tech | Steve Woods

PDF – a religion?

16/07/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Oddities, Open Source, Tech

Amongst some technology enthusiasts free and open source software is promoted with a zeal approaching that of Christian evangelism, i.e. the preaching of the gospel or the practice of giving information about a particular doctrine or set of beliefs to others with the intention of converting others to the Christian faith.

Does this mean that free and open source software – also referred to by the acronym FOSS – is now a religion?

Richard Stallman – founder of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation – has been known to appear at events in pseudo-religious garb masquerading as his alter ego, St IGNucius of the Church of Emacs.

Since the foundation of the FOSS movement a couple of decades ago, there have been many developments in information technology and the working of the internet.

Of these one of the most notable is the development by Google of predictive search terms; as one types, Google tries to anticipate the final search string. This can have some interesting results, as evidenced by the screenshot below.

PDF – Portable Document Format – was originally a proprietary standard developed by Adobe Systems. It was released as an open standard on 1st July 1 2008 and published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO 32000-1:2008, at which time control of the specification passed to an ISO Committee of volunteer industry experts.

No information is available as to when Judaism, Islam and Catholicism are to be released as open standards under the auspices of the International Organization for Standardization. 😉
Network Rail messes up on dog fouling

14/07/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities, Tech

One of the great tools not available to previous generations of those producing print for public consumption is the spell checker – an application program that flags words in a document that may not be spelled correctly. Spell checkers may be stand-alone, capable of operating on a block of text or as part of a larger application, such as a word processor, email client, electronic dictionary or search engine.

However, some people and/or organisations still seem reluctant to use them, such as UK railway infrastructure operator Network Rail, which chickened out on the occasion shown below and thus qualified for a residency in Homophone Corner. 🙂
Bari to migrate 75% of workstations to LibreOffice

03/07/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

Bari Today reports that the Municipality of Bari is migrate 75% of its workstations to the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite during the current year.

According to Alessandro Tomasicchio, the councillor with responsibility for technological innovation, “In this way we guarantee the participation of citizens in public sector decision-making.”

In addition, the council is adopting ODF – the standard file format of LibreOffice and other open source office suites – as the standard file format that meets all the authority’s technical requirements.

Management of the project entails various kinds of skills, from the analysis of flows of documents within the council to the management of interactions between users and IT systems. Great attention has been paid to staff training and internal communication, which are regarded as fundamental elements for achieving the local authority’s goal.

After analysing the software solutions available and practical testing, the Innvoation Department decided to adopt the free and open source LibreOffice suite, which is compatible with other proprietary office suites, including MS Office currently used by Bari.

The choice of LibreOffice, unlike proprietary software, is compliant with the provisions of Article 68 of the [Italian] Digital Administration Code and the Apulia Region‘s law on the adoption and promotion of open source by public sector organisations.

By the end of the current year at least 75% of Bari’s workstations will migrate from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice.

Antonio Cantatore, head of Bari’s Innovation Department also stated that one reason for switching to LibreOffice would be major savings in the total cost of ownership (TCO). By not having to pay licence fees to Microsoft for the Office package currently installed on 1,700 of Bari’s workstations, the local authority is looking at costs savings €75,000 +VAT.
Registration is open for 2015 LibreOffice conference

02/07/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

Registration for the 2015 LibreOffice Conference, which will be hosted by the Danish city of Aarhus from 23rd to 25th September (posts passim), is now open, The Document Foundation blog has announced.

Attendees can register at http://conference.libreoffice.org/2015/registration/.

The Call for Papers is still open until 15th July 15, 2015. Tracks for papers are based on Development, Quality Assurance, Localization, Documentation and Native Language Projects, Ease of Use, Design and Accessibility, Migrations and Deployments, Certifications and Best Practices, ODF, Document Liberation and Interoperability and Building a Business around LibreOffice.

The conference website also includes some practical info about travel and accommodation.

This year’s conference is being sponsored by CIB, Collabora, Google, Magenta and RedHat.
Russia opts for ReactOS as Windows alternative

26/06/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Politics, Tech

After the Russian Communications Minister Nikolai Nikiforov suggested a common approach by the BRICS states – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – to solving the dependency on imported software earlier this year, Russia recently announced a list of possible options, German IT news site heise reports. There is to be a concerted promotion of open source projects as a part of the national programme to ensure economic development. In addition to two Linux distributions developed by Russian companies, the ReactOS project has also been chosen as a Windows alternative worthy of promotion. However, what that actually means remains unclear for the time being. The Russian programme is only envisaging software alternatives being made available within 10 years.

Although the ReactOS project has no announced any major technical progress since the integration of rudimentary support for NTFS, the developers have nevertheless not been inactive: “Over 750 bug reports filed by the community have been processed, resulting in appreciably better software compatibility,” ReactOS developer Colin Finck remarked in a discussion with heise. In particular, the emulation implemented in the last year for executing 16-bit applications (NTVDM) and Java support have been improved.

