• Postballs – Boxer dies when asked by Bristol’s Mayor

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

    Like many, I was saddened to hear of the death of Muhammad Ali. As a young lad growing up in the 1960s and keen on sport of all kinds, he was a large presence on the TV sports programmes and the newspaper sports pages.

    His achievements in the ring and his stand against conscription and the Vietnam War helped reinforce his reputation: he really did end up as “the greatest“.

    However, news emerges via the Bristol Post that Ali’s death may not be all it seems: Muhammad’s demise could have been at the behest of Marvin Rees, Bristol’s newly elected mayor.

    first paragraph reads The Big Screen Bristol in Millennium Square will show the memorial service of Muhammad Ali who died last week at the personal request of the city's mayor Marvin Rees

    However, as per usual, it is merely a case of the endemic bad use of English, appalling grammar and ambiguity by the Post’s semi-literate hacks.

    In contrast, Ali was renowned for his eloquence and use of the English language, something which the current crop of Post journalists will never, ever emulate.

  • Latest version of Snoopers’ Charter before Parliament this week

    Steve WoodsOddities, Politics, Tech

    This week the House of Commons is due to debate the Investigatory Powers Bill, the latest version of the Snoopers’ Charter (news passim), that will allow the United Kingdom’s police and services to regard the entire UK population as potential organised criminals, suspected terrorists and other assorted ne’er-do-wells and enable those same services to monitor the UK residents’ internet traffic and telecommunications.

    In advance of the parliamentary debate and to publicise the illiberal nature of Home Secretary Theresa May’s bill, the Open Rights Group installed a public toilet on a busy Friday afternoon in Brick Lane in east London. However, the public toilet was not all that it seemed; it was a toilet with a difference.

    The Open Rights Group has also provided a helpful, fact-packed page for MPs on the Snoopers’ Charter to brief them ahead of the debate.

    Originally posted by the author on Bristol Wireless.

  • Italian Defence Ministry on LibreOffice migration

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

    Italo Vignoli has written today about the Italian Defence Ministry’s migration (posts passim) from the proprietary MS Office suite to a free and open source alternative, LibreOffice.

    LibreOffice logo

    On 30th May, General Sileo of the Italian Defence Ministry gave a presentation on migrating to LibreOffice at Milan University within the scope of meetings organised by the university’s centre for innovation and organisational change in the public sector (Icona Centre), with this particular event being organised by the Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods for the public management degree course.

    General Sileo explained how the adoption of the migration procedure enabled the project to be implemented on the basis of Italian and international best practice, combining the best experience of the community – such as LibreUmbria – and making all elements common factors to avoid surprises, problems and rejection during the migration.

    At the end of the migration, which involves some 150, workstations, the Italian Defence Ministry will have saved €26-29mn., which will then be available for use on “strategic” activities.

  • Introducing The Document Liberation Project

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    Document Liberation Project logoToday many people have digital content they created years ago and stored in obsolete and proprietary document formats. Very often these old file formats cannot be opened by any application on the user’s current operating system, leaving the users locked out of their own content.

    However, it is not just individuals that are affected: public and private sector organisations are similarly afflicted; and this can have huge consequences when, say, a a government is unable to read or access digital data it has created in the past.

    This is where The Document Liberation Project comes into its own.

    The Document Liberation Project was created to enable, people, private and public sector organisations to recover their data from proprietary formats and to provide a means of converting the recovered data into open and standardised file formats, such as Open Document Format, thus returning effective control over the content to the actual authors from the software computer that devised the proprietary formats.

    To achieve this, The Document Liberation Project develops software libraries that applications can use to read data in proprietary formats.

    The following video explains how this process works.

    Read more about The Document Liberation Project and the list of projects it supports.

  • Bristol Post balls – man concealed by sound

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

    One of the joys of the illiteracy of the Bristol Post – the city’s newspaper of warped record – is the unintentional humour the manifestations of that lack of skill inspire.

    Such an instance occurred yesterday when the Post reported, with a local angle of course, on the reopening of the inquest into the victims of the Birmingham pub bombing by the IRA on 21st November 1974.

    One of the survivors – Frank Thomas – now happens to live in Bristol and the Post’s reported duly managed to get rumble and rubble confused, as shown in the following screenshot of the article’s first paragraph.

    text in image reads For 20 minutes Frank Thomas lay hidden under rumble while emergency services struggled to rescue bodies from a Birmingham pub

    Should any passing Post hack wish to avoid future confusion, the definitions of rumble and rubble are helpfully transcribed below from Cambridge Dictionaries Online.

    Rumble (n.) – a low continuous sound.

    Rubble (n.) the piles of broken stone and bricks, etc. that are left when a building falls down or is destroyed.

  • Collabora Online 1.0 “Engine” for hosters and clouds released

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    Collabora Productivity, the driving force behind putting the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite in the cloud, has announced the release the first production grade version of Collabora Online, its flagship cloud document suite solution. Codenamed “Engine”, it is targeted specifically at hosting and cloud businesses who wish to support both commercial and consumer document viewing, creation and editing services in their portfolios.

