This week, Wikipedia reaches its fifteenth birthday.
These days the free online encyclopaedia is the world’s seventh most popular website and now includes more than 38 million articles in 289 languages, all maintained by an army of volunteer editors and contributors.
Andy Mabbett, one of that army of editors and contributors, has been musing on Twitter as to how Wikipedia will react having reached this chronological milestone.
Over the last 15 years, although the project was originally initiated by Anglophone geeks, Wikipedia has been working to increase the diversity of its content and contributors through outreach programmes such as edit-a-thons at universities and museums and by trying to appoint more women administrators. However, there is still plenty of work to be done in this field.
The Wikipedia website and the open source Mediawiki software it runs on are managed by the Wikimedia Foundation charity, which is funded by donations, the vast majority of them from small donors.
To mark Wikipedia’s 15th birthday the Foundation has created an endowment fund that it hopes will raise $100 mn. over the next 10 years.
Happy birthday, Wikipedia – and may you enjoy many, many more.
Miklos Vajna of open source consultants Collabora has produced a short video showing the recent changes in mail merge in LibreOffice.
If you ever used the mail merge wizard with a Calc data source, then you know how it worked in the past: you’ve got 3 files: the .odt mail template, the .ods data source and a .odb data source definition that defines how to access the .ods.
The procedure has now been changed. As of LibreOffice 5.1, the .odb data source has been eliminated and the .ods data source is now embedded directly the .odt mail template.
As part of Alternative Bristol’s Breaking the Frame series of talks, an email encryption talk for beginners will be taking place at Hydra Books in Old Market Street, Bristol (map) from 7.30-9.30 p.m. on Friday 22nd January.
How public key encryption works
According to the organisers, an ordinary e-mail is like a postcard without an envelope: anybody who can put their hands on it can read it. Unlike a postcard an email is copied (rather than moved) to many different computers on its travels. All of these computers’ owners we can’t possibly trust and know. This makes them feel uncomfortable and is not necessary with simple email
encryption.
After this short (one hour!) workshop attendees will be able to email anyone else who makes it to the workshop without the email being intercepted by a third party.
Certain organisations (e.g. journalists, unions, activists, etc.) have a responsibility to transmit sensitive messages securely and currently do not always do this. Don’t think what does this one email say about me? (or its recipient), think rather when examined en masse over time (most emails are stored indefinitely these days) what does this reveal about the way you live?
It would save time if prospective attendees had Thunderbird set up and receiving your emails. If you have Ubuntu or another Linux distribution, it would help if you installed both Thunderbird and GPG before attending the talk. If you already use email encryption and want to help or share your key please come by too. No experience necessary, but if you have a laptop and USB stick please bring them with you.
Now that Christmas is just about out of the way for another year, the great speculation amongst Britain’s shoppers will be how soon into the New Year will Easter eggs appear on supermarket shelves. The customary 3 months as with all that Christmas tat? We’ll just have to wait and see.
As a user of free and open source software, I’ve had an early – or late – Easter egg already courtesy of the VLC media player, as shown below.
VLC media player wearing its Christmas hat
Unless you’re familiar with the language of tech aficionados, the previous statement and accompanying screenshot are probably incomprehensible.
In software an Easter egg is defined as “an intentional inside joke, hidden message, or feature in an interactive work such as a computer program, video game or DVD menu screen. The name has been said to evoke the idea of a traditional Easter egg hunt“.
One of the first occurrences of what are now known as Easter eggs appeared in the Atari video game Adventure, having been planted there by computer game developer Warren Robinett. It wasn’t too fancy or interesting, just a hidden object planted in the game that led to a screen that said “Created by Warren Robinett.” The developer had buried this object within the game code as Atari didn’t credit its games developers at the time.
Anyway, returning to the screenshot above, the Santa hat on the VLC program logo (the traffic cone in the middle of the window. Ed.) appears each year for the Christmas holiday period only; for the rest of the year, the logo is hatless.
