Yesterday, feeling frustrated with Bristol City Council’s ineptitude at tackling fly-tipping and litter in the city’s Easton and Lawrence Hill wards, despite 18 months’ vigorous campaigning by local residents and ward councillors, I decided to take advantage of Twitter’s poll facility.
The results of the poll are shown below.
That’s right! 90% of respondents believe Hell will freeze over before the local authority gets a grip on fly-tipping.
If anyone spots Satan shopping for ice skates in Broadmead, the Galleries, Cabot Circus, Cribb’s Causeway or any other retail centre in the Bristol area, please provide details using the comments form below. 🙂
Esencial para empresas (essential for companies), because it covers all enterprise office automation needs without adding licensing costs;
Mayor potencial de crecimiento (best growth potential); this was awarded because LibreOffice is regularly updated and is open to new features and applications.
Other winners included GNU Health (most revolutionary), WordPress (essential for communication) and CyanogenMod (best for mobile).
The Linux Foundation has released episode 4 of its A World Without Linux video series.
Called “Avatar Reimagined”, this latest video sees characters Sam and Annie going to the pictures (as we used to call them when I was a lad. Ed.) to watch a film with really bad special effects to make the point that the effects in many blockbuster movies are made on Linux supercomputers.
The Linux Foundation commissioned six episodes for the series, leaving one left before the final episode featuring Mr Linux Kernel himself, Linus Torvalds.
It’s now that grim time of year between the end of British Summer Time (BST) in October and the winter solstice in December when periods of daylight are short, deciduous trees lose their leaves and the weather deteriorates. Indeed the United Kingdom is presently experiencing a succession of autumn storms and two evenings ago the Avonmouth area of Bristol experienced the strongest wind in the country with a blast of 79 mph as Storm Barney battered the country. In short, it’s the middle of November.
The Victorian poet Thomas Hood (23rd May 1799 – 3rd May 1845) caught the mood of the time of year beautifully in his 1844 poem November.
No sun – no moon!
No morn – no noon –
No dawn – no dusk – no proper time of day.
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member –
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds –
November!
Linux distribution bug reports are not a place one expects to find stuff to make one smile: they’re normally places where the faults and failings of software are described in normally boring detail.
14.04, locked screen to go to lunch, upon return from lunch cat was sitting on keyboard, login screen was frozen & unresponsive.
To replicate: In unity hit ctrl-alt-l, place keyboard on chair. Sit on keyboard.
Resolution: Switched to virtual terminal, restarted lightdm, lost all open windows in X session.
What should have happened: lightdm not becoming unresponsive.
Ubuntu fans are now trying to reproduce this bug, including some who want to try and reproduce it with other pets, as per the latest comment on the bug report page reproduced below.
will it also work with a small dog, please some one with a small size dogs test it!
LightDM is the display manager running in Ubuntu. According to the Ubuntu Wiki, it starts the X servers, user sessions and greeter (login screen).
What’s a tahr? Wikipedia informs us that tahrs form a family of three species of large Asian ungulates related to the wild goat. The three species are the Himalayan tahr, Nilgiri tahr and Arabian tahr.
Finally, there are millions of pictures of cats and kittens all over the internet. Indeed, there’s even a Firefox add-on called Kitten Block that steps in whenever the user who has it installed attempts to access the right-wing Daily Mail and Daily Express websites. However, there are far fewer pictures of tahrs. Let’s remedy that with a fine picture of a male Himalayan tahr courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
At times like this, I’m reminded of the words spoken earlier this year on a Ramadan open day by one of the imams at Al Baseera mosque in St Judes, Bristol said: “a terrorist is someone without religion; he’s just a criminal”.
Open source software is a good option for local authorities who are dissatisfied with the price and quality of their software, says Dutch Labour MP Astrid Oosenbrug. This former sysadmin believes open source and open standards can liberate local authorities from their current suppliers, who she maintains can have too much power over their customers.