    “Collabora Online 1.0 is the culmination of several years’ intensive work”, remarked Michael Meeks, Collabora Productivity’s General Manager. “Our objective is to enable key document suite service delivery for hosters by integrating seamlessly with their existing groupware, storage, file sharing and other customer solutions. Critically, Collabora will tailor the look and feel of the integration to complement a hoster’s identity and desired product experience.”

    Calc spreadsheet being used online
    Calc spreadsheet being used online

    For this release Collabora Productivity has also updated its demo, which now includes, amongst other things:

    • Header menus;
    • Right click menus;
    • Tables
    • Comments

    Interested potential users can request access to the demo from Collabora.

    Reposted from Bristol Wireless.

  • On this day in 1649

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

    For any Brit with republican leanings who is still trying to forget yesterday’s antediluvian pantomime in Westminster otherwise known as the State Opening of Parliament, 19th May 1649 is a significant date.

    On that day in 1649 the English Parliament enacted a law entitled “Act Declaring and Constituting the People of England to be a Commonwealth and Free-State“, abolishing both the monarchy and the House of Lords.

    The text of the Act is available on Wikisource*, from whence it has been transcribed from the accompanying PDF with the original 17th century spelling and punctuation.

    BE IT DECLARED and enacted by this present Parliament and by the Authoritie of the same:—
    That the People of England and of all the Dominions and Territoryes thereunto belonging are and shall be and are hereby constituted, made, established, and confirmed to be a Commonwealth and free State And shall from henceforth be Governed as a Commonwealth and Free State by the supreame Authoritie of
    this Nation, the Representatives of the People in Parliament and by such as they shall appoint and constitute as Officers and Ministers under them for the good of the People and that without any King or House of Lords.

    * Originally taken from Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642-1660, edited C H Firth and R S Rait (London, 1911)

    Hat tip: Westengland

  • Local MP stands up for Afghan interpreters

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Politics

    headshot of Jack LoprestiJack Lopresti, the MP for the Filton & Bradley Stoke constituency on Bristol’s northern fringe, has questioned the UK’s treatment of the Afghan interpreters employed by the British armed forces during their deployment in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2014.

    Today’s Bristol Post reports that Mr Lopresti asked the Prime Minister about the fate of the Afghan linguists.

    To quote from the Post:

    The former Army reservist said it was a “stain on our country’s honour” that Afghan interpreters who had helped British soldiers, including his own 29 Commando RAs when they were mobilised in 2008-09, had been “abandoned”.

    He told the Prime Minister that many had been murdered upon returning to their country and pleaded that all of them be offered “sanctuary” in the UK.

    The PM said there was a “very generous scheme” to help those who had not been translators [sic] long enough to qualify to come to Britain.

    According to Hansard, the full verbatim exchange between Lopresti and Cameron is as follows:

    Jack Lopresti (Filton and Bradley Stoke) (Con)
    During military operations in Afghanistan, British forces were heavily reliant on locally employed interpreters, who constantly put themselves in harm’s way alongside our people. I saw with my own eyes during Herrick 9 just how brave these interpreters were. Does the Prime Minister agree that it is a stain on our country’s honour that we have abandoned a large number of them to be threatened by the Taliban? Some have been murdered and others have had to flee their homes, in fear of their lives. We owe the interpreters a huge debt of gratitude and honour, and we must provide safety and sanctuary for them here.

    The Prime Minister
    We debated and discussed around the National Security Council table in the coalition Government and then announced in the House of Commons a scheme to make sure that those people who had helped our forces with translation and other services were given the opportunity of coming to the UK. We set up two schemes: one to encourage that, but also another scheme, a very generous scheme, to try to encourage those people who either wanted to stay or had not been translators for a long enough period to stay in Afghanistan and help to rebuild that country. ​I think it is important to have both schemes in place, rather than simply saying that everyone in any way involved can come immediately to the UK. Let us back Afghans to rebuild their own country.

    If Mr Cameron cannot tell the difference between interpreters and translators, in spite of his expensive education at Eton College and Oxford University, I suggest he consults this handy illustrated guide. 🙂

  • LibreOffice 5.1.3 available for download

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    The Document Foundation (TDF) has today announced the immediate availability of LibreOffice 5.1.3, the third minor release of the LibreOffice 5.1 family, which now supports Google Drive remote connectivity on GNU/Linux and MacOS X operating systems.

    LibreOffice 5.1.3 is targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users. For more conservative users and for enterprise deployments, TDF recommends the “still” version – LibreOffice 5.0.6. For enterprise deployments, The Document Foundation also recommends professional support by certified people.

    For those users interested in helping to test forthcoming releases, there are also development versions and nightly builds available. However, these are not recommended for use in a production environment, where stability and reliability are required.

    LibreOffice Impress presentation software
    LibreOffice Impress presentation software

    Download LibreOffice

    LibreOffice 5.1.3 is available for immediate download.

    LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can also support The Document Foundation with a donation.

    LibreOffice Conference 2016

    In 2016 the annual LibreOffice Conference will be hosted by the Faculty of Information Technology at Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic from 7th to 9th September.

    The Call for Papers is open until 15th July 2016 and registration for the conference is now open.

Posts navigation