While unemployment rates are getting worse and worse (I a victim of unemployment too) some organized (and not so organized) electronic criminals resort to harvesting CVs exploiting the desperation of unemployed people and the lack of attention caused by their eagerness to send CVs out there, in hopes of a job.

I can do nothing more than alert people to be careful where they send their CVs as identity theft is on the rise.  Waking up one day and finding debt on your name isn’t a nice thing.  Or discover you are employed in Africa!!

Having a look at this example:
http://www.cyprusjobswebsite.com/jobs/job-vacancy-2 we can see how it is carefully crafted to attract the desperate and trick them to sending their CVs.  The Achilles heel of these attacks though is the destination email address of the recruiter.  Here the email is Email:info_hardyoilgas@yahoo.com .  I added the email here in hopes that some spider will pick it up and spam it relentlessly

They use legit company names, and in some instances i saw legit vacancies, but the emails are always not real.  They are either yahoo, gmail etc emails or in some cases emails belonging to domains bought that are similar to ones of actual companies.

In this case the site hosting the advert failed to make the appropriate check, and spot the email address.  I took the liberty of contacting one of these companies, but actually contacted the legit company asking them if they had any actual vacancies.  The response was rather disappointing (but expected) when the london based company said that they have fallen victims of this attack, but police in London did nothing to put an end to this and help protect people falling for it, protecting the company itself and its name from being involved in this scheme.

If the crime is small enough in impact no one will bother doing anything about it.  So the recipe for success? Many little crimes apparently such as this one and the police will do nothing!  Ofcourse such crimes are hard to address as there is nothing much the police can do about them.

Responsibility is with us, being careful where we send our CVs and with recruitment websites making sure they scrutinize ads before posting them.

Good luck!

Well it seems that i am currently unemployed and looking for a job!  The economy of Cyprus is going downhill and the recent influx of 40 000 + working immigrants from Greece has contributed in a shortage of jobs in the Cyprus market.  No one can be blamed here but from the looks of it a lot of Cypriots will be migrating to other countries to seek employment in the months and years to come.

The government doesn’t seem to be doing much to help the situation either.  They were not prepared for the new reality.  Then again what can you say, the political scene in Cyprus is inherited and belongs to a few well known families, most of whom are backed with family money.  I guess this is the reality in most democratic countries anyway.  Makes me question the whole concept of our modern Capitalistic Democracy.  The lesser of all evils i guess.

Well not much else to say here, if any of you readers hear of anything job wise i would appreciate any help i can get.

are you unemployed? you want to get a job? Are you wondering why you cant get a job in Cyprus some times???? Simple, thank the government and the  HRDA http://www.hrdauth.org.cy/  for the ANAD (HRDA) sponsorship plan.

A plan aimed to help unemployed people get work! but what is really happening is this: companies only hire ANAD candidates!! result?? simple: unemployment rates remain the same as people who are looking for a job will remain unemployed till they become eligible for an ANAD (HRDA) sponsorship !! Thanks a lot dear government once again!!

I have 2 days left before leaving the Cyprus Agricultural Payments Organization.  My stay here was an experience, and so was my departure.

I started here as an IT Officer with a 3 month contract that was renewed 2 more times covering a total of 6 months.  I was assigned programing duties on a dead end project which represents nothing more than a typical example of how governmental organizations waste the tax payer’s money.  The project was outsourced which meant i was pretty much doing donkey work for the people who already worked on the project.

The system here is such that you accept the phrase “less is more” as part of the natural daily life here.  Soon you find your self doing less and less and even getting stressed about not doing enough.

I actually went through panic modes as they kept me idle for most of the 6 months, occasionally giving me things to do such as reports.  I actually used my time here to read and expand my understanding on certain subjects such as technical skills, design, or politics.  Ebook reading became a daily ritual. Over all it was a good experience to understand first hand how the government engine works and how things get done.

My exit was also interesting,  my contract was simply not renewed.  Although i was renewed twice and was congratulated on good performance on both times my contract was renewed. My departure coincided with the visit of one of the 2 big political parties in Cyprus, a few weeks before election times.  One has to wonder but for those who know me, they by now know what happened.  It was nothing personal at the end of the day, people needed work, some people needed to go. Votes count and so do friendships. The excuses used were obviously excuses, and not much can be said or done.  Nor do i want to do anything about it.  People complained for things such as me annoying them asking for more work et cetera.

