Posts Tagged ‘work time’

Quitting my job as IT Manager and moving to Further Horizons in Hewlett Packard

Friday, September 13th, 2013

International University College Logo IUC

I haven't blogged for a while for a plenty of reasons, I'm going through a change period in my life and as any change it is not easy.
This post will be not informative and will not teach any of my dear readers, anything on Computers its pretty personal but still for my friends it might cause interest.
Here is my personal life story over the last few months …

For a while I worked in a International University College situated in my hometown Dobrich. I was hired on position of IT Manager, and actually was doing a bit of E-Marketing to try to boost traffic to College's website – www.vumk.eu and mostly helping the old school hacker ad college system administrator over the last 10 yrs – Ertan to fix a bunch of Linux Mail / SQL and Webservers and some Windows machines. In college I learned from Ertan how to install and backups of restaurants software called BARBEQUE as well as how to fix problems with billing terminals situated in College Restaurant (3rd floor of building). Other of my work time I had to  fix infested Windows computers with viruses re-install Windowses and fix various printing and network problems of College's teachers, accountants, cash desk, marketing and rest of college  employees.

Talking about Ertan I should express my sincere tremendous Thanks (Thanks Ertan) to it for recommending me for this job position. Right before I started work in the college I was jobless for a while starting to get desperate that its impossible find work. Current IUC sysadmin – Mr. Ertan Geldiev is a remarkable man and one of the people that made great impression in my mind. Something I found interesting I can learn from Ertan was to get from his cheerful "admin" attitude. As a true hacker Ertan had this hacker attitude of playfulness I myself has for a while lost over the years. So seeing someone like this near my life make me a good favor and had a positive influence on myself.

I have learned a lot from Ertan during the 3 months and 3 days in International University College. Just for a bit of historic information earlier IUC was known as International College – Albena, also among Dobrich citizens known as The Dutch College – as earlier IUC had good relations with Dutch Universities and was issuing double degrees both Bulgarian and Dutch. Nowadays I'm not sure if still Double-degrees partnership between IUC and Dutch Universities exist, what I know for sure is college is issuing European Double Degrees in partnership with Cardiff Metropolitan University. I myself have earlier studied in the college and already know the place well thus will use this post to say a few words on my impressions on it …

International University College - one of top prestigious colleges in Eastern Europe

The college is a great place to be as you have chance to meet plenty of people both lecturers (professors), participate in the various events organized by College's as well as get involved in the many European Projects which are being handled by a European Projects department special department situated on the back of the College Building. Other positive about College is it is small and located on a peaceful town of Dobrich. This gives the bright people a lot of space for personal development, anyways on the other hand it can make you also a bad as Dobrich as a small city is a bit boring. The studies in College are good for students who want personal freedom as there is not too strict requirements for professors on how to teach.

Though college had help me grow, especially in my knowledge in Windows 7 and 8 (Ertan had a really good Windows background), I couldn't have the chance to develop myself too further in the long term. So my job offer to work in HP as Web and Middleware Implementation Engineer opened much broader opportunities for my long term IT career. Other reason I quit the College IT job was simply because I needed more money I had the vision to make a family with a girl from Belarus – Svetlana and in order to take care for her I need to earn good money. My official salary in the college was the funny for the position – 640 lv (though after a few months I was promised to have a raise and earn 400 EUR :)) . Such low sallary was for the reason I had the idea to continue studying in College and complete my Bachelor Business degree and we had agreed with the College CEO Mr. Todor Radev to extract part of my salary monthly and with that to pay my 1 semester tuition fee (2200 EUR) – necessary for my graduation assignment. Though completing the Bachelor is important phase to close in my life for a long time, I found for the moment more valuable to work for HP and earn normal living salary with which to possibly finance myself and create family with woman of my life (hopefully) in the short term.

In this post I want express my sincere thanks to all people in International College (Elena Urchenko, Krasimir – for helping me in my job duties), Pavel and Silvia for being a colleague for a while I worked partly in the Marketing Department.

Talking about Marketing Department what I did there is some Twitter Marketing (building some twitter followers) and wrote a tiny document with recommendation on how to optimize College website – vumk.eu (future version) – for better SEO ranking. This included complete analysis from user outlook to Indexing bots and site current code. 

Mr Docent Phd Todor Radev

I have to do a big underline on how great person the College President and UNI Rector – Docent Todor Radev is. I have already bitter experience studying for a while in a government universities when younger and I know from experience usually Rectors and Universities management of state universities is pure "Hell". Thanks to Mr. Todor Radev for he did me a big favor letting me quit  job just a week later (instead of 1 month as it is officially set by Bulgarian Dismissal Law and explicitly stated in my Work Contract. Also as a person my experience from Docent Radev is wonderful too. He is extremely intelligent, brilliant gentleman and  most importantly open minded and always open for innovation.
 

As a close up I would like to say Big Thanks to everyone which I worked with or met in International University College! Thanks guys for all your support and help, thanks for being work mates and friends for the time.

How to Block Facebook access on Microsoft Windows XP / Vista / 7 and 8

Friday, July 26th, 2013

Disable facebook on Windows computers using windows hosts fileIn Office home network, there is a Windows XP computer which is spending all his official work time in facebook.
Hanging in facebook makes this social network freak work quite inefficient so something had to be done immediately … and guess who had to do it …

 Usually I do facebook filtering via iptables rules directly from Linux NAT router, but filtering facebook https (port 443 traffic) is real pain in the ass and moreover facebook has a bunch of hosts so filtering from Linux i-net router is not always best solution. In this specific case the Linux router deliving internet to the Win host was also having complete routing so filtering with iptables wasn't so easy.
To save myself from loosing few hours trying to discover why I can't manage to filter facebook from Linux router, checked online if it possible to filter facebook using standard Windows method.
It turns out on Windows computer it is possible filter facebook by simply mapping all Facebook main hosts to localhost (127.0.0.1) using hosts map file. In my case Win computer was running Windows XP, however on All Windows XP / Vista / 7 and 8, default location of hosts file is in: 

  
C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Microsoft Windows c:\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file Windows explorer screenshot

Therefore I used  Windows Explorer, navigated to C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\ copied hosts file to Desktop, edited with Notepad and placed at the end of it following lines:

# Block Facebook
127.0.0.1 api.facebook.com 
127.0.0.1 connect.facebook.net
127.0.0.1 facebook.com
127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 graph.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 profile-b.xx.fbcdn.net
127.0.0.1 s-static.ak.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 static.ak.connect.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 static.ak.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 static.ak.fbcdn.net
127.0.0.1 www.fbcdn.com
127.0.0.1 static.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 www.static.ak.connect.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 www.login.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 login.facebook.com

how to block facebook Windows hosts file opened in Notepad

Then copied the new modified hosts files from Desktop back to C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc
Following same logic, its possible to disable access to any host on the Internet. There are even some software like SpyBot which does by default change Windows default hosts file with pre-mapped well known spammer / spyware / malware hosts to prevent viruses and spyware to download more of themselves.

 Finally to make Windows re-read new hosts file I had to restart the PC, and Voila! Facebook access was cut 🙂