Arthur acquaints

In the middle of September I have been at the Nextcloud conference and took the opportunity to join a workshop on Android dev (I still utterly dislike Android, but that is a different topic). Back in the day I already tried and had troubles setting up Android Studio, so why not trying to get it running while the Pros are around.

Turned out it simply worked after installation. But the next challenge was to make my local Nextcloud dev server at https://cloud.example.com available from within the Android emulator to the Nextcloud app.

Summer holidays are here and a night-owly parent I am benefiting from the lift of the early rise dictate. This is yet another blog post fighting for the acceptance of chronotypes other than early birds.

A new study highlights the interplay between different factors including chronotypes on cognitive performance; and once more a contribution to the constant call-out for sane school start times.

(Sorry, this one is a bit of a longer post. Perhaps goes best with a cup of coffee or a bottle of Club Mate ;) )

Nextcloud can be run in combination with different software stacks, starting with the PHP runtime, to web servers, databases, memcache servers (or without), file storages and so on.

This year in March I went with my beloved ones for a week-long trip to Budapest, Hungary. It was the first time for all of us to visit this city. Here, find my impressions, things I learned, along a few tips.

We stayed at the Seven Seasons apartment hotel pretty much in the city center. In the spacious two-room apartment we had a room for us, the kids stayed in the living room, amd there was also an equipped kitchen, well suited to cook some children compatible food. The hotel also offered a good breakfast buffet, we were satisfied.

There are a lot of things out in the world that catch my interest and curiosity. That I like to dive into, and learn more about, and get excited about. Contemporary financial things are not one of them. And also I only have limited trust, to put it polite, in the various actors around financial products. It feels like swimming in a shark pool.

Gökhan Gültekin. Sedat Gürbüz. Said Nesar Hashemi. Mercedes Kierpacz. Hamza Kurtović. Vili Viorel Păun. Fatih Saraçoğlu. Ferhat Unvar. Kaloyan Velkov.

Four years ago, they were murdered by a racist in Hanau, Germany, a town I have never heard about before. Children lost their mother or father. Parents lost their children. Siblings lost their others. And of course friends lost their friends. Their lifes are broken and they are suffering to this day.

In software with plugin capabilities, typically in interpreted languages, it is possible that plugin have dependencies included, that may collide with dependencies included in core product, or in other plugins. It is not a problem when the same version is used, but in turns into a problem when different versions that are incompatible to each other are shipped. The end user may face bugs. Developers speak of the Dependency Hell.

In Nextcloud these plugins are the various apps, coming from various sources.

Example:

For a while the growing memory usage of my Nextcloud Talk app for SailfishOS was a kept in the back of my head. For the longest time the potential leak was an occasional observation: when looking which apps or processes may hoard memory. My app was never slim, and it looked it would only grow in RAM usage.

So this was a problem I wanted to tackle for a bit, although I was lacking tooling (was already digging there without much success) and in depth understanding of the technology used (after all it is a side project with pragmatic goals with very limited time resources).

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.