Arthur acquaints

Recently we spent a few days in the former Roman regional capital. We enjoyed three full days, arrived the late evening before and left on the morning after the last day. The method of travel was high speed long distance train. Being one of the largest cities in Germany, Cologne has good train connections and so we had a direct train.

We went in early March, with dry and sunny, but cold weather. The main objective was to wind down from work and today’s world crisis. We selected a centrally located hotel ten minutes by foot from main station. The staff at Cerano was incredibly nice, their breakfast rich and awesome, and they offered really good wifi.

For a long time it is already possible to leave comments on files. With Nextcloud 11 we provide a way to mention users in comments, so that a notification is created for the respective individual. This was never really advertised, however, because it was lacking an auto-completion tool that offers you a type-ahead selection of users. The crucial point is that user IDs are neither known to the end user nor exposed to them. For instance, if users are provided by LDAP, it might look like "1d5566a5-87e6-4451-bd2f-e0e6ba5944d9". Nobody wants to see this and the average person also will not memorize it :)

It would be sad to see the functionality rot away being unseen in a dark corner. With Nextcloud 13 the time was ripe to finally include this missing bit, which is actually pretty fundamental and every application that allows text based communication amongst multiple people ships it.

I am happy to announce the availability of Bookmarks for Nextcloud 0.10.0! Bookmarks is a simple way to manage the remarkable websites and pages you come across on the Internet. Bookmarks 0.10.0 provides API methods to create, read, update and delete your bookmarks as well as compatibility with upcoming Nextcloud 12, next to smaller improvements and fixes.

Bookmarks 0.10 is available at the Nextcloud App Store and thus of course from your Nextcloud app management. Since this release Bookmarks is not officially supporting ownCloud anymore.

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.