Besides VLC, some well-known and widely used applications have also contained Easter eggs. For instance, Easter eggs in the 1997 version of Microsoft Office include a hidden flight simulator in Microsoft Excel and a pinball game in Microsoft Word, whilst on all Microsoft Windows operating systems before XP, entering the text “volcano” in the 3D Text screen saver will display the names of all the volcanoes in the United States. Microsoft removed this Easter egg in XP but added others. Microsoft Excel 95 contained a hidden Doom-like action game called The Hall of Tortured Souls.
Turning away from Microsoft, Apple is also not immune from Easter eggs. In 2012 an update to the Mac App Store for OS X Mountain Lion introduced an Easter egg in which apps, during the download process, were timestamped “January 24, 1984,” the date the original Macintosh went on sale. However, Easter eggs were not popular with Apple’s founder, the late Steve Jobs, who went through bouts of banning them.
In addition to being sophisticated and/or laden with deep significance, some Easter eggs can be very simple and bereft of any meaning, merely reflecting the playful personality of their creators. Here’s a prime example from the GNU/Linux apt-get command line tool used for managing software packages. Typing the command apt-get moo results in something similar to the following screenshot.
The output of typing the command apt-get moo in the Linux terminal
Anyway, I’m enjoying my festive Easter egg and I hope it’s not too late to wish all readers and visitors to this site the compliments of the season.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has as its mission “to make the internet work better by producing high quality, relevant technical documents that influence the way people design, use, and manage the Internet“.
As part of this work, the IETF develops and promotes voluntary Internet standards, in particular the standards that comprise the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP).
These standards include HTTP status codes, which are derived from both IETF internet standards, IETF RFCs other specifications and some additional commonly used codes.
The IETF’s HTTP Working Group has recently published a draft RFC proposing a new HTTP status code – status code 451 – for use when resource access is denied as a consequence of legal demands.
The draft’s introduction gives the rationale for the proposal:
This document specifies a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) status code for use when a server operator has received a legal demand to deny access to a resource or to a set of resources which includes the requested resource.
This status code can be used to provide transparency in circumstances where issues of law or public policy affect server operations. This transparency may be beneficial both to these operators and to end users.
Getting into detail, the draft states that responses using this status code should include an explanation in the response body of the details of the legal demand, i.e. the party making it, the applicable legislation or regulation and the classes of person and resource to which it applies.
The use of the 451 status code implies neither the existence nor non-existence of the resource named in the request. That is to say, it is possible that if the legal demands were removed, a request for the resource still might not succeed.
The draft also gives an example of status code 451 in action.
<html>
<head><title>Unavailable For Legal Reasons</title></head>
<body>
<h1>Unavailable For Legal Reasons</h1>
<p>This request may not be serviced in the Roman Province
of Judea due to the Lex Julia Majestatis, which disallows
access to resources hosted on servers deemed to be
operated by the People’s Front of Judea.</p>
</body>
</html>
One of the reasons behind the proposal is that existing status code 403 (Forbidden) was not really suitable for situations where legal demands mean access to resources is denied.
Comments on the draft will be received until 13th May 2016.
The numbering of the status code pays homage to science fiction author Ray Bradbury‘s 1953 dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451.
The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 5.0.4.
This is the fourth point release of the LibreOffice 5.0 family and contains a large number of fixes compared with the previous releases.
Based on feedback from journalists and end users, the LibreOffice 5.0 family is the most popular version of LibreOffice to date.
Furthermore, LibreOffice 5.0.4 is suitable for commercial or large-scale deployments when backed by professional level 3 support from certified developers. When migrating to LibreOffice from proprietary office suites, organisations are advised to seek professional support from certified migration consultants.
Finally, there are companies providing LibreOffice LTS versions which are intended for commercial deployments.
Download LibreOffice
LibreOffice 5.0.4 is available for immediate download.
LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation.
New project shop
There’s another way LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support the project. That’s by buying LibreOffice merchandise from the brand new project shop.