Situation “has been going on for years”
It recently became apparent from an investigation by NRC and Reporter Radio that many local authorities feel they are being held hostage by their software suppliers who are making the most of a dysfunctional market with price increases. According to Oosenbrug, the situation “has been going on for years”. She has been campaigning for a long time for open standards and open source solutions, her greatest success being a parliamentary motion passed in April according to which the government would be obliged to give preference to open source in invitations to tender.
More opportunity for open source
From their dissatisfaction, Oosenbrug perceives that local authorities are seeking alternatives to their current software. Oosenbrug states: “The opportunities for open source are increasing and definitely now the government is giving it preference. Amongst local authorities we do find those where the councillors won’t interfere (with procurement choices. Ed.), but I’ve also sat in the council chamber myself. Not every intervention from The Hague is in itself bad or negative, but is on the contrary supportive.
Open source good option for local authorities
In open source software the software’s source code is published and freely available to the public. The software can therefore be freely copied, adapted and distributed. Software standards between applications that work, services, systems and networks that work with each other can be inspected with open standards.”
Oosenbrug views open source and open standards as a good choice for local authorities. “Software companies have a hold on them with their products. If there’s no agreement with price rises, they stop providing the services and local authorities get into quite a bit of trouble. With open source local authorities can be freed from the stranglehold. With open source, anyone can examine the software used and inspect the source code. In this way security holes and clumsy coding are quickly traced.” Users with expertise are also looking everywhere, on account of which the software remains up to date and inexpensive solutions can often be found,” declares Oosenbrug. “There is a safe environment in which ethical hackers for example can play a major role.”
Open standards
Local authority websites are regularly attacked and are sometimes as leaky as a sieve. Consequently, Oosenbrug is also advocating open standards in addition to open source. “Of the 360 local authorities, only thirty comply with accessibility standards. You can overcome these sorts of problems with open source and open standards.” Oosenbrug believes there should be a template for websites with which local authorities can comply with all standards. “The remainder of a website can then be completed according to the local authority’s own preferences.”
Investment repays itself
Open source and open standards mean a considerable investment, but Oosenbrug believes it’s one that is repaid. “The bid that works best wins invitations to tender. Everything is checked for price and quality by the users themselves. Local authorities are currently in the land of the blind where the one-eyed man is king and they must always pay more. Software is becoming safer and cheaper with open source. The government must not view open source as a punishment, but as an opportunity.”
Municipality of Ede
Several local authorities have made progress with open source. In this way the Municipality of Ede has been able to make appreciable savings. After the changeover, it has been spending ten times less for software licences than comparable local authorities. On account of this, total ICT expenditure has been one quarter less than previous years.
Hardly a day goes by when the hacks at the Bristol Post exhibit the poor quality of written English so prevalent in the media nowadays; and today is no exception.
Writing about a closure of the A4174 Avon Ring Road and clearly out of his usual field of politics, reporter Ian Onions drops a real clanger which would doubtless have been picked up if the paper still employed proper, old-fashioned, omniscient sub-editors.
Having a shelf life – that’s another first for a bridge!
Shelf life is the length of time that a commodity may be stored without becoming unfit for use, consumption, or sale. In other words, it might refer to whether a commodity should no longer be on a pantry shelf (unfit for use), or just no longer on a supermarket shelf (unfit for sale, but not yet unfit for use). It applies to cosmetics, foods, medical devices, explosives, beverages, pharmaceutical drugs, chemicals, and many other perishable items. In some regions, an advisory best before, mandatory use by, or freshness date is required on packaged perishable foods.
No sign of a bridge in that list of products, unless it’s covered by “perishable items“. 🙂
The term for which Mr Onions was grasping was clearly “service life“, whose definition is once again supplied succinctly by Wikipedia.
A product’s service life is its expected lifetime, or the acceptable period of use in service. It is the time that any manufactured item can be expected to be ‘serviceable’ or supported by its manufacturer.
However, since the reports headline tried to create uncertainty about the length of any road, I reckon the Post’s objective was more concerned with whipping up emotions amongst its predominantly car-obsessed readership than with accuracy in use of the written word.
