Daily Life: Dominik at Open Expo 2009

Tomorrow at 11 20 AM: Listen to Dominik participating in the Digital Sustainability Track at the Open Expo 2009 in Winterthur.

Here's a short description about the panel discussion (in German):

Podiumsdiskussion mit Dominik Grolimund von Wuala, Michael Näf von Doodle und Jasper Bouwsma
Die vielfältigen Zusammenhänge zwischen Nachhaltigkeit, Innovation und Open Source sind das Thema dieser prominent besetzten Paneldiskussion: was bedeutet Open Source für kleine, hoch innovative Startup-Firmen? Fördert oder behindert Open Source echte Innovation? Welche Rolle spielt darin ein nachhaltiges Entwickeln von Software? Und was bedeutet all dies für Grossunternehmen, die Öffentlichkeit und die Communities?

UPDATE: Added the whole panel discussion (in German)

New Search!

Finally, our new world-search is online!

Much faster and more precise than ever. We also implemented a a few new features:

• trek* finds all words starting with 'trek', for example trekker and treky. a* will not work though, as this would match too many words.


• star +trek -voyager will find names containing 'trek' but not 'voyager'. It may also contain 'star', in which case it will be listed first.


• lurker~ does a fuzzy search, which means it will find everything that sounds link 'lurker', for example 'worker'. Warning: fuzzy search is slow.

Not only the filename is indexed, but also the description, tags, path and user. So if you see a filename which does not include your search term, check the other fields too.

Filenames in camel-case are split: you will find WaterPlant.jpg when searching for 'water' or 'plant'.

Please note: The new search is only for for the world area (not groups or friends).

Developer Zone: Inside Wuala's Connection Types

You might have already read about the improvements of the trading system. The goal was to enable trading even if your connection has some kind of restriction. Therefore, we distinguish three different types of connections, which all allow to trade.

The connection types are defined as follows:

Connection type A:
You're fully reachable, i.e. your computer accepts all incoming connections. Your firewall (if there is one) accepts incoming connections at the Wuala port. If you are behind a router with NAT, it is either a “Full Cone NAT” (described in RFC3489) or configured (with UPnP or manually) to forward incoming UDP packets at the Wuala port to the internal host.

This is the best situation. You will earn storage very quickly.

Connection type B:
Your computer is behind a router and is connected with a “port restricted cone NAT”, as described in the same RFC . The only restriction is: An external host can only send a packet, with the source IP address X and the source port P, if the internal host has previously sent a packet to the IP address X and port P.

As a consequence, you will receive less fragments from the Wuala cloud than with connection type A.

Connection type C:
Your computer cannot receive incoming connections, but can open UDP connections. Your computer can receive fragments only from nodes when a UDP connection is already established with a call from your local computer.

You will receive fragments, but only very slowly.

You are able to trade storage with all three connection types mentioned above. Your online time will always be counted in the same way. The only difference lies in the speed of receiving fragments.
Please note that your computer cannot trade, when UDP connections are blocked. This is usually the case when you have activated UDP blocking in your router or your firewall.

Upcoming Improvements: A New Search and A New Networkdrive

Just two quick things:

1) As some of you have already noticed, the world area is currently not searchable.
We have switched it off temporarily, since we’re working on integrating a completely new search system. We are truly sorry for the inconvenience and thank for your patience!

2) We're working on the file system integration! We have decided to use a new software and will have finalized the process until the end of the year. With this we hope to solve the problems that currently occur when using the Wuala network drive. Stay tuned!

New Team Member

Hi Wuala!

My name is Bernd and I've recently started to work for the Wuala Support Team. I'm working for a scientific institute in the administraton and support for over 15 years. It is a very exciting experience to help to develop the support of a fast growing community like Wuala.

You can find me in Wuala at here and of course at Getsatisfaction and more.

