Arthur acquaints

I am going to the Nextcloud Conference in Berlin at TU Berin, from September 16th to 22nd. We have found exciting keynote speakers for our event: Karen Sandlerand Jane Silber. On Friday we are focused on the usage of Nextcloud within an enterprise environment, while on Saturday and Sunday we will have mostly lightning talks and workshops after the keynotes. The following days are dedicated to hackathons and ad-hoc meetings.

If you like to meet me or any of the other contributors, you know where to find us! If you like to join please register, so our Dear Jos can organize enough food and drinks so that nobody needs to starve or becomes parched.

Yes, like Jos, Lukas and Björn I (mostly known for my work on and maintenance of the LDAP backend) am leaving ownCloud Inc. Actually, the 20th of May was already my last day.
I decided to quit because not everything in the ownCloud Inc. company world evolved as I imagined. It's not necessarily bad, only it became clear that for me it is time for a change. No regrets, I have had a splendid time at ownCloud Inc. and am proud to have it as a part of my life and identity.

The ownCloud contributor conference comes closer and closer! Roughly two weeks are left until it kicks off on August 28th here in Berlin. You did not register yet? Please do at the conference site.

With time passing rapidly our dear Jos is like the sedulous ants, taking care of all the smaller and bigger things, hopping to and fro. Helping around a bit, I feel the air is heating up and tension rising. Yeah!

Recently I set up the Karma Javascript suite for locally running the Javascript tests for ownCloud. Since it was not totally straight forward to get it up an running, here be my setup notes.

First, it requires Node.js. They can be installed right out from the repositories. As I read somewhere, more recent versions are available on some PPA, but this one is sufficient. npm is its package manager.

Upfront, In case you did not get the news: last week we released ownCloud 8.1, despite the version number a major release!

Now I could spent a week to follow a pet project. I picked to revive ownCloud Bookmarks, which was launched years ago also by me. I passed on maintainership quite a while ago, but recently it was a little bit abandoned. This is my invitation to you users and develepors interested in ownCloud Bookmarks, to pick it up and work together on it. Especially to make it move forward, and ideally to find more co-maintainers. Check out the Bookmarks Github repo!

Update/Info: I continue my work at Nextcloud. /Update

With ownCloud it is possible to connect to one or more LDAP instances so existing users are able to login with their passwords and have email and pictures imported. However, if a somewhat bigger directory is in use, an improvable performance might be faced in some scenarios. Typically the first look at the Users page after configuring an LDAP connection can make the admin wait quite a while. Obscure rumours claim that this delay is sponsored by the coffee industry.

When a user account has been deleted, ownCloud will clean up after it. Files, group memberships and preferences are cleared and a notification is send to apps so they can clean up on their end. However, an LDAP user account cannot be deleted, since ownCloud does not write to the directory. Of course, an account can be deleted on the LDAP server. Unfortunately, we are not being informed about this and so data from LDAP users was kept around even when their accounts were long gone.

We needed to think of a way how to get rid of unwanted remains. And we did, and we implemented it, an this is how it works.

Currently I am enjoying my summer vacation. Vacation is when you do non-stop activities that make fun, no matter whether this is more relaxing or challenging, and usually in another place. So I am going to take the opportunity to visit Kazan, and furthermore I am taking the other opportunity and will give an ownCloud talk (btw, did you hear, ownCloud 7 was released?) at the local hackerspace, FOSS Labs. Due to my lack of Russian I will stick to English, however ;) So, if you are there and interested in ownCloud please save the date: Monday, July 28th, 18:00 FOSS Labs Universitetskaya 22, of. 114 420111 Kazan, Russia

Mal ein bisschen etwas anderes und – huch – auf Deutsch! Außerdem kurz.

Die Krautreporter wollen ein Online Magazin aufziehen, das ohne Werbemittel finanziert wird. Einnahmequelle sollen ausschließlich die Leser sein. Das funktioniert in der Presse Landschaft bislang so nicht, gerade deswegen ist es aber interessant zu sehen, ob die Zeit dafür reif ist.

In about a week we release version 6.0.3 of ownCloud Community Edition! It is a maintenance release that includes nearly two months of improvements (including performance improvements) and some fixes. I want to use this opportunity to shed some light on the fixes the LDAP back-end has seen.

There are no big things, however, but the performance improvements in sharing related methods and in the configuration wizard will significantly enhance the experience for end users and admins. The following list is not a complete one, but addresses the most notable changes.