Once upon a time Macedonia (as territory) was part of Bulgaria. That time continued for over 600-700 years.
During that time the people who lived there called themselves Bulgarians. But sadly one day World War I and World War II started and ended. This changed things. The word “Macedonian” changed its meaning from a word describing people who live in Macedonia (as geographical location) to people who recognize themselves as a part of the newly formed Macedonia nation. Cool. We are all being born free and we have the right to recognize ourselves
as a part of whatever we wish. I see no problem here, just exercise of a birth right - to recognize yourself as a member of certain ethnic group. Like it or not Macedonians exist, they are a nation and recognize themselves as one. That is a fact. A fact like other facts that I will outline.
Macedonian language - oooh, sadly there is no such language, not for me, and not according to History,
and not according to Present. Sorry.
Macedonian History - very touchy team for Macedonians. Well guys sorry but the history that you claim as your “own” is not your own. It is the history of Bulgaria and Greece. You were Bulgarians once, you are not anymore - fine by me, but do not steal our history. I descent from a Macedonian family. My grand-grand father along with few other fellows went and killed the governor of Solon (ottoman turk) because he incorrectly assumed that since MK was a part of the Ottoman Empire (whatever was left of it) he can do whatever he likes.Wrong. So my grand-grand father took all of his children and went to Bulgaria and he was not the only one to do so.
Alexander the Great - well he is as Macedonian as Issac Newton is Lincolnshirist. Yup he lived in what is today Macedonia but he was a Greek. Macedonian history as history involving the Macedonian nation begins with the formation of the Yugoslav Republic.

Whenever there is a problem/issue/situations there are at least TWO completely different perspectives/view points both of which are equally right and completely incompatible but only one of them is right and the other isn’t. You can twist what you like but this does not change a thing. There is Macedonia (and I do believe that the name of this country MUST be Republic of Macedonia), but your history begins in 1946. The rest is history indeed but not of your own.

Well since we the Bulgarians and Bulgaria as a whole are so god damn nationalistic and want to enslave you and assimilate you (as your “news”papers state) I’d suggest to check who was the first country to recognize you as state under the name Republic of Macedonia - in case you have missed - it was us. We also made a big gesture in recognizing a language that does not exist - the Macedonian. Why does it not exist ? Because following that logic this leads to the conclusion that English is spoken only in England, and in USA it is Americanease that is spoken, in Canada they speak Canadinease and in Australia - Australianease. Same applies for Scotland, Ireland, New Zealand & etc. and the same can be applied to German, French, Russian & etc.
Since you are so much Macedonian I don’t understand why do you go to the line in order to get a Bulgarian passport - one of the must-to of which is to prove your Bulgarian roots. I find this very hypocritical - to give up your believe for a piece of paper simply because your neighbor got into the EU first (which is another theme, the EU membership was a gift for Bulgaria that came after licking lots of @sses, not something that we earned with hard work).

I know many Macedonians some of which are like best friends to me. I recognize their right to believe in what they want (no matter if it is wrong or right) because I find friendship to be above those crappy things that can never lead to something good. However I also recognize my right to speak out loud of what I do believe is right.At least it is good to know that Macedonian politicians and journalists are as worse as Bulgarian ones - no doubt we all came from the same stock

p.s. this post is mainly for MK politicians and “journalists”. You should meet your BG counter-parts - you will find so much similiar ground, behavior , stupidty, so much to talk about - sometimes I wonder from where both groups take those reserves - after all so simple and narrow minds should not be supposed of such great ability of negative “creativity”. Hm…..

Today is an election day in Sofia. We are voting for mayor. Nobody from the candidates is worth any vote, because nobody of them will bring any significant and positive change in our urban life. For almost 20 years nobody has made anything good at all. Really?

Yes, indeed. All the mayors without any exception up to this point are sharing something in common - they do something that they must do anyway (usually they do it in a very cr@ppy way) and after that they start to show off with “look what I HAVE DONE !!! I paved a street !!!! ” And the narrow minded people are all “wooooow, he’s good” and I’m like “so what ? I don’t have a car, I want to walk and I’m tired of walking through the mud, pave the sidewalk you idiot!”.