Looking forward to read and maybe meeting some of you!
Bernd

New Team Member

Hi there, Wuala followers

My name is Dario and my work here will mainly focus on managing/updating Wuala's server-landscape. I've just finished my B.Sc. studies in IT and worked for a dev company before joining Wuala. You will find me here.

Have fun!

Dario

Update 2009-09-16: I managed to find a picture of me at my favorite spot in winter.

Chinese Release

To all our Chinese users - Wuala is available in Chinese (Simplified)!
We really appreciate the hard work of our Chinese translator Yu(Smith) Tian - you've done great work!

Here is his message for you:

首先感谢大家使用Wuala的中文版本.翻译量很大我断断续续翻了2个月总算全部完成.(一万多字果然不好翻译)
使用Wuala的中国人好像很少.希望通过我的翻译将来能够有更多的人加入进来.
翻译过程中因为没有办法直接对照到原版本的软件参看翻译效果.所以有些地方可能翻译的不是很好,这些我以后会慢慢修补.
大家如果有什么改进的意见或者使用问题但是英文又不怎么好的话可以发邮件给我,我会尽量回复邮件地址(slug014 AT gmail DOT com)
当然也欢迎到我最新开的博客上看看.会发现很多和Wuala相关好东西哦,链接地址http://wualachina.blogbus.com/
希望喜欢这款软件的人能够把它推荐给身边的人.感谢所有为Wuala的成长努力的朋友们.

Thank you for using Wuala Chinese. It's really hard work to translate about 10000 words into Chinese.
It looks like that there are very few Chinese people using Wuala. I hope that through my translation there will be more people joining in the future.
Some places may not translated well, because I can't see the translation results directly. I will update them after this release.
If anybody has questions or suggestions about Wuala and is not good at English, you can send an e-mail to me (slug014 AT gmail DOT com). I will do my best to reply.
Welcome to my latest blog, there's a lot of good things about Wuala. Link: http://wualachina.blogbus.com/
Please introduce this cool software to all your friends and bring them in.
Thanks to all the friends efforts for the growth of Wuala.

Daily Life: Help Us Win The Public Award!

SwissICT, Switzerland's leading association for information and communication technology, has nominated Wuala as one finalists for the yearly Swiss ICT Award. There are three categories: "Champion", "Newcomer" (this is where you'll find us) and "Public Award". The jury will select the winner in the categories "Champion" and "Newcomer", while the public gets to vote their own personal winner. Help us win! :-)

1) Click here.
2) Scroll down until you find Wuala and select "Sieger" (Winner)
3) Enter your data and click "Send".
4) Tell your friends about it :-)

Thanks so much in advance!

Effective Usage: Backup

With our new feature, Wuala isn't just about online storage anymore, it's also about online backup!

In order benefit from our new backup feature, you need to be a Pro user. Just buy the storage plan that fits your needs (up to 1TB!) or trade local disk space for online storage to become a Pro.

Why backup?

Skim through your files and you'll realize how valuable they are. Family pictures, papers or spreadsheets, everything is precious and maybe even irreplaceable.

By enabling backup, files on your computer are directly copied to Wuala. Choose the folders (documents, media files, etc.) you want to sync to Wuala and get started!

How To Enable Backup

Enabling backup is simple. Just go to File > New Backup Folder. From your computer, navigate to the folder you want to backup to Wuala. The Backup Folder will be created. Please note that depending on the folder size, it may take a while until all files have been uploaded. Since Wuala uploads everything in the background, you can just keep working and don't have to worry about it.

This is how the Backup Folder will look like - in case you're wondering - the folder image is our Wuala-Anniversary-Birthday cake :-)
How To Set Backup Settings

Rigth-click (control-click for the Mac) on the Backup Folder in Wuala and select Backup Settings. You may adjust the settings and the time span between backups. If you have important files, such as projects or papers you're currently working on, you should backup at least once a day.
Wuala will now always backup your files at the time you specified. If Wuala isn't running or your computer is turned off, Wuala will try at a later date.

No need to worry about your files anymore, just sit back and relax!