of small projects of up to 1000 lines. But I still bite into the naming clashes with ActiveRecord regularily. They appear at random places and it takes a…
Попалась в руки мне недавно прикольная книжка, ATV RVD for Dummies. Учебник по стыковке космического корабля ATV к МКС , оформленный в жёлто-чёрном стиле книжек For dummies . Так вот, там между прочим говорится, что у…
Mind maps Mind maps are unstructured, so if your project is unstructured, use it. It is a safe bet to acknowledge the lack of structure altogether than to invent funny names like Inception, Elaboration, Construction to…
Интели не гангстеры, это отчаявшиеся люди, патриоты... У них одна задача - расшевелить это болото. Любыми средствами. Дать этому городу хоть какую-нибудь цель, заставить его оторваться от корыта... Они жертвуют собой,…
There are only three films that impacted my life to the point that they are day and night living around me in speaking and dressing habits, posters, wallpapers, ring tones, logins and passwords, class names and…
Маршрут Ивянец - Валожын - Доды - Іўе - Навагрудак - Мір Фота тут
mkdir ~/fusesmb fusesmb ~/fusesmb sleep 3600 # wait until fusesmb caches the network shares ls -1R ~/fusesmb > shared-files.lst # -1 is "minus one", not "minus l"
Create a 10G disk image: qemu-img create -f qcow2 netbsd-4.0-i386.qcow2 10G Avoid hangup on boot with --no-acpi and the default network card timeout by trying out a different card, e.g. -net nic,model=ne2k_pci : kvm…
I must admit that I was wrong in my previous stance over the tax calculation issue. Apparently, The Ministry of Finance has nothing to do with such a strange calculation process. It is prescribed by the law. Article…
I am probably missing some background knowledge, but the salary calculation process in Belgium looks like it has been subverted by Ministry of Finance officials. This is better seen by example The so-called key formula…
Кровавая история на тему от тюрьмы и от сумы не зарекайся .
На работе: $ find ~ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 file -i -b | sort |uniq -c |sort -nr| head 41880 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 23507 text/xml 12471 image/png 8990 text/x-c++; charset=us-ascii 8576 text/x-c;…
~$ history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head 356 cd 309 vim 217 mutt 131 svn 107 ls 99 gem 63 cat 48 screen 45 mysql 39 ssh
Although the popular description of the Open-Domain QA centers on the fact that the questions are not limited by a specific domain, this is not totally correct unless the term domain is used in the philosophical sense…
An old software project management axiom, otherwise known as Conway's law stated that any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it . Forty years after Melvin Conway formulated it, it has…
Выдали мне не так давно на работе компьютер dualboot: Windows XP и Ubuntu. И действительно, оказалось полезно, из Ubuntu я пару раз запускал Windows XP через kvm. В первый раз она просила её активировать. Ну дай думаю…
According to ONEM, there's been 53 mln service vouchers sold in Belgium in 2007. At the price of € 6.70, this makes for € 355.1 mln of expenses for belgian households. For each service voucher, the state pays € 20 to…
Everyone and his friends are afraid of calling the langue and parole concepts of Saussure by their English names. After giving in some thought and trying different translations in the discussions, I came out with…
Tired of trying to fix a bug that resulted in the display of an empty blank area instead of a floating image, I run to the best developer's friend which gave me an answer , no explanation attached. Now what the heck is…
More on Chaos control. The most dangerous outcome of the underplanning is employee frustration. Without clear day-to-day targets, employees loose interest in the work. Some become anxious, not willing to take on…
On Freedom management. The employee should be given as much control over his work as he can bear. This meets the requirement for the planning in that there should be just enough planning to induce day-to-day tasks, no…
A project manager plays with two major forces: Chaos and Freedom . When a project starts, nothing is clear, the previous stages like business analysis and user requirements collection have likely been a complete…
I finally figured out why I hate Rails . It is the most authoritative web development platform ever, developed on one of the most liberal languages.
