Actually, I didn't want to express myself politically in my blogs anymore. But what is happening in Europe at the moment is so present in my life that I cannot remain silent about it. My beloved girlfriend has Russian and Ukrainian roots. I myself have friends in both countries. And we look stunned at the horror that is befalling the people in Ukraine at this very moment. As if the conflicts in Donbass and Luhansk were not already terrible enough... now the horror becomes even greater. Beloved brothers and sisters in Ukraine and Russia, my soul cries with you! It is so unbelievably…

If you don't want to use Docker Desktop because it's extremely annoying without a Pro account, since you always have to apply every update immediately, Docker on macOS can become a real pain in the ass. In theory, docker-machine should be an alternative. Unfortunately, it often causes problems with VirtualBox or the network configuration when using Hyperkit isn't working. Fortunately, I always have enough Linux machines available. However, it is of course also annoying when you always have to log in to another computer just to build a Docker image. But there is a simple solution for this if…

You need a secure password that you can easily remember? Do the following: Make a sentence of at least 12 words that you can easily remember. Take the first letter of each word. Make every second letter of them a capital letter. Replace 'E' by '3', 'I' by '1', 'S' by '5', 'B' by '8', 'O' by '0' and 'a' by '@' (because th353 num83r5 l00k 51m1l@r t0 th3 r3pl@c3d l3tt3r5). Add a special character at the beginning or at the end of the character string (especially if you had no 'a', that you replaced with '@', in it). Example: My mother always roasts a goose at Christmas and adds baked…

Rule #1 - Take your camera everywhere you go.
Rule #2 - Use it any time – day and night.
Rule #3 - Lomography is not an interference in your life, but part of it.
Rule #4 - Try the shot from the hip.
Rule #5 - Approach the objects of your Lomographic desire as close as possible.
Rule #6 - Don’t think (William Firebrace).
Rule #7 - Be fast.
Rule #8 - You don’t have to know beforehand what you captured on film.
Rule #9 - Afterwards either
Rule #10 - Don’t worry about any rules

IntroductionHave you ever wondered what a company in  the EU has to do to ensure information security and all the depending legal requirements? You can get a rough idea by looking at the so-called "Technical and Organizational Measures" (TOM) which a company has to implement in its processes. Whenever I audit our information security measures I create a list of TOMs relevant for the processes of our company. Additional to the TOMs I check the list of security assets, their risks and the implemented controls, the inventory of used IT systems and the index of data processing activities to get…

After divorcing my ex-wife, I met my current girlfriend. Her drive in life is largely determined by art. Whenever she comes in contact with any kind of art, she explodes in a ball of energy that inevitably carries you along. And I love it to get infected by this energy, too. Sometimes we sit together in a room, doing our own stuff... she's drawing, I'm working. But sometimes I put my work aside, pick up my iPad, start drawing and then it happens... I swim through the waves of creative energy along with her. It's such an impressive feeling, when the world around me slowly fades away and only…

Yes, I hate IaC (Infrastructure as Code)... and I love it... sometimes. Of course there are a lot of advantages of IaC. It makes infrastructure reproducible (partially), auditable (partially) and by that... easier to control (partially). But you should ever take a closer look if it's really useful for your company. In fact it's not useful for more or less static infrastructures. If you don't use a server network with more than 100 servers or if you don't use a constantly changing server network, IaC is for sure not for you. If you run only some dedicated servers in a data center for your…

In principle, protection of IT systems can be separated into 4 levels. These are prevention, detection, assessment and response. In the proper combination, they can secure the IT platform of any company as much as it is possible to do. Prevention The area of prevention is probably the most comprehensive area for IT system security. It can be fundamentally separated into data protection and system protection. Data protection includes things like data encryption, transport encryption, backups and even access protection to IT systems. System protection, on the other hand, involves things like…

As someone who always has an eye on protecting private data, not only for our company's customers, partners and employees but also for myself, I've looked at some tools over the years and some of them I made part of my daily workflows. But before I talk about some of them, I want to make clear some points. First of all, I'm an Apple user. And I am by conviction. I'm not an Apple fanboy who needs always the newest iPhone, iPad, Watch and Mac and sleeps in front of an Apple store to be the first one who can by the newest models. But I work with macOS (and former OSX) for around 10 years now…

Our company is currently preparing the launch of a new mobile app. This means stress throughout the whole company. Marketing has to prepare all the campaigns and their tracking, the associated website has to be designed and tested, the management is constantly in contact with various agencies and the funders and that the developers hardly have a quiet minute, you can imagine for sure. I'm in the exciting position to be able to be involved everywhere. After all, there is hardly any department in which data protection is not somehow involved. Not only does the data of future users have to be…

Hello world! With the output of this line, many people start programming nowadays. Looks like a good start for a blog to me, too. ;) When I dove into the world of computers over 20 years ago, I could not have guessed the journey I would begin. It was not my first contact with a computer (a KC-85 from the GDR in our school was the first computer I used), but the real journey began when I first installed a Linux on my 386 PC, because Windows (3.11) and gaming bored me. On it I learned my first programming language... C. Ok, not really my first one, because I already wrote an application in a…