If one only read the Bristol Post, there’d be no way that residents in the wider city would have any inkling that three polluting standby electricity generating stations were currently awaiting planning permission in the European Capital of Greenwash.
Fortunately, this dreadful development has been picked up by Bristol 24/7: and here’s the unsurprising bit; they are all in the more deprived parts of the city.
It is believed these power plants will form part of the Short Term Operating Reserve (Stor) network of reserve power banks which provide additional generating capacity to feed into the National Grid at peak times.
Firstly, a planning application (ref. 15/02310/F) has been submitted on behalf of Plutus Energy for a 48 unit diesel generating plant and 2 diesel storage tanks with a capacity of 22,000 litres for 6 Feeder Road, Bristol and Avonbank, Feeder Road, Bristol, (both in the deprived Lawrence Hill ward. Ed.) close to St Philips Marsh School.
Forty-eight diesel generators will doubtless chuck out a fair old quantity of particulates, which is a component of air pollution implicated in human cancer,heart and lung damage, and mental functioning.
The applicants have not conducted an environmental impact assessment for the site since its small size (0.5 ha) is below the threshold for such a requirement. Nevertheless, local ward councillors believe such an assessment should be carried out due to the size and impact of the proposed development.
In addition, some skulduggery is evident in the noise impact assessment that has been carried out. Edward Road was chosen for the noise impact, significantly further away from the site than St Philips Marsh School. Again, local councillors think this study should be reviewed and amended to include the impact on the school and the nearby Severn Vineyard Church.
A diesel generating plant somewhere in Africa
Despite the fact that inner city Bristol already has dreadful air quality, this is not the only dirty diesel generating plant planned for the city.
An application (ref. 15/04297/F) for another such facility has been submitted for Romney Avenue in Lockleaze, another of the city’s not so prosperous areas. Once again the applicants are Plutus Energy, who want to put 32 generators on this site close to a major housing estate and obviously care very little indeed for Bristol’s air quality.
Finally, yet another application (ref. 15/04420/F) has been filed by UK Power Reserve for 10 diesel or gas generators for in in New Gatton Road in St Werburgh’s, with ten 12-metre high exhaust flues.
Below is a short video on the St Werburgh’s scheme made by local residents.
It’s quite scandalous that UK Power Reserve and Plutus Energy are even considering putting polluting power stations in or next to residential areas. On account of the need for extra domestic heating and lighting, these back-up power stations are most likely to be used on cold, foggy winter days when something called a temperature inversion occurs; this causes cold air to sink, trapping the warm air in a bubble enveloping the city, thus enabling urban pollution to build up to dangerous levels, perfect for increasing the incidence of respiratory ailments. The fact that both companies have cut corners in the form of environmental and noise impact assessments shouldn’t be forgotten.
These dangerous unwelcome schemes should be thrown out by councillors.
Finally, a language note. Over in the United States of America, this dumping of dirty, polluting and generally unwelcome facilities on poor, deprived communities has a name – environmental racism. In Wikipedia, environmental racism is defined as follows:
Environmental racism is placement of low-income or minority communities in proximity of environmentally hazardous or degraded environments, such as toxic waste, pollution and urban decay.
It’s now that grim time of year between the end of 
Linux distribution bug reports are not a place one expects to find stuff to make one smile: they’re normally places where the faults and failings of software are described in normally boring detail.
In open source software the software’s source code is published and freely available to the public. The software can therefore be freely copied, adapted and distributed. Software standards between applications that work, services, systems and networks that work with each other can be inspected with open standards.”
Computer system failures in the aeronautical world are nothing exceptional, but always have a far-reaching effect, stranding thousands of passengers on the ground. This is exactly what happened last Saturday at Orly which had to halt of all its inbound and outbound air traffic for more than half an hour. Besides the inconvenience caused, it’s above all the origin of the failure that is somewhat surprising. According to the French satirical paper 
Hardly a day goes by when the hacks at the Bristol Post exhibit the poor quality of written English so prevalent in the media nowadays; and today is no exception.
