About

I am a computer science student at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland. I work as a system administrator on the GNU/Linux and BSD platforms for Hostpoint AG and Nine Internet Solutions AG. Whenever I have the choice, I am using Mac OS X on the client, and Debian GNU/Linux on the server side.

This website is powered by 220V AC and a VServer by nine.ch, which I'm getting for free. I am using Apache 2 and good ol' PHP5-spaghetticode to generate these websites. This website is Web 1.0 compliant.

Living in..	I grew up in Binningen (BL). I am now living in Renens (VD) during the week so I can use the university's fast internet access.
Master Plan	1. Create website about me 2. 3. Profit!
Likes	Aelpler magronen (traditional swiss dish with potatoes, cheese and pasta), fast internet connections (in terms of latency. there's nothing worse than an ssh connection that lags), spending time with friends, working in flow without being interrupted, reading books, coke light, martial arts, teriaki chicken burger, The Simpsons, Family Guy, Futurama (discont.), 24
Dislikes	Slow internet connections, {unreliable, arrogant, immature} people, sea food (ok I like fish sticks and calamares, but who doesn't?), PDAs (worst invention ever. not powerful enough to do something useful; too big to fit into a pocket), power outages at datacenters. Tom is now making sure the servers are all running well.


China	Ambulance	Sweden

Education

Languages I can speak/write/understand without using babelfish:

Language	Level	Diplomas
German / Swiss German	(native)	-
English	I can watch movies without subtitles.	Cambridge First Certificate in English FCE (2001), Cambridge Certificate in Advanced English CAE (2001), Certificate of Proficiency in English CPE (2004)
French	Mostly read-only / listen-only mode. Using hands and feet to communicate with co-students.	(working towards DELF/DALF)
Japanese	Even worse than my french.	Japanese-Language Proficiency, Level 3 (2000)

Miscellaneous diplomas: I have passed the LPI exams 101 and 102 and I'm therefore certified in Junior Level Administration (LPIC-1) (2004). LPI is the only institute I know of providing vendor-neutral linux certification (for the first test, there are seperate DPKG and RPM versions available). As of this date, no employer has ever asked for these diplomas, however.

Current Activities

	I study computer science at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). I am currently in my third year in the cycle bachelor. I also work as a undergraduate teaching assistant in the course Programmation «Orientée Système» (C, Perl and Shell).

	nine.ch is the company that ate my company :) I have known tom for some time. We met coincidentially because we were both housing customers at Init Seven AG a long time ago (I think that was in 2002). We exchanged a lot of ideas and we talked about merging our companies many times, but our egos were more important than any practical thinking and everyone wanted to keep their own company alive. In April 2005, however, I had to make a tough decision and I gave up my company, because it was not able to survive on its own. TsunamiHost is now a part of nine.ch and I am working as a system administrator for them. This is a good thing, because like this I can still take care of my customers and keep the service running without having to give up everything. And with all the nine.ch webhosting customers, I can help even more people to configure their mail client :)

Past Activities

	The largest hosting provider (measured by the number domains hosted) in Switzerland, followed by Infomaniak on rank #2. About 20% (that's every fifth!) .ch domain is hosted by Hostpoint. I worked on-site as a system administrator for about 4 month in 2004 and I then kept on working as an external contractor until September 2007.

	My company. Founded in 2001 with my cousin Jonas Lorch and a friend Eike Frost. What makes me proud is that we had established a customer base of about 300 individuals and SMEs, purely by word-of-mouth recommendations, without ever doing any advertizing. I was taking care of almost everything in this company, from server administration, budgeting/financial planning, customer care to creating and maintaining the website. But when I came to the realization that the company could not survive on its own and considering that I was the only one left who was still actively involved in the company, I had to give up my "baby" with a heavy heart. Luckily, in April 2005, it was adopted by nine.ch, who also offered me a job as system administrator.

	I was coordinating all technical aspects of Partyguide's server infrastructure in 2003-2004 (IIRC) together with Eike. The servers were distributed across the globe: The primary servers were located in Zurich (first with Metanet, later with nine.ch) and due to massive bandwidth consumption we had the image servers located in the United States with ev1servers.net (formerly known as RackShack). Now Partyguide is a customer of nine.ch and all servers are located in their datacenter.

	eOrigen provides e-learning solutions (LCMSes). eOrigen specializes in both content creation and the development of the platform to deliver this content to the end-user. The platform, named ADAM, consists of a flash-based frontend and a java servlet based backend. I was part of the team which developed the latter. I worked for about 9 month on-site in the Preston (UK) based office.

	I worked as a freelancing PHP developer for Init Seven AG, based in Zürich-Oerlikon. Init Seven AG is a full-service ISP with focus on business customers.

	Nail Ünlü, a friend of mine, gathered a group of people to form the Tektron Group in 1999. Tektron created websites. Tektron started with 6 people, but most people of the initial group left and were replaced by others (certain individuals suddenly had girlfriends and would rather spend their friday evenings with her than sitting in a smoke-filled pub with us for the meeting; others just lost motivation or had too much homework assigned from school and no more spare time), but eventually these left, as well. In the end there was just me and Nail. We only had one customer, but with a huge project. We learned PHP and MySQL. We learned how to do websites. We learned about business and we earned some money. We were young and it was fun, but sadly Tektron is no more.

Last modified on 02.12.2007 at 14:58 GMT