[via LetterJames]

I celebrated my 33rd birthday yesterday evening in Milano – Italy. I had a great dinner in a Toscana restaurant in the center of Milano with my two colleagues Nick and Wolfgang (good choice, Wolfgang ;-).

It was also the first day of Nick by us in the eCenter, after having worked for a quite long period as an external consultant.

We had a great time together, some very interesting discussions, and….some very exciting food, including one of the best "mozzarella di bufala" I ever eat :-) I have also to say that the wines were great!

We went back from Milano by train, as usual a very nice trip, with some beautiful and impressive landscapes, despite of the quite bad weather.

And, by the way, our business meeting was very successful!

Pfuu, “already” 33 years old. I know, I look older;-) This picture left with my son is already 18 months old… We have celebrated for 2 weeks the 3rd birthday of my son, today my 33rd anniversary.

When I look back, I have a very good feeling because I was challenged a lot as a person, I could do a bunch of errors (and some people let me do them ;-) and experience, I could learn so much. A *very* enriching year!

The last 12 months were for me very “dense”, and on different levels:

• professionally with all the “ordinary” and “extra-ordinary” developments of my business unit
• privately with my son (this phase is *so* interesting, what for a development between 2 and 3!), with my wife (she opened very succesfully her own surgery), with the death of my grandfather (I miss him a lot…)
• humanely with all the great people I met the last time, with all my long-time friends, with all my so funny and smart colleagues.

All in all, I am very lucky.

I hope I could also give this “luck” back to other people, by helping them a little bit to develop themselves too, by letting them do their own experience and errors too, by organizing a motivating (and stressful, I admit) environment for all, by pushing as far as I can our values (responsability, commitment, trust, innovation, fun, excellence and professionalism, being open-minded) and by giving some sense to our work. I didn’t manage it all the time but I keep trying :-)

Thank you *all* very kindly for having a look at my weblog :-) That was also an important part of my last 12-months experience!

Outcha, Russell Beattie‘s website was seriously hacked. Have a look at his story, good reminder for all of us (back-up, security)….

Okay, so how did the guy get in? No idea. The logs were gone. My best guess is a PHP CLI script I had running which allowed a Flash IRC app to re-route through my server to the freenode IRC servers. It was probably running as root and hackable as hell. I’ve also been playing with Apache and PHP 5 lately, so that was running on port 8080, and I really hadn’t made any effort to secure it. Or it could have been any number of exploits out there that I never bothered to patch, or it could’ve been a bad password. We’ll never know. Whatever it was, it was my fault for not maintaining my site better. Hopefully this new setup is more secure, enough to deter another attack for a while at least.

Okay, lessons: back up your data, NOW. I backed up my server last month, but the files were incomplete and a freakin’ mess. So don’t just back up, do it cleanly and in an organized, easy-to-find manner. Secondly, re-check your security. I’ve got a few more things to clean up and harden myself and I’ve been banging at the server all weekend.

Rodrigo posted a book’s review of Jim Collins. I find Jim’s ideas very valuable and I already published some abstracts about his work in my Corporate Entrepreneurship section (9 to 14).

Have also a look at Jim Collins’ website (no blog yet as far as I know).

[via Dilbert]

It sounds quite familiar :-)

After the 60th anniversary of the D-Day (I posted about that on 5th of June 2004), the World is marking the anniversary of the death camp liberation of Auschwitz these days.

Do not forget our duty of memory, specially for our children.

Lest we forget that…

…about 6 million Jews were systematically murdered, 1.5 million of these were children. This represents 2/3rds of the European Jews and about 1/3rd of the worldwide Jewish community at this time. 6 million people, it’s about the current population of Austria or Switzerland, annihilated in 6 years, 1.5 million children. One and a half million children were killed. God….

A concentration camp survivor wipes a tear during a ceremony at the former death camp Auschwitz Birkenau. World leaders and elderly survivors of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz gathered in Poland on Thursday to mark the 60th anniversary of its liberation by Soviet troops and remember the victims of the Holocaust.

[via Reuters]

[via Seth]

I couldn’t believe it was not a joke. Incredible, this is *so* ridiculous! As Seth says, the most important question is:

Who, exactly, makes the little tiny gloves?

OKLAHOMA CITY — With cockfighting now banned in Oklahoma, one legislator is proposing a blood-free alternative: fitting roosters with little boxing gloves and letting them slug it out.

“Who’s going to object to chickens fighting like humans do? Everybody wins,” said Democratic state Sen. Frank Shurden, a protector of the gamefowl industry and a longtime defender of cockfighting, in which birds are fitted with razor-like spurs and often battle to the death.

Oklahoma voters banned cockfighting in 2002. The practice is still legal in Louisiana and New Mexico.

“To me it answers everything. It saves the industry, takes blood sport out and generates revenue for Oklahoma,” Shurden said.

Janet Halliburton, a lawyer who led the drive to ban cockfighting, dismissed Shurden’s idea as the first step in a scheme to bring back the sport.

[via BetaNews]

Following news that lead Firefox engineer Ben Goodger has been hired by Google, fellow Mozilla developer Darin Fisher has announced that he, too, has joined the search giant. With at least two high-profile browser developers under its belt, rumors have begun swirling about Google’s future plans with the Mozilla platform.