Up to this point the problems in our country are solved in the best way there is - all the people with power pretend  that there is no problem. If that is not possible they pretend it is not an important one. 10 years later they discover it is still there, so they come out with a law that outlaws the problem - hence - no problem and no need to look for a solution.

Some people think that the youth wants to leave because of the money we get from our jobs. Certainly there are people for which this is the reason but that is not the reason for me. It is not about the money - it is the about how life is organized.  For instance I don’t want to pay taxes that support administration which probably has over 300 000 employees. 300K for population under 8 000 000. Isn’t that too much ? And those people don’t try to make your life easier, oh no. Try to register a company - in 2 weeks you may succeed, if the stars are right and if the astrologist said now is the moment to move. If my state was a restaurant and I was the customer - I would never set foot again in this place - because it is simply not right to pay for someone’s wage and that someone then tries to give you the high-horse attitude – like you owe him/her something. Well I don’t owe you anything, you owe me – a qualified, efficient and reliable service !!!! It is also not right to be alright with this current situation and do nothing. Everyone are speaking about how terrible the administration is yet I did not see A SINGLE TIME when people stood united and protested against this. Yes, I am a Bulgarian and this will not ever change (can’t choose where to be born again), but I’m sorry. I’d rather dedicated my life to a country which will care for me. And that care is not expressed in any material benefits, it is expressed in the way the state treats its citizens. Why would I say such unpatriotic thing ?

Because Bulgaria has not changed significantly for the last 20 years. The standard of living has fallen and it will be another 10 or 20 years until we reach the level we had back in 1989 (the stupid and limited people who will say “you communist” at that point can go and fcuk themselves right away, stop reading and get away from my site !).  The fact that things have not changed imply that the politicians are the ones to be blamed - true but not really. Yes, they are ‘guilty’ but so is the whole nation that did not do anything at all to change the things. The nation is to be blamed since this nation has not realized that nobody is going to “fix” us. Only we can do this by constantly speaking out our minds and by being active participant in elections, protests (which should be constructive, after all we did set few buildings on fire so let’s try the other way around), or whatever public activity there is. People must act as corrective to the politicians and the administration. In other words my beloved nation has not realized that no nation has received the benefits of good standard of living, politicians that are corrupted yet their corruption does not disrupt your life (if you do not agree point me a country with politicians that are not corrupted at all). Corruption is everywhere and it will be there for very long time but the question is – does it affect your every-day life ?  Here it does. I very much wonder how it is expected to work hard so the economy can grow and in the same time to employ 5 lazy clerks that do work which can be done by 0.25th of a normal person  ? And I don’t even include the time wasted from running through different institutions and waiting on the queue line. If the company I work in was ran like the state we would have been out of the business in no time – literally.

Today probably less than 20% of Sofia will go voting.  From those 20% probably 2/3rds will vote for the current mayor – he loves to blame others for the problems he can’t solve. It is either the government, certain ministry, God, forces of nature or whatever is handy. Yet there was not a single time he admitted an error or a failure of his own. Well….given the fact that there are no perfect people I’m kind of scared… But what the hell – we had the “uhm, who ?!”  type  ( Ianchulev ), we had the professional good looking thief ( Sofianski ) , and now it is time to have the macho type ( Borisov ). From those three Sofianski was the smartest  – he managed to fill his basket with enough $$$$$$$$ and still was re-elected – why ? Well he was very good looking, and he had a wonderful smile J Although at the end his smile was saying something like “You want to sue me ? Okay, go ahead please, the things are arranged in such a manner that I’ll be 95 before you manage to succeed !” While Borisov is very strong (physically) – and he has another great ability – he solves the problems by forbidding them (although he would really wants to arrest the problem or shoot it down) Very cool indeed, and how sad that this is no solution at all…. Hey dude, I’m waiting for paved side-walks ! You know what a side-walk is ? It is the place where people choose to walk if there are no cars parked on it. Also – it is supposed to be a solid – not soft and muddy – that’s a swamp.

