SuisseID, OSX, OpenSC, and Quovadis
after a lot of fiddling I turns out that OSX 10.6 is not supported (at least not fully) by Quovadis' SuisseID implementation. I could not get the certificates to show up in the Keychain so that I could use them with the Mail application.
However, I did come across opensc (link) and this seemed to work wonderfully well and since i installed it I can see the certificates in the keychain and a separate chain and send authenticated emails from the Mail.app.
For some reason I did notice a high CPU spike for the pcscd application, i'm not sure whether this is a anomaly or a result of running opensc, I killed it and once I re-inserted the application it once more spiked 
update 10/05/2011: the friendly people from Quovadisglobal.com gave me a pre-release piece of software that support the SuisseID (software is called Sign!) under OSX 10.6. I instaled it and it works like a charm! nice work Quovadis!
lastpass, quovadis, and smart-card reader
I ordered a SuisseID certificate (even though i'm dutch I can still order one as long as I live in Switzerland). Its basically a digital certificate that authenticated me as me for any government site (if I choose to use it). The "me as me" part means I can only get one once they have authenticated me through my passport and the local community where I live have to puts it ID check stamp on it.
So now I've got this certificate and cardreader (link) ... now what ?!
Last week lastpass.com (which I use) thought they might have some problems with their master password data base (link) and rather than go the Sony way they announced it straight away and suggested that everybody change their master password (whcih is needed in order to decrypt the password database on your machine) good on ya lastpass, better be save that sorry (plus the fact that their whole business model runs on this ... if they were to make a mistake they can close shop)
It turns out that you can tell the lastpass site/browser extension to use a card-reader / smart-card authentication (link), which means I can only get access to the password data base if I have the smartcard on me. Very nice and very secure! note: I did have to re-install the lastpass plugin after I updated chrome, small price to pay I guess.
note: you can disable the smart-card authentication on the login prompt, this will send an email to confirm to you registered email address. So they are not in full paranoia mode, which is nice.
update: one nasty thing: lastpass shows the smart-card password in plaintext, i.e. not hidden behind '*' ... bad !!