Richi's blog

A blog about personal projects and experiences

  • Code coverage for C++

    Ever since I wrote automated tests, I wondered how complete the coverage was. Of course you have a feeling which parts are better covered than others. For some legacy code you might prefer not to know at all. But I thought test coverage was something easy to do with a language running on a VM […]

  • prevent or react

    Beginning of this year, there was a very tragic event prominently present in all newspapers across Switzerland. The whole thing was so tragic, that I won’t add a link here. But there is one aspect, that kept me thinking for the last two weeks. Today’s blog post by Bruce Schneier triggered me to write about […]

  • decentralized social communication

    When you think about social networks, do you even realize how centralized and compartmentalized the prevalent systems are? Neither centralization nor artificial borders are inherent traits of a network though. Imagine you could only talk to customers of the same phone company you use. Or you could exchange emails only with customers of the same […]

  • wake up to a clean state

    I used to have problems when my ultrabook woke up from sleeping mode. Nothing serious, but annoying. One thing was that the empathy messenger application fully occupied one CPU core, effectively transforming the power out of the battery into heat. I grew tired of manually terminate it every time. So I did some research, and […]

  • Paying online without a credit card

    I can still remember the times when travelling without a credit card could be really inconvenient. But since Maestro and Cirrus cards work around the globe, it’s fine without. The time where shopping on the internet without a credit card was inconvenient to impossible was not so long ago. In a recent post, I announced […]

  • fido universal 2nd factor authentication

    In the time since my rant about passwords, more and more sites adopt OAuth. I don’t like this development. Usually they offer login with facebook, sometimes with google or twitter and rarely with linkedin. The problem with OAuth is that the site operator decides what providers are supported. With OpenID on the other hand, I […]

  • A strange kind of holiday

    It all started about two weeks ago when my wife discovered water on the kitchen floor that kept coming. The plumber who came immediately, found out that two parts of the waste pipe shifted out of each other, leaving a gap open. He told us that this must have happened two or three weeks earlier. […]

  • Fading out my credit card

    Once upon a time there was no internet. When you went to a restaurant, you had to pay in cash. If you had no cash with you, you might have been lucky if the owner knew you good enough to think you were credit worthy. But what if you were in another city? Then some […]

  • Back to Mac (nothing to do with Apples)

    After I stopped flying in competitions, I also slowly stopped flying competition gliders. So I went back to my old and proven sports class glider. I meant to replace it for a long time. But as my Gradient Aspen 1 is by now more than eleven years old, there really were no more excuses. So, […]

  • MultiSig with HardwareWallets

    2014 is touted as the year of multi-signature for BitCoin. It is being integrated into some wallets and services. But not quite the way I expected. Electrum has an implementation that assumes multiple hierarchical deterministic wallets distributed over different machines, that know the other’s master private keys. -> This should work well for corporate environments […]