ReactOS screenshot. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Thus not only can the installation routine of Oracle’s Java Runtime Environment be executed with the current build of ReactOS, but also ancient software such as the FreeGEM desktop or previously barred applications such as Skype. Support for the UDF file system for reading optical data carriers is also new.

Grant showing results

Initial results are also being produced by the student scholarship system which had been selected by Verein ReactOS Deutschland e.V. after a successful funding campaign over the last year on fundraising site Indiegogo. “With the completion of the new Explorers and Shell32 with theme support, which has been rebuilt from the ground up, the system interface works more nimbly and is also more comfortable to use as regards Explorer,” Finck explains. He has now started work on a printer stack which should be ready by December 2015 and could become a component of ReactOS 0.4.0.

No deadline for new release

Although there is no definite deadline for a new release of ReactOS with all new features, the project is nevertheless making automatic daily build versions available for download. The ReactOS developers themselves classify both the daily builds and previous releases as alpha versions which are only recommended for testing.

The ReactOS community is hoping for a further surge in development from the first ReactOS Hackfest, which is taking place in Aachen, Germany from 7th to 12th August 2015. According to the organisers, more than half of the current ReactOS developers have already registered for the event. According to current plans, improving ReactOS’ hardware support and working on the forthcoming version 0.4.0 shall form the focus of the event.

Reposted from Bristol Wireless.
BarnCamp burns the nerd gag

24/06/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Politics, Tech

Last weekend saw the staging of BarnCamp 2015 (in which Bristol Wireless’ volunteers have been involved since its inception. Ed.). Running from Friday 19th June to Sunday 21st, BarnCamp was as usual a low-cost rural DIY skillsharing event open to everyone, including UK activists, campaigners, people involved in social and community groups and anybody else with an interest in technology and how to subvert it to put it to good use.

According to the sales pitch: “All skill levels are invited and we promise that workshops are not too geeky due to our infamous nerd gag” (of which more later. Ed.).

Once again we were the guests of Highbury Farm, a housing co-operative set in some 30 acres of unimproved but rather steep grassland at Redbrook in the beautiful Wye Valley south of Monmouth.

Looking north towards Monmouth from Highbury Farm

Your correspondent formed part of the forward crew who went to site on Wednesday to set up the event. This year a few more of us were on hand to ensure that all the essential infrastructure – large tents for workshops, signage, kitchen, other refreshment facilities, camp fire, showers and the like – was all in place for the first arrivals. Indeed it was more or less complete by lunchtime on Thursday. Well done all!

Once into the event proper, each day started with breakfast, followed by a plenary session, then workshops, lunch, more workshops and concluding with supper and socialising.

The workshops this year had the usual variety: an introduction to satellite communications, basic electronics, using WordPress and OpenStreetMap, to mention but a few. There were even sessions on basic self defence, whilst Ben’s ever-popular wild food walk took place on no fewer than 3 occasions.

Your correspondent was in charge of building the nightly campfire, a duty that occasionally involved some sheltering of the previous night’s embers from the rain, whilst even the woodpile showed its geeky side.

The pyromaniac’s equivalent of the locked screen

The woodpile geeking out wasn’t the only bit of strangeness occurring on site during BarnCamp. There was also the the intriguing sounding shamanic laptop massage that happened somewhere in the surrounding woodland, for which scant photographic evidence exists.

Shamanic laptop massage

What’s happened to the nerd gag? And what is it in the first place? This was a standard implemented some years ago to stop the less technical becoming too intimidated to the use of too much jargon by the more technically adept. Workshop presenters are encouraged to explain things properly if anyone so asks; this year there was even a space on the information wall where BarnCampers could share the jargon they had just acquired.

The jargon buster

Nevertheless, there was one workshop – Sunday morning’s session on server optimisation – that not only ripped off the nerd gag, but set light to it and threw it away! (And that was just with the first slide of the presentation! That one slide contained more technical acronyms than the rest of the programme put together. Ed.) However, this was perhaps the most jargon-laden session of the weekend and the most geeky, but it did come with lots of laughs… as long as you could get the jokes.

I hope all my fellow BarnCampers had as good a weekend as I did and once again my thanks go out to the good folk at Highbury Farm for their friendliness and hospitality. See you at the next one! 🙂
Microsoft sits in homophone corner

16/06/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Social Media, Tech

This blog has discussed homophones before (posts passim). Homophone corner is a space to which people who cannot distinguish their homophones are banished to consider the errors of their ways – rather like the corner of the classroom to which misbehaving children were exiled during my primary school days.

It now appears as though the curse of the homophone is spreading to the giants of the technology world, as shown by the following tweet from Nix Tran Stories.

