6 | May | 2013 | Steve Woods

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… 🙂

Anonymous Capita linguist writes to Helen Grant

Contribute to Wikimedia Commons from your smartphone

LibreOffice 4.0.3 RC3 released

“Rock solid” Debian 7 released