The improvements have been incorporated into LibreOffice versions 3.6, 4.0 and 4.1. The code is licensed under the LGPL and MPL 1.1 3, but may also be used under the Apache 2 licence, so it can also be incorporated into Apache OpenOffice.
The Swiss Federal Government launched its open data portal opendata.admin.ch comprising over 1,600 public data sets, including election results, key figures for cantons and local authorities, as well as demographic information and data at the start of the Open Knowledge Conference 2013 in Geneva, the German technology news site Heise reports. The portal will provide a central point of access for the open data portfolio in Switzerland. The website already features the first applications based on the data made available.
Open Data currently ranks fairly high up the Swiss political agenda: last week the National Council called for a master plan for open government from the Swiss Federal Council. The Swiss Federal Council in turn announced the development of a national open data strategy by 2014, which, amongst other things, should clear the way for the repeal of restrictive usage rights, as well as the abolition of fees on public data.
A dispute has broken out in Belgium over the language to be used in the new national stadium just one day after agreement was finally reached to build it, Reuters reported at the end of last week.
The planned 60,000 capacity stadium will be the centrepiece of Brussels’ bid to host matches during the 2020 European football championships and replace the current 45,000 seat King Baudouin Stadium (formerly known as the Heysel Stadium).
The venues are only about 1 kilometre apart, but while the King Baudouin Stadium is in Brussels (which is officially bilingual but largely French-speaking), its planned successor is in the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders.
Flemish politicians are indignant of Brussels extending its francophone to Flanders. Flemish Sports Minister Philippe Muyters has stated that language rules must be respected.
“One of the underlying elements should be an agreement on the use of Dutch there,” said Muyters on a television programme last Wednesday.
Language is a frequent source of controversy in Belgium. The 6.23 mn. Flemish majority fiercely protects its Dutch language and culture and is constantly alert to encroachments by French speakers, who comprise some 3.32 mn. of the Belgian population.
Know Your Place, Bristol City Council‘s historical mapping service that allows you to explore the city through historic maps, images and linked information, has been featured before on this blog before (posts passim).
Earlier today Pete Insole, archaeologist for Bristol City Council, announced via Twitter that Know Your Place has now been augmented by the addition to the Hartley Collection layer of original architects’ drawings for the reconstruction of Bristol after World War 2.
Bristol was the fifth most heavily bombed British city of World War 2. The presence of the city docks and the Bristol Aeroplane Company made it a target for bombing by the Luftwaffe whose pilots were able to trace a course up the River Avon from Avonmouth into the heart of the city using reflected moonlight on the waters.
A screenshot featuring the new one of the new additions – one of the drawings for what ultimately became Broadmead shopping centre – is shown below.
Now improved – Know Your Place. Click on the image for the full version
For decades, managers have been trying to come up with anodyne terms for dismissing people and making them redundant.
Some of the more common ones are: give someone their notice, get rid of, discharge, terminate; lay off; sack, give someone the sack, fire, boot out, give someone the boot, give someone their marching orders, show someone the door, can, pink-slip; cashier.
Following this trend, bosses at Bristol City Council have now come up with another, ‘to catalyze’, as evidenced by a mole down the Counts Louse (since renamed ‘City Hall’ by Mayor Red Trousers (posts passim). Ed.) who tweeted the following yesterday.
I’m sure all employees of the council are reassured that the management has their best interests at heart by not wanting to hurt their feelings as they’re unceremoniously handed their P45s and shown the door.
As any journalist knows, an appropriate picture can add interest to what would otherwise be a dull story. However, what a quay full of cars has to do with a report on school expansion in Portishead, only the Bristol Post knows.
Evidently, the above image is so good, the Post decided to use it a second time for a completely unrelated report into Frenchay Hospital.
Both screenshots were taken from the Bristol Post website at about 7.00 a.m. on Friday. However, the ‘featured image’ might have changed by the time you read the articles. đ
Orca, the screen reader for the GNOME desktop used on Linux machines, is now at the Beta 2 stage for its forthcoming 3.10 release. According to Softpedia, the 3.10 Beta 2 release fixes the broken text attribute presentation for Gecko, the new sliders are now present in GNOME Shell, partially-implemented value interfaces with range of 0 to 1 are now handled and a workaround has been added for Delete and Backspace text changed events.
Moreover, Braille functions are now performed only when Braille is enabled and object:active-descendant-changed has been added to events that may be part of an “event flood”.
Finally the Polish and Slovenian translations have been updated in Orca 3.10 Beta 2.
See the fairly basic change log for all changes since the last release.
The LibreOffice Conference will officially open in less than three weeks at the University of Milan on Wednesday, 25th September, the blog of The Document Foundation reminds us. The opening session will be held in the historic CĂ Granda building, while all technical sessions and tracks will be hosted by the Department of Computer Science.
LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas
The conference is being sponsored by Canonical (the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. Ed.) and open source consultancy Collabora, whilst Google and CloudOn will be sponsoring the live ‘hackatons’ happening on Wednesday and Thursday evening and open source consultancy Lanedo sponsoring the food for the conference breaks.
The conference will close on Friday, 27th September with the traditional Q&A session, where project members can question The Document Foundation’s board of directors.
The conference tracks will cover the following:
Open Document Format (ODF);
LibreOffice Development;
Community Development;
Best Practice for Deployments and Migrations; and
Building a Business with LibreOffice.
For the first time during a conference, there will be a chance of sitting together with LibreOffice developers to hack the code, or just discuss the next feature.
“LibreOffice Conference comes to Italy at the right time, as during 2012 and 2013 there have been several migrations to LibreOffice in the public administrations at regional and local level,” says Italo Vignoli, a member of The Document Foundation’s board of directors and the leader of the conference team. “Meeting with the project members will encourage other public administrations and enterprises to undertake the migration to LibreOffice”.
Conference sessions will be broadcast online, as well as being recorded and made available on the conference website.
Munich City Council has announced that a total of 2,000 Linux CDs featuring the Ubuntu 12.04 Long Term Support (LTS) distribution will be given away from next Monday in Munich’s public libraries according to the German technology news site Heise. The city’s Administration and Personnel Commission decided to take this step on 19th June 2013 because Microsoft is finally ending support for Windows XP on 8th April 2014 and will not be providing any more security patches for the operating system from that date onwards.
Bavaria’s capital city thus wants to make sure first and foremost that computers which have been using Windows XP do not end up as electronic waste. Furthermore, Munich wants to be regarded as an “innovative expert in the open source sector”.
Nevertheless, the council points out that it cannot provide any support at all for the chosen Linux distribution and that users should refer to for this to suppliers in the database of the local Chamber of Commerce & Industry (IHK) and ubuntuusers.de.
According to Heise, Suse and Lanedo have completed a project to improve the interoperability of the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite with OOXML, the format used by Microsoft Office files. The requirements were jointly defined by several bodies, including Munich City Council, the Swiss Federal Court and the French Ministry of Culture and Communication and the project received total funding of €160,000.
The Swiss Federal Government launched its open data portal 
Orca, the screen reader for the GNOME desktop used on Linux machines, is now at the Beta 2 stage for its forthcoming 3.10 release. 