To be honest i am happy it happened as I was just wasting myself here, and actually started getting used to the system here.  I showed 0% growth professionally although i did pick up a lot of people skills (as well as office politics skills). The salary and hours were great don’t get me wrong, although waking up at 6 and driving through 1 hour of traffic to get here wasn’t.

On the plus side i made new friends here, one or 2 of them read my blog actually so thanks guys

Overall i am thankful to the people here, for their kind words,  for not letting me waste my time here and helping me actually get out and try and do something more with my life, even if it pays less at the beginning.

So I look forward to the new challenges i have ahead, starting on the 11th of April

If you are from Cyprus you probably know what ETEK is.  For the rest, it is the corresponding body of the British Engineering Council.  What has unfortunately happened in Cyprus though is that this body has managed to include people from the computer science discipline demanding that they are registered and pay an annual license for practicing their profession.  This is apparently mandatory by law.

Point 1: why would someone with a computer science background need to register as an engineer although they are not, in the traditional sense, engineers.  Why should they not be registered with a body such as the Cyprus Computer Society, whos corresponding British body seems to be responsible for evaluating, recognizing and registering degrees of relevant disciplines?

Point 2: The main drive behind someone wanting to register is that the biggest employer in Cyprus, the government, dictates that for someone to be able to compete for an A8 level position (pay-wise a starting salary of 2000 euro gross) they need to be registered with the body of ETEK.

Point 3: ETEK fails to recognize and provide levels of membership, thus either allowing someone to be registered or not, but does not offer registration and recognition of technicians, or even take into account the years of experience and thus allowing someone to be registered, if they for example graduated from a diploma awarding institution such as the late Higher Technological Institute in Cyprus. It has become a binary decision of yes or no, without even allowing for the government to tap to the potential and expertise of a lot of people out there whos degrees might not be adequate for registration.

point 4:  cynicism – If ETEK was aiming to make more money by simply registering Computer Science graduates then why not allow for levels of membership, more people registering = more money.  Also government positions will then be able to request for different levels of membership depending on the position.  Better yet why not allow another body such as the Cyprus Computer Society to evaluate degrees and eligibility for registration and the academic capabilities of the person at hand .

Cases:

1. Person graduates from HTI (ATI) as an engineer with years of experience working for a construction company such as J&P and still can not register with ETEK in Cyprus
2. Person graduates from a UK University with a degree whos title doesn’t match Computer Science or any other UCY title and as such can not register without an MSc.  Such a title could be computing studies.
3. Graduate with an Management Information Systems degree, not a pure science degree (again note the word science and not engineering.)

Conclusions are up to you to make, but i will quote the following from the official page of ETEK:

Cyprus Scientific and Technical Chamber (ΕΤΕΚ)

The Cyprus Scientific and Technical Chamber (ΕΤΕΚ) is the statutory Technical Advisor to the State and is the umbrella organisation for all Cypriot Engineers. It was established by Law 224/1990 and is a Public Law Body with an elected Governing Body. It has an office and a Service capable of promoting its objects.

Have a read through the rest of the page and see what you think.

The legislation and system itself, although aiming to protect professionals and their professions, has managed to impose a sort of monopoly and word play where people who could not for various reasons get a degree which would allow them to register with ETEK (reasons being that they could not afford to go to a University abroad during their time of studies), but do have the skills, are denied the opportunity to compete on equal terms with others for positions or have been denied the ability to exercise their profession.  They are denied this by a system which has not been designed and implemented correctly.

A group of people who currently can not register with ETEK and thus can not either practice their profession legally or be able to claim such, or higher ranked, government positions with their degrees (or diplomas) and gathering people who want to simply unregister from ETEK (yet another daunting task).

To find them or contact them simply go to
http://anti-etek.com/

To have a look at the official site of ETEK go to
http://www.etek.org.cy

You might also want to have a look at the following page: http://www.etek.org.cy/page.aspx?page_id=84

P.S.
In case you are wondering, yes i am registered with ETEK, and i do believe in the importance of such a body to exist as it will better control who can practice a profession.  But i also believe in fairness and equal opportunities and seeing injustices such as this, which can be fixed, leaves me hoping for change.