I’ve used Microsoft Word/Office since the days of Windows 3.1 and its spelling and grammar checking tools have in my opinion never been particularly good: I’ve always run rings around them; and now it appears that the spellchecker has been coded by an illiterate.

I suppose the least I could do is pat the leader of the MS Office team on the shoulder and mouth the platitude “their, there, they’re!“. 😉
LibreOffice 2015 Conference – call for papers

16/06/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Social Media, Tech
The call for papers for this year’s LibreOffice Conference has today been announced on Twitter by Collabara’s LibreOffice team.

Proposals should be submitted by 15th July 2015 in order to guarantee that they will be considered for inclusion in the conference programme.

The conference programme will be based on the following topics:
- Development, APIs, Extensions, Future Technology;
- Quality Assurance;
- Localisation, Documentation and Native Language Projects;
- Appealing Libreoffice: Ease of Use, Design and Accessibility;
- Enterprise and Public Sector Deployments and Migrations, Certifications and Best Practices;
- Open Document Format, Document Liberation and Interoperability; and
- Building a successful business around LibreOffice.
This year’s event will be held in Aarhus, Denmark’s second city, from 23rd to 25th September inclusive.

Venue

The venue will be a completely new venue on the harbour in Aarhus called “Dokk1 – Urban Media Space Aarhus“.

Urban Media Space is described as “a flexible and dynamic sanctuary for everyone in search of knowledge, inspiration and personal development – an open and accessible learning environment supporting democracy and community and is also going to be an example of the library of the future.”

Conference communication channels

The official communication channel during the conference will be the conference mailing list, conference@global.libreoffice.org. All participants will automatically be subscribed to that list, whilst the archives can be browsed at http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/conference/.

Primary Danish conference contacts

The primary conference contacts in Denmark have likewise been announced; they are:
- Carsten Agger (Open Space Aarhus);
- Line Dybdahl (Municipality of Aarhus);
- Leif Lodahl (LibreOffice Denmark); and
- René Lagoni Neukirch (LibreOffice Denmark).
Microsoft finally enters 20th century

03/06/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

Nearly one decade and a half into the 21st century, Microsoft has announced that it is finally going to enter the 20th century by offering SSH support for its PowerShell offering.

Windows PowerShell session screenshot. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

This move means that users will in future also be able to access and administer other systems remotely using the SSH protocol.

In its implementation Microsoft will be backing the OpenSSH project, which is popular in the open source world; MS wants to join the project and contribute its own code. It is still not certain when the initial results of this work can be expected as things are currently in an early planning phase.

Microsoft becoming more open to open source

MS’ blog post also reports that the developer team has been attempting to extend PowerShell with SSH functionality for quite some time. This proposal was made as early as the first two versions of PowerShell, but was rejected. “Changes in the management and culture” of the company have now encouraged the development team to attempt it again. Pressure from the community and several requests via social media have resulted in the idea now having full senior management support.

The company has become more amenable to open source ever since Satya Nadella took over running the software giant and as a consequence the complete .NET framework has been released as open source.
Don’t let the Snoopers’ Charter bounce back

30/05/2015 Steve WoodsPolitics, Tech

In the Queen’s Speech the Government announced it’s going to introduce an Investigatory Powers Bill (posts passim). This is the new Snoopers’ Charter and will more than likely comprise even greater powers for the police and GCHQ to spy on British citizens. (Will the Government’s longer term aim of a British Bill of Rights comprise the right to be spied upon by the State? Ed.)

This is the fifth time a UK Government has tried to bring in a Snoopers’ Charter. The Home Office wants to give the police and intelligence services even more powers to look at what Brits do and who they talk to.

Do Britons really want to live in a country where all their communications are monitored by the State?

Precise details of the Home Office’s plans but there might be an attack on the encryption technology that helps keep our emails and online banking and shopping secure.

The police and intelligence services should concentrate on targeting people suspected of crimes instead of collecting everyone’s data all of the time.

It’s unclear whether the Home Office’s collect-it-all approach is effective or giving taxpayers value for money. The perpetrators of heinous crimes like the murder of Lee Rigby and the Charlie Hebdo attack were already known to the British and French intelligence services respectively, but those services decided to stop monitoring them due to lack of resources.

The Open Rights Group (ORG) has set up a petition to campaign against the revived Snoopers’ Charter.

The text of the petition reads:

We demand an end to indiscriminate retention, collection and analysis of everyone’s Internet communications, regardless of whether they are suspected of a crime.

We want the police and intelligence agencies to have powers that are effective and genuinely protect our privacy and freedom of speech.

Sign the petition.

The ORG will also be organising a lobby day soon so supporters can go to Parliament, get a briefing about the Bill and then talk to their MPs.

Reposted from Bristol Wireless, with minor re-editing.

Grant showing results

No deadline for new release

Venue

Conference communication channels

Primary Danish conference contacts

Microsoft becoming more open to open source

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