«Are you proactive, communicative and independent? Welcome in our Team!»

Helvetia Patria is a leading Swiss insurance service provider with core competencies in risk management and private pensions. Mutual appreciation, open communications and clear objectives are important principles of management and collaboration in our company.

We are looking in our ecenter for a professional, client-oriented and motivated

System Administrator to strengthen our Infrastructure and Architecture Team.
(ID 340281)

The ecenter, a small and very specialized unit of the Helvetia Patria Group, is delivering a central e-business infrastructure and platform, based on the J2EE specifications, to the Group’s subsidiaries already for the past 5 years. We differ from others in offering a great team spirit and a motivating environment where technical and business expertise is thriving. Our office is based in Zurich, Switzerland.

In cooperation with our outsourcing partners and internal architects, you will be working on ensuring a secured and highly available delivery of our e-business infrastructure and platform to our clients.

We are expecting you to bring to the position a deep knowledge and expertise of – as well as a minimum of 3 years experience in – the administration and operation of Linux systems (SuSe distribution), of Oracle and MySql databases, of Apache and Tomcat components, and last but not least, of the BEA WebLogic application server. General competency in network and security is also necessary as is experience with scripting languages (shell, perl, ant). German and English (written and spoken) are required while knowledge in a third European language is appreciated.

Competencies in Microsoft Windows 2003 Server and SqlServer are a plus.

If you are interested in working in a growing and fast moving international environment, if you are interested in learning and discovering, do not hesitate to contact me at:

didier DOT beck AT free DOT fr
– or –
didier DOT beck AT helvetiapatria DOT ch

The advert on the Helvetia Patria website.

[via Wikipedia]

Again, the horror… My thoughts are with my colleagues and my readers in the U.K. and London in particular.

On 7 July 2005, beginning at 08:49, during the height of morning rush hour, a series of four bomb explosions struck London’s transport system. Three Underground trains were hit within half an hour, and a bus a further half an hour after that. At least 37 died. The number of injured treated is at least 700. At least one news report has quoted 360 injured. Fox News reported 700 injured. This number is expected to rise as authorities survey the impact of the blasts. It is the worst terrorist attack to take place within the United Kingdom since the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which killed upwards of 200 people.

[via Software Only]

Are you using MySQL? We are, and quite intensively, but not everywhere. Oracle (what an arrogant company…) is still in place in some of our e-business high-available productive environments. I am dreaming of the day when we will be able to get rid of the last Oracle database….
Anyway, Marc is writing about European Innovation. Marten Mickos from MySQL took part at this discussion. And Marc gives us some insights of MySQL.

MySQL is not the primary topic of his talk so he just states that it is the largest open source company, doubling revenues every year, growing 20 times over the past 4 years – to $20M run rate (not sure if this is their run rate, or their 2004 actuals). MySQL is used by the largest corporations in the world now, Internet “giants” and is THE standard database for most startups as part of the LAMP infrastructure. Just one data point: it is downloaded 40K times a day (1 every 2 sec). Marten refers to the company as the “RyanAir” of databases.

MySQL today is a company with 200 employees, 70% working from home, in 22 countries, and almost 100 locations. This created a lot of HR, legal and logistical headaches… but is also a great asset from a support standpoint. Employment contracts and stock options plans were a big issue because of the different tax and regulation systems MySQL had to deal with. Also they implemented a five weeks of vacation policy like in Sweden, no matter the country. Healthcare benefits are adapted to each country, with a policy of not being equal, but to be fair.

During the Q&A;, Marten pointed out that the database market was worth $15B, which means that MySQL still has a massive growth potential. The will maintain its sheer focus on being the reference database vendor for all types of applications, not competing with its clients/partners going “up stack” like Oracle did/does.
He also pointed out that Open Source is a software production model (and philosophy), not a business model. Each Open Source company needs to come up a clear value proposition that allows it to grow profitably without offending the community. Example is Apache: most successful Open Source piece of infrastructure in the world, and nobody is making a lot of money from it.

You have surely heard about the NASA’s Deep Impact. I find this mission really great, what a technological success!!

• Comet impact: July 4, 2005 (surely, by accident ;-)
• Impact velocity: 37’000 km/h
• Spacecraft Size: nearly as large as a Volkswagen Beetle automobile.
• Impactor spacecraft: about the same dimensions as a typical living room coffee table

Deep Impact consists of a sub-compact-car-sized flyby spacecraft and an impactor, about the size of a washing machine. The dual spacecraft carry three imaging instruments, two on the flyby and one on the impactor.