For many years already, Java developers running Debian ignored the Tomcat bundled with Debian in favor of a manual installation. Nowadays, with the availability of Sun Java 1.5 in Etch, it is time to reconsider this.…
Ну вот и ещё один дубль. Восьмого января фотосайт изменил структуру сайта и поломал так полюбившийся многим photosight wallpaper под Windows, а также скрипты дла автоматической установки "фото дня" на рабочий экран,…
The folks at debian-administration have shown me the light , once again. It turns out that enabling a multiuser remote console is much simpler than what I previously thought . Just login, run screen and tell the…
The expression Keep It Simple, Stupid has a negative connotation, coming from the ambiguity between Keep It Simple AND Stupid Keep It Simple, YOU, Stupid that the original wording suggests.
ActiveRecord has been built straight from the Martin Fowler's Single Table Inheritance design pattern. Period. This is fine for simple applications with that can live with the database design imposed by the application…
PHBs, stay away. This is as complicated as the Type C work permit gamble , Type B vs. immigration legal loophole or the intrinsics of the payslip calculation . Here is the idea of service vouchers in a 100 words. A few…
Nearly everyone gets one surprisingly small monthly pay during his 1st year or so in a company. In order to understand what happens, one has to know that workers earn their holidays this year for the next year. Once…
This time, it took me around 8 working hours since the start of a new ruby-based project before I stumbled upon what seems to be a serious bug. The first time I tried to extend an association, activerecord failed with…
ActiveRecord is a beautiful piece of software. But just step aside of the prescribed road, and you are guaranteed to have problems. This time, my problems began when I started to design the model first. I quickly laid…
The shortest version I could come up with. A more "formal" calculator in Ruby takes ~350 SLOCs 1 INTRO 2 3 The salary calculation in Belgium has 5 steps that I will call by their 4 respective french/dutch names: 5 6…
Тут Лукьяненко поставил ссылку на высказывание об авторском праве Романа Афанасьева. Что симптоматично, у обоих комментарии отключены. К чему бы это? ЗЫ: Назовите меня идиотом, но чтобы найти ссылку на этот постинг…
Everyone and his friend is already aware that installing rubygems to a non-default location was a nightmare just until very recently (that is, version 0.9.5, produced on 2007-11-19). Now, suppose we try to do something…
Тут abbra пишет про удачное внедрение OLPC и ненароком сообщает статистику испльзования этих компьютеров детьми. Это значит, что кто-то, даже не родители, а в лучшем случае учителя мониторят детские компьютеры на…
There is a whole thread on /. about the pay system failures in US public schools. As usual with slashdot, you get sometimes a pearl while digging through a multitude of clueless comments. Here is one I found out for…
How can one not be disappointed with Groovy after looking at its User Guide ? Here is just one example. Can you tell from the StreamingMarkupBuilder documentation how it works? I bet no. After looking through the code…
Er... after reading the insightful comments at debian-administration.org , I figured out a much shorter version which is also easier to understand. Tested on GNU bash, version 3.1.17(1)-release (i486-pc-linux-gnu).…
I just fixed a 6-year old bug in the 5 lines of code that I use at least 100 times a day, every day, including weekends and holidays. Now, I can finally publish it. function truncate_pwd { if [ $HOME == $PWD ] then…
There's been a long-standing commitment from Sun to make Java backwards-compatible. It made introducing new features in Java painful (generics), and fixing bugs (java.sql.Timestamp vs. java.lang.Date) impossible. On…
The Linux Distribution Chooser test gave me Debian and Ubuntu in precisely that order. Yuppie!
I am regularly doing the LLOD support over phone+remote console to the production support guys. Our software runs on virtualized headless Fedora 5 instances that are accessible solely by ssh, as it should naturally be.…
В течение долгих лет у меня идёт вялотекущий спор с che по поводу причин оттока интересных людей из Беларуси. Из года в год уезжают отличные собутыльники, идеальные коллеги, люди, выделяющиеся из общей среды умением…
Google Code Search Pros links to the code in the same package Cons Limited set of languages, e.g. no Groovy search No in-page links to other classes Virtually no code highlighting, only comments are highlighted.…
Linux says, it's U0020 aka SPACE $ grep mon_thousands_sep /usr/share/i18n/locales/fr_FR mon_thousands_sep "<U0020>" Java says, it's U00A0 aka NO-BREAK SPACE as the following code returns "160", better known as as in…
I tried to look over the internet for an article critical of JSF technology. Surprisingly I found nothing worth mentioning. This is really strange, as JSF lends itself easily to critics. The whole idea if JSF looks…
Supporting that crappy product I had to code first. P.S. Oh my GNU!
