As some of you know my primary knowledge and expertise is in Internationlal Business Law and International Commercial Arbitration (SJD candidate at CEU). Interpreting legal acts and rules was part of my everyday life for 8 years of bachelow, master and PHD studies. This is not to brag but simply to bring more credibility to what I am going to say:

SOPA (Stope Online Piracy Act) is a badly writte piece of proposed legislation!

eKreative joins an enormous myriad of  companies and NGOs like Free Software Foundation (FSF), Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), Mozilla, Google, Wikipedia, Open Source Initiative, WordPress, and Human Rights organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, in expressing our concern with these US Congress and Senate bills:

• Information on H.R.3261 - Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)
  http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3261/show
• Information on S.968 PROTECT IP Act (PIPA)
  http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-s968/show

A US Congressional vote is slated on these bills for February 2012, and many feel that it will inevitably become a mandate for formalized Internet censorship, with an impact that goes far beyond the borders of any single country.

PIPA introduces a deeply concerning degree of legal uncertainty into the internet economy, particularly for users and businesses internationally. And while SOPA is also a US bill, it has several provisions that would have serious implications for international civil and human rights which raise concerns about how the United States is approaching global Internet governance.

eKreative respects legitimate Intellectual Property rights of others, but we is concerned about the consequences of such far reaching laws, both for citizens of the US, and the global community. 

Do not be ignorants! Join the protest! Let your voice be heard. Educate yourself about these issue. You can start with these articles:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act
• http://gizmodo.com/5877000/what-is-sopa
• http://www.pcworld.com/article/248298/sopa_and_pipa_just_the_facts.html
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzqMoOk9NWc

 

I am back from Christmas trip in teh UK and could not come empty handed! :) 

The ekreative team is excited about our new 8 Gig flash cards with eKreative and Kreativity logos! Our Manager Kiril in particular is thrilled, as he has been using a 1GB flash for years. What an upgrade!

We're glad to introduce our new intern Zhenya aka Onegin, who will now be conquering the web along with eKreative team! 
Bright guy, bright student, bright personality... well, just like everyone else here! :)

Does your internet provider ever let you down? you get to the office only to find that today its not working. Well not any more, an upgrade to our router lets us make use of two ISPs simulataniously and when one lets us down, the other takes over.
This has been achieved with a nice and simple linux distro called 'Zeroshell'. As the name suggests there was no need to touch the shell as would have been the case trying to do this yourself and everything was quickly and simply setup.
In our setup we use the usb disk image as the main hard disk in a virtual machine. 3 bridges on the host machine allow it to connect to two ISPs and the internal LAN. Its a small distro with minimal memory usage (around 100mb) so is not costly to run on the vm host. 
This has now replaced our physical routers, which now just act as wireless acess points, and we are able to have two separate wireless networks, one for 'n' devices and one for older slower devices. Our internal dns and dhcp was simple to setup, although i did have to remember how to use bind again as we had moved to using unbound in the old setup. Unbound is a really simple dns server which makes it really easy to override dns responses with internal addresses for services within our network, this avoids having to completly replicate the normal domain as you have to with bind.
We now also have OpenVPN server, we just need to think of a use for it :)
Overall zeroshell was quick and easy to setup, with no install process. lots of powerful features are assessible without every having to ssh and change config files manually. 

Someone has just left this note in the door of my office (and I think every door of our office center). People are desperately looking for jobs!
This note says: "Young man, 24 years old, is looking for a job. He will consider any offers!"

Although I very much appreciate and admire everyone who takes initiative and does not wait for a job to magically fall in his hands - this note assumesthe the broadest possible spectrum of skills and talents (digging ditches, making clothes, cooking food, selling cars, performing teeth surgeries, you name it!) :) I am looking for something more specific.

Do you know how to code for web and/or mobile apps? HTML/CSS, Java Script, PHP, Objective C, Ruby on Rails, ASP .Net ?
Contact us if you want to be an eKreative geek!

Just agreed with the team the days we will not be working this winter. A bit of combination of UK and Ukrainian bank holidays! :)

Hi Everyone. My name is Viktor Yevpak and i am the managing director of eKreative.

Sometimes I have thoughts, ideas, impressions about our IT work which you might find exciting, or funny, or horrible, or annoying, or all of the above together. This is the place where I will share them with you.

First post: New blog - new Hair. Yesterday my beautiful wife caroline and I were a bit bored and I felt like doing something spontanious. I asked her to  cut my hair. She did a great job except for the final touch where she basically shaved my sideburns all the way to the skin! We were at the point of no return so I had to loose it all. Here is what is left of my hair. The good news is that hair has a tendancy of growing back!

Who thinks I look good without hair - let me know.



video to follow.