Collabora, the architects of LibreOffice Online, have announced a the formation of a partnership and the release of CODE (Collabora Online Development Edition), a distribution of LibreOffice Online and ownCloud Server. The purpose of CODE is to give interested developers from any field an easy way to get early access to the very latest untested feature additions and updates to LibreOffice Online, in order to enable them to develop, test and contribute. ownCloud is the company behind ownCloud Server, the world’s most popular open source enterprise file synchronisation and share (EFSS) software. The partnership will deliver a combined commercial solution during 2016, based on an integration of Collabora CloudSuite – a trio of Online, Mobile and Desktop office productivity – with ownCloud Server.
“We’re delighted to partner with ownCloud to strengthen our go-to-market posture as we look forward to fulfilling the considerable market demand for an Open Source cloud document suite,” said Michael Meeks, Collabora Productivity’s General Manager. “This initial release of CODE is our first step in this exciting journey. By design, Collabora Online does not include essential cloud functionality such as identity management or storage. CODE gives a showcase of how filling this gap with a complementary integration with ownCloud gives a taste of the final deployment experience.”
“Collabora is a great open source contributor and a great partner for ownCloud to deliver a full LibreOffice Online experience integrated with ownCloud to the ownCloud Community. Developers and Users will be able to easily view and edit documents while storing them in ownCloud,” said Frank Karlitschek, ownCloud founder and project leader. “This integration proves the power of integration between leading Projects and allows full support for all major document, spreadsheet and presentation file formats.”
CODE (Collabora Online Development Edition) allows prototype editing of richly formatted documents from a web browser. It has good support for key file formats , including text documents (docx, doc, odt, pdf, etc.), spreadsheets (xlsx, xls, ods, etc.) and presentations (pptx, ppt, odp, etc.). All files are processed in the cloud and rendered locally. This initial version allows basic editing. Collaborative and rich editing are planned. Interested developers can download CODE as an easily deployable virtual machine base image, bundled with ownCloud Server, and start contributing to both projects right away.
Bristol boffins have developed a pair of socks embedded with miniaturised microbial fuel cells (MFCs) and fuelled with urine pumped by the wearer’s footsteps that have powered a wireless transmitter to send a signal to a PC. This is the first self-sufficient system powered by a wearable energy generator based on microbial fuel cell technology, the University of the West of England (UWE) reports.
Soft MFCs embedded within a pair of socks were supplied with fresh urine, which was then circulated by the human operator walking. Normally, continuous-flow MFCs would rely on a mains powered pump to circulate the urine over the microbial fuel cells, but this experiment relied solely on human activity. The manual pump was based on a simple fish circulatory system and the action of walking caused the urine to pass over the MFCs and generate energy. Soft tubes, placed under the heels, ensured frequent fluid push–pull by walking. The wearable MFC system successfully ran a wireless transmission board, which was able to send a message every two minutes to the PC-controlled receiver module.
Professor Ieropoulos says, “Having already powered a mobile phone with MFCs using urine as fuel, we wanted to see if we could replicate this success in wearable technology. We also wanted the system to be entirely self-sufficient, running only on human power – using urine as fuel and the action of the foot as the pump.”
“This work opens up possibilities of using waste for powering portable and wearable electronics. For example, recent research shows it should be possible to develop a system based on wearable MFC technology to transmit a person’s coordinates in an emergency situation. At the same time this would indicate proof of life since the device will only work if the operator’s urine fuels the MFCs.”
MFCs use bacteria to generate electricity from waste fluids. They tap into the biochemical energy used for microbial growth and convert it directly into electricity. This technology can use any form of organic waste and turn it into useful energy without reliance on fossil fuels, making this a valuable green technology.
Yesterday The Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice 4.4.7, the seventh and final minor release of the LibreOffice 4.4 family. LibreOffice 4.4.7 is the “still” version, which is aimed at more conservative users and enterprise deployments.
The Document Foundation recommends the deployment of LibreOffice in enterprises and large organisations with the backing of certified professional support.
This week, Wikipedia reaches its fifteenth birthday. 
The 