 
Ohhhh… my dear country why are you so full of apathetic, narrow minded people who think of themselves as very smart and wary…. There is no bigger danger than an idiot with power who thinks of himself as a grate genius – that’s what I think. And as usually I’ll be voting “AGAINST” because there are no people that are worth to vote “FOR”. And the ones that are worthy –  are dead, will never be elected,  will never participate in elections (because those people still have dignity), are far away – throughout EU, Canada, US, Asia, South America, Africa, Australia … or they have simply chosen to work for a living…

by Thomas. A. Limoncelli and Chirstine Hogan.

This book is a must-to, not only for system administrators but for everyone who is involved in the IT world. It provides you with wonderful perspective to how problems should be handled, advantages and disadvantages of different solutions and most importantly it shares a great deal of practical experience. Go buy it !

Datacenters are the places where you keep your servers hoping that “professionals” will take care of them. Here’s some experience with few of them:

Alpha-Red - well those guys really try to do their best, but they are waaaaaaaaay to go. Is it normal to look for a server (given the name and the server ID + IP address) for over 30 minutes ? No, it isn’t. Is it normal to plug in all servers AT ONCE thus causing utter most destruction of the CDU ? (well when smoke starts coming out of it this can’t be good). My advise is not to have more than one or two servers with them for a long enough period (determine it for yourself) unless you have a very strange sense of humor and you enjoy the moments when you smile while you want to cry

Layered technologies - we had just one server with them for very short period of time. One day an abuse report was sent from them to us. To a mail box that is not monitored 24/7 although they were instructed (and they did confirm) they will sent abuse reports to two separate boxes one of which is monitored 24/7. The time for reaction was 4 hours. The abuse was not handled which caused the server to be unplugged. Okaay…BUTTTTTTT After we reacted they plugged back the server but oooooooh - terrible shame - they have given the server IP to another machine… Over 24 hours of downtime due missing senior administrators, network engineers & etc. STAY AWAY ! Or test - with no more than a single machine for at least an year. The best way to test them - run free hosting service. Free hosting attracts a lot of abusers and you can test a given datacenter (as well as your support team reaction) by running this type a service for a certain period of time.

Peer1 - not the best, but compared to the first ones - on the top of the wave ! : ) Tripping up around the power cord, not being able to find a server, rebooting the wrong servers (two of them) before finding the right one, okay with reboot request from an e-mail box that is not authorized to have such requests fulfilled… but if I had to choose those are the guys! Certainly they do have more experience than the first two and certainly the trouble with them will be much less.

The Planet - sadly but we don’t use them anymore. They have a really good ticket system, very responsive, very ahead with the ‘material’ so to say. Their network is very stable and reliable. They react quickly and they do not like getting a lot of abuse reports regarding your servers - which is inevitable thing since you will always have either customers who abuse the service or insecure sites that are an easy victim for a spammer, or H4×0r

The conclusion ? Be very careful when choosing a datacenter. Remember that higher price not always means higher quality (an interesting analogy => Windows Vista ). If you plan to have a lot of machines with a given datacenter make sure to do your homework and test, test AND TEST. And when you are done testing - be sure you have not tested their services well enough.

This topic reminds me for hosting companies that run their own datacenters. Well that’s kind of cool - everything is under one roof. However this does not guarantee anything at all. I recall an interesting story about a mistake of an administrator who wiped out the whole HDDs of a server, no back was present, the customer was told that the it was HDD failure but he wanted the HDD shipped. No problem - take out the HDD, smash it few times against the wall and try it on any box - just to be sure it is utterly useless, then - you can ship it. When I heard about this case I was shocked to find out that such a practice can take place at all !!! If your business really depends on Internet it’s better to lease a high-speed line and host the machine in your building, or pay one of the ‘giants’ (like IBM) to host it for you. Not that they will not ever do such a thing - it is just very unlikely to make the mistake that lead to loosing the whole information.