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!

Wie der eine oder andere mitbekommen hat, haben wir kürzlich ownCloud 4.5 veröffentlicht (Achtung, Englisch) mit einigen Goodies wie das Einbinden fremder Speicher wie DropBox oder Google Drive, eine bessere und schnellere Synchronisation im Zusammenspiel mit dem neuen ownCloud Client 1.1 (technische Details, Englisch), verbesserte Versionierung, eine Neufassung der Teilen-Funktionalität mitsamt feiner Rechtevergabe, bessere Import/Export Funktionalität im Kalender, möglich Synchronisation geteiltert Adressbücher, Drag'n'Drop von Kontakten zwischen Adressbüchern, Gruppen-Administratoren und ein Betrachter für impress.js Präsentationen und ein aufpoliertes LDAP Backend.

As posted before, I spent the last week at LinuxTag in Berlin. For us (ownCloud) it was pretty good. It was our first appeareance there, hence we got a lot of interest and visitors. We got higher visibility through the two booths, i suppose, but especially because of our most recent ownCloud 4 release. All in all a good combination that made ownCloud overtake Ubuntu One in Google Trends (12 months view, click to enlarge).

During LinuxTag, Frank also gave an interview to Golem, a German online magazine, about features and the history of ownCloud and the company behind.

This years LinuxTag is coming close! For the nth year in a row the German Kubuntu community will represent their distribution of choice at Europe's leading conference for Linux and Open Source. For the first time, also ownCloud will attend there, with a community and a commercial booth.

It will also be the first time for me not to be directly an the Kubuntu booth, but – thorugh my involvement – mainly there for ownCloud. We also just released ownCloud 4! We like to give you a look on our freshly baked version, meet us and drive us up the wall with questions.

So yesterday Nokia announced its strategic partnership with Microsoft. It brought quite a disturbance on the industry and users, especially the free software community. As owner and main driver of the Qt Framework and driver of the free and Linux based smart phone operating systems Maemo and MeeGo, of course Symbian too, this will have quite an impact on the development and future of those products. With Microsoft breathing down Nokia's neck it is clear, that it will not be bright in this context. And moreover there is also a social impact. Let's take a look on the different aspects one by one:

Qt

Qt as a cross platform framework has most value for Nokia. Though I am not sure if it is compatible with Windows Mobile 7, it would make sense to develop the compatibility. If only to write applications only once, for Symbian, MeeGo and that Win stuff. Symbian will still be used in the low price segment and MeeGo phones, computers i mean, are not abandoned, yet. Well, you can have your doubts on this [1]:

Last weekend I hat some nice chats as well at Ubuntu Release Party in Berlin, as well as something like a talk circle. Out of those I like to share some application tipps with you:

• style

  style is a command line utility that can analyse German and English texts and gives out a whole lot of statistics. Style differs among the parts readability, sentence info and sentence beginnings. From Camilla's point of view, who introduced this tool to us, the Flesch-value, which ranges from 0 to 100 (except for C language ;) ). This, some other rates and statistic information like number of long and short sentences are given and are useful to stylecheck your documents.
  

Meanwhile it is the day before yesterday, when the KDE Community released KDE SC 4.4 and yesterday, when Kubuntu published the packages. It is great to see how the desktop environment matures and still getting new and terrific features. One of the finest features – i think – is window tabbing. It is as simply as that: you pick some single applications and group them in one window. Actually, i enabled it only few hours ago, but generally i am thinking of grouping applications for a certain, specific task, but also grouping applications for a superordinate purpose. Like communication. In the following screenshot i arranged all real-time and micro-message programs, which are Konversation (IRC), Choqok (Identi.ca), and Kopete (Jabber and stuff). Great thing is that if I open a chat window in Kopete it is sorted automatically (like JR).

Glückwünsche an Matthias Ettrich! Dem KDE-Gründer wurde gestern durch Staatssekretärin Almuth Nehring-Venus der Verdienstorden der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, oder kurz das Bundesverdienstkreuz. Er erhielt diese Auszeichnung für seinen Einsatz und Beitrag für freie Software, insbesondere natürlich KDE.

Weitere Infos und ein Bild des Gerühmten gibt es auf dem Artikel von dot.KDE.

Es ist soweit! Ein halbes Jahre nach unserm Wolpertinger-kompatiblen Fabelwesen ist heute der Tag des Koalas.

Kubuntu 9.10 bringt nicht nur das aktuelle KDE mit, sondern auch zig neue Anwendungen und Features, eine experimentelle Netbook-Variante und viele Clients und Anbindungen an Social Media-Dienste. Bisschen ausführlicher gibt es die Meldung auf kubuntu-de.org :)

As reader of Planet Ubuntu might now, the nice porgram vrms from the self-named packed shows how (un-)free your system is. Mine:

21:53:49 blizzz@xara:~$ vrms

Non-free packages installed on xara

fglrx-modaliases Identifiers supported by the ATI graphics driver

latex2html LaTeX to HTML translator

nvidia-96-modaliases Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org driver