May | 2013 | Steve Woods

“An absolute disgrace”

10/05/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

The evidence that Capita is incapable of providing an adequate interpreting service for courts and tribunals in England and Wales continues to pile up.

The latest failure comes from Nottingham where a court hearing for Anxiang Du, a Chinese businessman accused of stabbing a family of four to death in Northampton, was adjourned today because no Mandarin intrepreter was sent to the proceedings, according to the Northampton Chronicle.

At the hearing at Nottingham Crown Court, Mr Justice Julian Flaux explained that he had asked for an interpreter to be booked. However, he said Capita had indicated that it was not worth sending an interpreter as they “would not make enough money” from the hearing.

Mr Justice Flaux is reported to have said: “To say that the presiding judge of the court is annoyed about this is an understatement.” In addition, he ordered Capita to provide a written explanation giving their account of their failure to supply an interpreter for the proceedings.

The plea and case management hearing has now been set provisionally for 19th July, with the trial due to begin on 12th November.

A Mandarin interpreter did eventually arrive at the court at about 2.30pm, but the hearing had already been adjourned by then.
ISS migrates to Linux

09/05/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

Laptops for crew use on the International Space Station (ISS) are being migrated from Windows to Linux, the Linux Foundation reports.

International Space Station – now penguin-powered

The reason for the migration, given by Keith Chuvala of United Space Alliance, a NASA contractor deeply involved in Space Shuttle and ISS operations was as follows:

We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that was stable and reliable – one that would give us in-house control. So if we needed to patch, adjust or adapt, we could.

The laptops will be running Debian and those currently running Scientific Linux, a Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone, will likewise be converted to Debian, according to ZDNet.
Snooper’s Charter: the legislation that refuses to die

09/05/2013 Steve WoodsPolitics, Tech

Yesterday the world witnessed an annual bit of Ruritanian pantomime that passes for the unwritten British constitution in action: the state opening of Parliament and the Queen’s Speech.

According to a report in today’s Guardian, it would appear that the so-called Snooper’s Charter is proving harder to kill than a particularly stubborn vampire, in spite of Nick Clegg’s recent assurances.

This emerged from the text of the Queen’s Speech which gave the go-ahead to legislation, if required, to deal with the limited technical problem of there being many more devices including phones and tablets in use than the number of IP addresses that allow the authorities to identify who communicated with whom and when.

Published at almost the same time, a Downing Street background briefing note on investigating online crime says: “We are continuing to look at this issue closely and the government’s approach will be proportionate, with robust safeguards in place.” The note also reportedly states: “This is not about indiscriminately accessing internet data of innocent members of the public, it is about ensuring that police and other law enforcement agencies have the powers they need to investigate the activities of criminals that take place online as well as offline.”

At this juncture, it’s worth pointing out that we don’t know who is advising the government, but those advisers don’t seem to realise that an IP address can never be linked to a single human being, no matter what they do.

Civil liberties organisations are also worried by the rise of the Snooper’s Charter from the grave. Emma Carr, deputy director of Big Brother Watch, said: “The Queen’s Speech is clear that any work should pursue the narrow problem of IP matching, nothing more, and does not mandate the government to bring forward a bill. It is beyond comprehension for the Home Office to think that this gives them licence to carry on regardless with a much broader bill that has been demonstrated as unworkable and dangerous by experts, business groups and the wider public. It is not surprising that some officials may want to keep trying, having already failed three times under two different governments, to introduce massively disproportionate and intrusive powers, but that is quite clearly not what Her Majesty has put forward today”.

As is also helfully pointed out by The Register, the Home Office spent the past 5 months completely rehashing its proposed Communications Data Bill following a mauling from a select committee of MPs and peers in late 2012. Consequently, it’s hard to believe that the work Theresa May’s department has done on the redrafted bill to date will not – once again – appear before Parliament and predicts it could make reappearance in the 2014 Queen’s Speech – the last one before the next general election.

So, it looks like the lobbying will have to continue, perhaps assisted by holy water, wooden stakes and garlic for more efficacy. 😉
Irony

08/05/2013 Steve WoodsBristol, Language

The front page of today’s Bristol Post.

No further comment needed!

Meanwhile over at BBC Bristol, their headline for the story reads ‘Keynsham stand-off: Police shoot suspect in wheelchair’.
Tomorrow is Global Accessibility Awareness Day

08/05/2013 Steve WoodsBristol, Open Standards, Politics, Social Media, Tech
We learn from Accessible Bristol that tomorrow, Thursday 9th May is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). On that day people all over the world will be coming together to spread the word about accessibility and Accessible Bristol will be among them.

Throughout the day the Accessible Bristol team be on Twitter answering your questions about technology and accessibility, as well as tweeting useful accessibility tips and resources.