When choosing between features, deadlines and maintainability, they always choose maintainability. They have settled on a development methodology, be it Evo, Scrum XP or some home-made cocktail and follows that…
Dear literate welfare state slave, Today, I met a welfare state king. He popped up in my office around lunch time, keeping in his hands a fat workbook with the logo of the local trade union on the cover. Without…
You scored as Belgian , Which European nationality should you have created with QuizFarm.com
Первый вопрос про оффлайновый органайзер и список дел очень успешно разрешился советами перейти на Evolution. Выяснилось, что Evolution довольно стабилен, просто не надо было пользоваться Ubuntu. Удобнейшая интеграция…
Сабж, будучи завален разнообразной работой, ищу удобный способ самоорганизации. Пока лучше Google Personalized Homepage + Google Calendar ничего не нашёл, хотя всего-то хочется календать с возможностью добавления…
Can you imagine that nearly all Xen-based hosting providers are fully booked weeks and even months ahead? And those serving Debian preinstalled like the venerable http://www.unixshell.org stopped accepting new…
Поздравляем! Вы- Янус Невструев Вы - Янус, великий Маг ижертва собственного эксперимента. Вы едины в двух лицах и знаете всё о будущем ваших коллег. Они вас любят, но слегка побаиваются. Будьте с ними пооткровеннее, и…
You are a Social Liberal (66% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (26% permissive) You are best described as a: Democrat Link: The Politics Test on OkCupid Free Online Dating Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test
Recently, I caused a delay in the delivery of a JSF/Spring/Hibernate application running under Tomcat. The reason was that I built the application with Java 6 and shipped it this way for testing which used Java 5.…
The antonym of racism is escapism © myself. will enjoy seeing me saying that ;-)
It's been a while since I dreamed about writing a book about a the IT project management methodology called Disastrous programming . Today, I finally figured out the title of my future, never-to-be-written book:…
I never did this before, so the most difficult part of getting a VPN connection working was about finding the right solution. The source of my inspiration being apt-cache search , I first tried the Gnome Network…
There are three types of work permits in Belgium. Type A is delivered to liberal professions. Type B is delivered to employees and workers. Type C is delivered to asylum seekers. What's the point of delivering work…
Well, it turns out that the best place to go shopping for resin balls, wooden cubes, plastic handles of all types is Tom&Co , a mid-sized chain of animal shops. People who advise Tom&Co over the conventional Baby 2000…
http://svr.gov.ru/history/dirs.htm Обратите внимание на преобладание еврейских имён и фамилий в 20-е и 30-е годы.
There are twice as much work permits delivered every year to asylum seekers and illegal immigrants than to foreign workers.
I recently participated in the local-level Belgian elections as a commission member. Brussels uses an electronic voting system where all votes are done one a computer and recorded on a floppy disk. The thing is, given…
There are more than 450.000 people in Belgium that receive unemployment money from the state without doing any work at all. 68.000 out of 1.000.000 living in Brussels, that is, 6.8%. 171.000 out of 6.000.000 living in…
Out of two next snippets, the first one will throw a UNIQUE KEY constraint error and the second will pass. SET NAMES utf8; CREATE table test(name varchar(60)) DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8; ALTER TABLE test ADD UNIQUE KEY name…
Фотосайт раздаёт программу под винду, которая ротирует фотообои с лучшими фото. Программа -- маленький, глючный до невозможности экзешник. А ведь её можно заменить всего одной строчкой, которая будет скачивать…
When I am typing in cyrillic, I can not access any of the vim key bindings, unless I switch the keyboard layout to a latin-based one. There existed a solution for 1-byte locales, the famous langmap command. Putting the…
After reading the excellent Easy Automated Snapshot-Style Backups with Linux and Rsync , I deicided to make a new backup script for my home directory that would keep the last 9 incremental snapshots. Here is the…
Java enums are translated by the compiler into a class that contains the enum elements as public static final fields. If we put specific code into the enum elements, these fields become inner classes. (So that they can…
Everyone knows that it is often superfluous to add www in front of a site name. Something few are aware of is that one can append a dot to the site name and it will still work. Check http://google.com and…
Just another story I presented on a few occasions already. Belgium has a very developed temporary job market. One particular feature of temporary contracts, also called interim contracts is that they are made for the…