Adding the following:

I did not want to touch on this subject but seeing as it might help, i want to raise the issue of people who work in the field of IT (or other engineering subjects for that) but have no relevant degree or no degree at all.   Where do they stand in terms of the law.

My builders did not have a licence from ETEK, did they need someone supervising them with a mechanical engineering degree and an ETEK registration?

Some do have certifications but not all.  So what happens with them in terms of ETEK? or other such bodies, i wonder

One of the servers i am running at work (a debian box running on a sparc sun machine) decided to stop responding, after months of running smoothly.  My first reaction was “F**K there goes my uptime!!).  I could not connect to the box in any way so we had to do a hard reboot.  When the machine started again, one of the mysql tables of RT (ticketing system running on it), was corrupted (the table was marked as crashed).

After googling i endedup with a mysql command to repair the table, which failed due to a “Not enough memory for blob”.  I ended up with the following link : http://maheshsworld.jokesplanet.com/?q=mysql_crash which basically allows you to increase the allowed blob size when using the myisamchk command.  For example myisamchk –max-record-length=1048576 -r -f <table_name> . This command needs to be ran in the same folder as the .MYI file of the table we are trying to fix.  In my case this was under /var/lib/mysql/<DB NAME>/ .

I hope this is useful.

This will be a short post but have a read at this article about the future of the Oracle and Sun merger:

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/120109-what-if-oracles-buyout-of.html

I came across a utility that might be useful to people, it does what other shareware utilities do, have a look at it, what do you think?

www.getsharepod.com

Remember how in Windows XP there was something called MUI and how you could change the language windows used to display messages et cetera?  Vista has a similar concept, only not available for the Vista home editions.  But fear not! there is a solution!! Check out this link!

http://www.froggie.sk/

How to send a Nudge using pidgin:

/nudge

That’s it!

This link appeared to be interesting. A bit old but might actually work, and if not then have a look at the comments cause they seem to provide additional links.

http://davieslim.wordpress.com/2008/09/15/use-ps3-controller-in-windows-wireless-bluetooth/

Forgot to register your domain name and lost it? Did your domain name provider mess things up and loose your domain? Does this sound all too familiar?

Some so called companies on the Internet are getting away with what is happening in the grey zone of the net, where no ethical law applies. What am i on about? Imagine if you forgot to pay your rent and you were suddenly homeless, and not because of the credit crisis.

2 years ago the dot com domain i owned got lost thanks to, partly my stupidity, and mostly to the stupidity of the person i trusted managing my domain, who also supplied my hosting. (NEVER EVER TRUST ANYONE IN THAT WAY, it is plain stupid, and i was stupid). Did that guy sell my domain to some other company? noone knows (kidding hehe)

Now picture this, you set up a company that simply registers domains the minute the expire, using automated systems, and of course under the nose of ICANN. These people get your domain, and you receive an email later on that they are selling your domain for 200 dollars or more. Amazing is it not? And what is ICANN doing about this?

NOTHING, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING

What these people are doing is unethical, they are earning lots of money by reselling domain names that others worked hard to build a reputation for. And once you loose your domain, there is no way of claiming it back, none. ICANN demands you pay them lots of money to do anything about it.

Does it sound like we are getting screwed by someone with a monopoly? Well yes we are, this is unacceptable.

The latest victim of this was a website called bballvideos dot com .

When this happened to me i actually did a lot of research on these people who you might remember from domain servers such as name-services.com and plenty of others. They seem to be using other “company names” as well to disguise themselves. I wonder how much they are turning over if noone is saying or doing anything about them.

One of the most annoying things in windows is when we are behind a proxy and an application we want to use is not configured to use a proxy of its own.

The proxycfg does just that. Documented at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa384069.aspx

For a command line proxy try this:

set HTTP_proxy=http://my.proxy.server:8000

http://www.ireallyshouldstudy.com/technology/2008/12/05/firefox-31-beta-only-a-few-days-away/

have a look

I know that each of the above is good for specific types of video and we all sort of use them occasionally, either to watch our favorite video clips over and over again, or to watch the occasional tv show we missed last week.  Has anyone checked out Hulu though?  Have a look at www.hulu.com