Tweet your questions to @AccessibleBrstl and use the #GAAD hashtag to keep track of Global Accessibility Awareness Day activities.

However, Accessible Bristol also has a challenge for the people in Bristol and the South West for 9th May and challenge you to do at least one of the following things on 9th May:
- Go mouseless for an hour (touch screen devices don’t count);
- Surf the web with a screen reader for an hour;
- Create a captions file and share it with the video’s owner;
- Write a blog post or make a video about the way you use and experience the web.
This post originally appeared on Bristol Wireless.
Lost ferrets

07/05/2013 Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities

Over the long weekend I took a walk over Purdown and through Eastville Park in Bristol, enjoying the sunny weather.

Spring has finally arrived, as shown by the appearance of cowslips in the old pasture on Purdown.

Primula veris – the common cowslip

However, I was more intrigued by the ‘Lost Ferrets’ posters I saw descending towards the park at Snuff Mills.

Lost ferrets!
Anonymous Capita linguist writes to Helen Grant

06/05/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

Helen Grant MP
The letter below, originally posted on RPSI Linguist Lounge, has been sent to Helen Grant MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry of Justice, in response to the recent announcement of an increase in the remuneration for linguists employed under the MoJ’s contract with Capita Translation & Interpreting (posts passim), an increase which will be borne by the taxpayer, not the contractor.

Dear Helen Grant,

I would like to congratulate you on increasing ‘the take-home pay of interpreters’. But this isn’t going to really change anything at all for interpreters in providing a better service as this increase is VERY minimal, as this still doesn’t fully cover the travel expenses of getting to a job location. There are very few of us who can afford to work full-time as a public service interpreter with the possibility of only earning £13.32 in a day (before tax). The calculations show that Capita does not even guarantee a rate equal to the minimum wage and at best the gross hourly rate for half a day at court has been reduced by 57.85% (even at the previous enhanced mileage rate of 40 [pence] per mile).

So what NEEDS to happen is: Tier 1 Police interpreting jobs need to be paid a premium of about £30 per hour with FULL travel expenses covered, door to door travel mileage at a rate of £0.40 per mile and full travel time of £10 an hour, to ensure interpreters/translators accept the assignment and arrive at the immediate police job as soon as possible, as most Police jobs are emergencies and are needed very quickly, otherwise the ‘criminal’ will have to either stay in custody till a interpreter arrives (which could take days, with the low pay for interpreters) OR they can just be freed on bail back on to the streets, so they can re-offend and make the streets even less safe.

Also the mileage rate needs to become £0.40 per mile across the board; so Tier 1, 2 and 3 because as I said the current £0.20 rate is just horrendous, making it not even viable to even head out to go to a job assignment because the interpreters will still be making a loss at the end of the day!

If you listen to what I am trying to say, you will find out that this will, in essence, bring the full qualified interpreters back to the court room and make justice possible!

How can you do this to interpreters which have trained for many years to get to where they’re to then be paid a minimum wage?! No wonder they’ve boycotted Capita! They deserve to be paid a way more than what is currently being paid. So when the rates eventually rise, then we shall see very positive work from Interpreters and Translators. But hopefully you will fix this issue because at the end of the day, this just isn’t fair on the interpreters, translators, solicitors, barristers and judges.

I hope to see a reply from you.

Kind Regards
Contribute to Wikimedia Commons from your smartphone

06/05/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Data, Open Source, Tech

Login screen on the Commons Android app
Wikimedia Commons is a great resource: nearly 17 mn. freely usable media files that anyone can use for any purpose and to which anyone can contribute too!

Making contributions to Wikimedia Commons is also getting easier: it’s now possible to transfer images to the Commons database from an Android or iOS smartphone using a free and advert-free mobile app. Features include the ability to view a stream of your contributions, upload multiple files and export to Commons using – if you’re on Android – that phone’s share functionality. Your images will also be tagged with the GPS co-ordinates if GPS tagging is turned on.

Wikimedia points out that by uploading your files to Commons, contributors will be doing more than if they just shared them with friends: they’ll be contributing the goal of spreading free knowledge around the world and sharing their work with billions of Wikipedia readers around the world (Wikipedia is the fifth most visited website in the world. Ed.).

The Android app is available from Google Play, whilst the Apple Store features the iOS app.

The developers also hope to add more features in future and make it easier to browse and discover all the great content Commons has to offer.

The app development team would like you to report any bugs, as well as giving them your suggestions for new features.
LibreOffice 4.0.3 RC3 released

06/05/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

The third release candidate (RC) for LibreOffice 4.0.3 is now available for download for evaluation and testing, etc.

As usual, the development team stress that using LibreOffice pre-release builds for “mission-critical” purposes is not recommended.

LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

Potential users are also advised to consult the Releases Notes.

When you visit the download page, it will try to detect the visitor’s system and offer the visitor the right download automatically, but may not succeed in all cases.

People who are interested in even more bleeding-edge binaries of LibreOffice’s current development are advised to try the nightly builds. However, those are potentially even less suitable for productive work, provided by individual contributors and have not been approved in any way by a quality assurance process. Caveat emptor.
“Rock solid” Debian 7 released

06/05/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech
On 4th May, Debian made the following announcement concerning the release of Debian 7.0, the latest stable release of this venerable Linux distribution.
After many months of constant development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 7.0 (code name “Wheezy”).

This new version of Debian includes various interesting features such as multiarch support, several specific tools to deploy private clouds, an improved installer and a complete set of
multimedia codecs and front-ends which remove the need for third-party repositories.

Multiarch support, one of the main release goals for Wheezy, will allow Debian users to install packages from multiple architectures on the same machine. This means that you can now, for the first time, install both 32- and 64-bit software on the same machine and have all the relevant dependencies correctly resolved, automatically.

The installation process has been greatly improved: Debian can now be installed using software speech, above all by visually impaired people who do not use a Braille device. Thanks to the combined efforts of a huge number of translators, the installation system is available in 73 languages and more than a dozen of them are available for speech synthesis too.

In addition, for the first time, Debian supports installation and booting using UEFI for new 64-bit PCs (amd64), although there is no support for Secure Boot yet.

This release includes numerous updated software packages, such as:
With this broad selection of packages, Debian once again stays true to its goal of being the universal operating system. It is suitable for many different use cases: from desktop systems to netbooks; from development servers to cluster systems; and for database, web, or storage servers. At the same time, additional quality assurance efforts like automatic installation and upgrade tests for all packages in Debian’s archive ensure that Wheezy fulfils the high expectations that users have of a stable Debian release. It is rock solid and rigorously tested.

You can install Debian on computers ranging from handheld systems to supercomputers, and on nearly everything in between. A total of nine architectures are supported: 32-bit PC / Intel IA-32 (i386), 64-bit PC / Intel EM64T / x86-64 (amd64), Motorola/IBM PowerPC (powerpc), Sun/Oracle SPARC (sparc), MIPS (mips (big-endian) and mipsel (little-endian)), Intel Itanium (ia64), IBM S/390 (31-bit s390 and 64-bit s390x) and ARM EABI (armel for older hardware and armhf for newer hardware using hardware floating-point).

Want to give it a try?
If you want to simply try it without having to install it, you can use a special image, known as a live image, available for CDs, USB sticks, and netboot set-ups. Initially, these images are provided for the amd64 and i386 architectures only. It is also possible to use these live images to install Debian. More information is available from the Debian Live homepage.

If, instead, you want to directly install it, you can choose among various installation media, such as Blu-ray Discs, DVDs, CDs and USB sticks, or from the network. Several desktop environments – GNOME, KDE Plasma Desktop and Applications, Xfce, and LXDE – may be installed through CD images; the desired one may be chosen from the boot menus of the CDs/DVDs. In addition, multi-architecture CDs and DVDs are available which support installation of multiple architectures from a single disc. Or you can always create bootable USB installation media (see the Installation Guide for more details).

The installation images may be downloaded right now via bittorrent (the recommended method), jigdo, or HTTP; see Debian on CDs for further information. Wheezy will soon be available on physical DVD, CD-ROM, and Blu-ray Discs from numerous vendors, too.

Already a happy Debian user and you only want to upgrade?
Upgrades to Debian 7.0 from the previous release, Debian 6.0 (codenamed “Squeeze”), are automatically handled by the apt-get package management tool for most configurations. As always, Debian systems may be upgraded painlessly, in place, without any forced downtime, but it is strongly recommended to read the release notes as well as the installation guide for possible issues and for detailed instructions on installing and upgrading. The release notes will be further improved and translated [in]to additional languages in the weeks after the release.
I’ve been using Wheezy on my laptop since release candidate 1 and can testify to it being rock solid and reliable. In particular, the screen display seems much more stable than it ever did under Ubuntu. Indeed the only problems I had with installing Wheezy were getting the wifi working (simply a matter of downloading and installing the correct firmware for the Broadcom chip on the card) and forgetting to install such little extras as libdvdcss2 so I could watch DVDs.

Why have I changed from Ubuntu? Unfortunately, the long-term support (updates) for the version I was running (10.0.4) runs out this month and subsequent versions have switched to the Unity desktop (not my favourite). I still regard Ubuntu as a great distribution, especially for beginners, to whom I’d recommend it for ease of use. Furthermore, for those who dislike Unity, there’s always the KDE-based Kubuntu, of course… 🙂

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