After 18 years, I will leave Squirro at the end of October. I will obviously stay connected to the company as a shareholder and strong supporter. At this point I have no concrete next step planned and will take a breather first. Back in 2008, while at local.ch , some of us discussed how to better work with information. How can we better make use of all the data that we get bombarded with every…
On September 27, 2026 we are organising the first dedicated Backyard Ultra for Kids in Zollikon, Switzerland. The goal is to run for as long as possible (with a sensible upper ceiling in place). If you have a kid aged 3 to 15, come and join us at this event. They will surprise you with how long they can last in this format. Check out the Kids Backyard Ultra website and follow kidsbackyardultra on…
Over the Easter weekend, we played a version of hide and seek on a grand scale, namely in the public transport network of ZVV , in the Swiss canton of Zurich. This game was very heavily inspired by Jet Lag: The Game , in particular their Season 9 (Hide & Seek Switzerland) . There were nine of us (four adults, five kids) participating. We split into two groups and set off. The rules we followed are…
I recently spent a long day and night debugging a SAML login issue over at Squirro . Eventually we found out that the xmlsec version shipped with RedHat Enterprise Linux 8 is broken for signing. Error Introduction As part of our Single Sign-On implementation we use pysaml2 . That library in turns depends on xmlsec , a library supporting XML signature and encryption. In the deployment we were…
TL;DR: I’m shutting down list.blogug.ch and stats.blogug.ch , unless you save it by taking over. Over the past few years I have been maintaining parts of the blogug.ch project, namely the list and the stats . I haven’t done any actual development on those since 2006 but they have been running fine. From time to time I even confirmed the blogs to make sure they match our community guidelines. But…
To stay updated on all things geek I have been relying a lot on Hacker News lately. But not by using the main web site which would steal too much time from the work I should be doing. Instead I use two great services, one for daily and one for monthly updates. Hacker News daily is a blog where each day the top 10 Hacker News stories are posted. The stories are deduplicated, so only new information…
I have a simple password policy: every account gets its own password. To manage this I store them in a password manager. When switching to Windows one of the most painful things was replacing that password manager for which I had used the Mac Keychain. It’s a password storage, secured with either the login or a separate password. It integrates extremely well into the system. Apple even ships…
A few months ago I switched from Mac to Windows. The reason was work. At Memonic we develop a consumer application which should work well for non-geeks and average consumers. But a while ago I noticed that at our office every single one of us was either on Mac or Linux. While you can test Windows apps well enough using VMWare that just didn’t happen in practive — not least because of the heavy…
Over on the Memonic blog I blogged about why and how we work with Python at Memonic . As the original blog is now archived, I later reproduced the article below. Python Fun fact: Memonic is written entirely in Python . Why did we choose this particular programming language? After all - aren’t all the serious developers on Java and the cool ones on Ruby? When we thought about the programming…
I spent the past weekend in Paris and tried to go paperless with the iPhone. At the same time I wanted to keep data roaming deactivated. So before the trip I researched some offline applications to make the best out of this vacation. And was very surprised by the selection of very good apps that do not need permanent Internet access. I’ll quickly introduce the apps I used. OffMaps OffMaps is an…