Patrice Neff

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 debugging we saw that the xmlsec1 call was erroring out: ...

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 time has been short for that and the list of unconfirmed blogs has been constantly growing with nobody else picking up the slack. This even though a few people have admin access and access is liberally granted. And of course the stats project shows that people just aren’t blogging anymore. ...

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 is shown. Using Google’s Feedburner I converted this into a newsletter. Feel free to subscribe to the resulting Hacker News Daily Newsletter. ...

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 pre-installed Subversion clients and SSH agents that store their passwords in the Keychain. And for non-integrated applications, getting a password out is relatively easy using a simple keyboard shortcut. That is topped off with secure notes for credit card information and similar. ...

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 memory tax of running Mac and Windows side to side. ...

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 language to use, we already knew how our architecture was going to look, namely that we’d have a frontend and lots of small backend web services. That’s a setup we had previously implemented successfully at local.ch. But at local.ch we had the frontend in PHP and the backend in Java. At Memonic we wanted everything to run on one language so every developer could feasibly work on the whole stack. This threw out PHP which isn’t so great for daemons and services (but I still like it for frontend work, especially with Okapi). We then had Ruby, Java and Python in the race. Without going into detail about why the other two languages suck ;-) Python won us over because of it’s maturity and the very wide selection of frameworks and libraries. ...

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 iPhone map application using the OpenStreetMap data. That data is now surprisingly complete for many European cities and even includes many POIs such as restaurants, bars, public baths and many more. ...

Next week on February 18 we’ll have the first meeting of the Swiss Puppet User Group (SPUG). The meeting is in Bern at the offices of Puzzle. The first time we’ll have some lightning talks. I’ll do a presentation about my personal Puppet setup on my Mac workstations. Get all the details on the official SPUG web site.

This post about JavaScript testing is part of the Setting up a full stack for web testing series. Introduction JavaScript tests are sufficiently special to deserve a post outside of unit and functional testing. You need a special set of tools to write these tests. But then again for JavaScript the usual split between unit and functional tests is still applicable. So what I wrote about those two topics is also relevant here. ...

The past few days I created a mobile site for Memonic. During this I made use of some of the newly found knowledge from the past Webtuesday which Adrian Kosmaczewski was kind enough to share. See also my notes about iPhone web development from that event. The goal of this mobile site was to get a broad device coverage. As we’ll create an application for the iPhone, it was especially important to get a nice site for all the other devices. During his talk Adrian mentioned the Yahoo! Blueprint framework and I was sold quickly. ...