toggg died on sunday 17th June 2007 of a heart attack.

He was one of the first guys to start working with me together on TikiWiki, when I joined the project and he was the guy going to LinuxTag with me to promote Tiki there.

toggg was a great coder, almost fanatic open source advocate, loving father, wizard of regular expressions and a major pain in the ass if he wanted to!

Most people didn't get his nagging way to call attention to problems (and sometimes I became bored by it, too). Sadly this misunderstanding grew into a big antipathy in some TikiWiki admins. So even his best contributions were disrespected - as for example the Pear::Text_Wiki integration into Tiki. toggg might have had a love-hate relationship to some authorities in Tiki, but he definitely loved Tiki. So he used his knowledge to write a Pear::Text_Wiki parser and renderer for Tiki-syntax, because he saw the huge advantages, that would be opened up to Tiki. Sadly his work was cruely dismissed and nowadays even is removed from TikiWiki HEAD in a genocidous code cleanup action. I think, this code would have provided one of the biggest improvements ever and been a killer-feature for Tikiwiki.

Some time later toggg turned to spip - a french CMS - and when I talked to him on IRC, he often told me how kind the people there are and that they understand him and how well they work together. I don't know, if at spip there are better people or if their social development system just works better - but I'm damn sure, that he didn't behave much differently. And I'm very thankful to the people at spip, that they realized, what kind of guy toggg is and that they valued his code and contribution! I think one of the most beautiful evidences of his great relationship to spip can be found on flickr: I love toggg at flickr.

There's so much to tell about him... how he always loved to show pictures of his little daughter Lola; how he had to give his too old hens away, because he couldn't kill them himself; how openly and truely interested he approached strangers; how he used to say, that you only get to know a foreign country's people and language in bars; how he used to say, that there's no magic, just code; how he used to say "time no key"...

... he was a real hacker and a good friend!

• toggg's open source projects
• spip saying good bye
• pictures of toggg at flickr
• TikiWiki saying good bye

"toggg is three g"

I love you too, toggg !

EDIT: I just saw, that toggg even syndicated my blog-feed on his homepage - on the page "family" in the category "on the web". I didn't know that, we talked so little lately, because of my lack of time... oh, man, toggg, I'm so sorry, that I always postponed visiting you!!