Fatal PHP error after upgrading ownCloud

Since I did not want to start the new year with software that isn’t up-to-date (or because I had a little time and didn’t want to do any real work), I decided to update my ownCloud installation to version 8.2.2. Unfortunately, the update tool failed:

Fatal error: Call to a member function getLogger() on a non-object in /path/to/owncloud/lib/public/util.php on line 166

After spending some time trying various stuff, I decided to compare my installation with a fresh one. The only thing I found that was weird was that I had a config.php in the main ownCloud directory (probably left over from a manual update I did a few months back).

ls than mv config.php config_old.php
Renaming the config.php in the main directory helped

So I renamed that one – and voilà. Apparently having a config.php in the main folder causes ownCloud to stop working.
I write this because I didn’t find any solutions of this problem online when I searched.

ATHENS November 2015 in Paris

In the beginning of November I had the amazing opportunity to take part in the ATHENS programme, a program that brings together students from Europe’s leading Technical Universities for one week intensive courses on a variety of subjects.
For me that meant spending a week in Paris and attending a course on Information Extraction at Telecom ParisTech.

After a first meeting organized by our local coordinator at TUM and a trip to the airport the day before because of the flight attendants’ strike it was off to the airport for me. I happened to be on the same flight with three other students that study at TUM as well and with only a slight delay we made it to CISP Kellermann (a hostel in the south of Paris), that was gonna be our home in Paris for a week.
After unpacking my stuff, I walked around the neighborhood with a few fellow students when all of us started receiving phone calls and texts because of the ongoing terrorist attacks in Paris. Back at the CISP all of us had a lot of questions but no answers, so after convincing friends and family that we were safe we decided that there wasn’t much we could do on that day anyway so we called it a night.

Usually, the hosting university organizes tours and visits for the incoming students, but in our case those had to be cancelled, so we organized our own program for the weekend which consisted of prolonged walks around the city, a lot of good food and obscenely many group-selfies.

A bunch of ATHENS students in front of Sacre Cœur
A bunch of ATHENS students in front of Sacre Cœur (photo courtesy of Zhang Jiapei‎)

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