The impactor has an auto-navigation system that will make final corrections to its flight path just minutes before the scheduled collision. Scientists hope the resulting crater will expose fresh material from below the comet’s surface and subsurface.

“That is the whole point of Deep Impact,” said mission principal investigator and University of Maryland astronomer Michael A’Hearn. “We want to find out what are the guts of a comet.”

The flyby spacecraft will use medium and high resolution imagers and an infrared spectrometer to collect and send to Earth pictures and spectra of the event. Space-born science platforms will also be watching Deep Impact. These include NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Swift and Submillimeter Wave Astronomy satellites, the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatory and Rosetta spacecraft. Observatories on Earth will view the impact and its aftermath.

Update: NASA logged about 1 billion connections in one day on July 4. Wow.

Great….. About 150 comment-spams during the last days. It seems that they are doing that manually. Crazy guys, all this stuff for some Google juice :-/

[via Skype Community News]

With some delays (post published on June 20, 2005….) but impressive anyway…

Today, we hit the 10 billion Skype-to-Skype call minutes served mark at around 18:00 GMT. Let’s recap. Skype was released in August 2003. We hit 1 billion minutes served somewhere in July 2004. Now, it’s 10 billion minutes in June 2005.

So it took roughly the same time to get from 0 to 1 billion, as it took to get from 1 billion to 10 billion. Does this mean we’ll be able to celebrate 100 billion next May?

I personally don’t find the last developments of the Adobe Acrobat Reader (now v7.0) very interesting: a huge package to download (hey guys, it is a *reader*) – about 27 MB for WindowsXP, a huge memory footprint and a quite bad performance. Adobe solved a part of the issue by….uploading automatically the whole application in the memory at the start of Windows. Great…..

Since about one month now, I am testing a promising alternative to the Acrobat Reader: Foxit PDF Reader, realized by FOXIT Software. It is free (for non-commercial use), *very* fast, very small memory footprint and great performance. Just a .exe to place somewhere on your disk (2.4 MB) and …let’s go!

Worth a try!

[via Rodrigo]

Marc Andreesen on launching start-ups. I like these “rules-of-the-games” ;-)

We have been around the start-up block enough times to have a very clear idea of what kind of company we want to build. Here are some of the things we believe in:

• Run fast, fly low, and be cheap
• Promote from within–quickly
• Keep everyone informed, both on the good news and the bad news
• Organize based on a cell structure for both technical and non-technical functions

• 3-5 person teams
• Flat organization

Be transparent

• Review projects every 2 weeks

Reward innovation, ingenuity, and hard work

• Meritocracy
• Evaluate and reward managers based on development of people
• Top down reassignments of high achievers

Build a team with potential, drive, curiosity, intelligence and ambition

• Don’t have to have experience or a track record
• We want people to build experience and track records with us

Train people

• Everyone teaches
• Honest, frequent feedback
• Weekly 1:1, staff, and all hands meetings
• Written career development plans

My dear readers – I have to apologize again. Blogging was very hard the last time – a *lot* to do – still impossible to tell in detail what :-) It comes, end of the “tunnel” (definitely a good one)?

Only 13 posts during the last month, pffuuu….

Switzerland and its state train company – SBB experienced a complete black-out of the whole train network on last Wednesday evening. This black-out last about 3 hours and impacted all the trains within Switzerland, i.e. about 200’000 passengers and 1’500 trains were blocked on the Swiss network.

A complete cut off of power due to a short-circuit and a chain reaction was the reason of the incident.

This black-out generated millions of Swiss francs of damages.

I am a very regular user of the train network in Switzerland (daily) and I must say that the quality of the service and the trains themselves, as their punctuality, is *far*, I mean really far, better than the one in France. Furthermore, the SBB employees are not taking their clients hostage each two months by striking. So, all in all, a very good service for the price. There was on Wednesday no trouble in the trains, although the more than 3 hours delay for the passengers! SBB also apologized very honestly by publishing some ads in newspapers. Well done!

As usual, the proof-of-the-pudding concerning the quality of service is crystallized during the crisis events.

I am normally in the train at this time but, on last Wednesday, I decided to go home earlier beacause of the weather :-)

One other consequence of this incident is that the cell phone network was completely overloaded because of all the calls due to the delays, but without a complete black-out in thi field ;-)