tech | Steve Woods

The Wild Wild Bristol West Hustings

17/04/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Politics, Tech
On Friday 24th April 2015, the Open Rights Group is supporting the Wild Wild Bristol West Hustings, a chance for local voters to quiz the candidates for the Bristol West constituency – rated by commentators as either a 2-way or 3-way marginal constituency.

The event will be from 7.00 p.m. to 10.00 p.m. and its venue is Bristol University’s Wills Memorial Building, Park Street, Bristol BS8 1RJ (map).

In alphabetical order, the candidates attending as this post goes to press include:
- Thangam Debbonaire (Labour);
- Darren Hall (Green);
- Claire Hiscott (Conservative) and;
- Stephen Williams (Lib Dem).
More information about the prospective Bristol West MPs is available at http//meetyournextmp.com/event/646-wild-wild-bristol-west-your-future.

The event is free, but in order to allocate spaces fairly, you’ll have to register via EventBrite.

The event is being supported by ORG Bristol as part of the organisers, the Greater Bristol Alliance, a coalition of local campaign groups.

Reposted from Bristol Wireless.
Hungarian universities adopt ODF

16/04/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site, reports that Eötvös University and Szeged University in Hungary are increasing their use of Open Document Format (ODF).

Between them the 2 universities have some 45,000 students.

In addition, both universities have also signed licences with MultiRáció of Budapest for the deployment and support of 34,000 copies of EuroOffice, a free and open source office suite developed especially for the Hungarian market, but based on both major free and open source suites, LibreOffice and OpenOffice. EuroOffice is available in 2 versions – free and professional – for both Windows and Linux. It can also be installed in 7 languages – English (US variant), German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish and Hungarian – which MultiRáció claims are the native languages of 85% of the EU’s population.

The Hungarian government decided to promote the use of both EuroOffice and ODF in schools and universities in 2014. MultiRáció’s senior software developer Kázmér Koleszár described these initiatives as “an important policy change”, given that the country’s public sector had been reliant on MS Office for the preceding 15 years.

MultiRáció is actively involved in the ODF specification, being a member of OASIS, a non-profit consortium promoting the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society.
Calibre 2.23 released

05/04/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Source, Tech
Softpedia reports that the Calibre eBook reader, editor and library management package has been updated to version 2.23.

The full list of changes since the last release can be seen in the changelog.

One of the major changes is the updating of the Qt cross-platform application framework bundled with Calibre to 5.4.1. This fixes various minor bugs, most notably improving text rendering on machines running Linux.

Furthermore, the new release of Calibre now allows users to add an empty ebook in various formats to existing book records. What is more, the ability to create additional empty formats to the ‘Add empty book’ command has been implemented.

Calibre 2.23 is available for download for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

If you’re on a Linux machine like me, your easiest way to update Calibre to the latest version is via the command line by running the following command as root:
```
wget -nv -O- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/master/setup/linux-installer.py | sudo python -c "import sys; main=lambda:sys.stderr.write('Download failed\n'); exec(sys.stdin.read()); main()"
```
This sets the process in motion and you’ll have the new Calibre installed in no time.
Plastic peregrine

05/04/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities, Social Media, Tech

Peregrine falcon
Yesterday it was a joy to discover that the peregrine falcons which nested on the old generator house by St Philip’s Bridge were nesting there again (posts passim). Talking to a gentleman on the bridge who’d been watching them through binoculars, it would appear our urban peregrines are also adapting to our urban environment and are also learning to hunt after sunset using the city’s streetlighting.

A couple of weeks ago, my attention was caught by peregrine calls when walking down Redcliff Street. They weren’t emanating from a falcon at all, but it’s taken your correspondent until now to track down their source. Looking up at the roof of the old, soon to be redeveloped Patterson’s building, I saw the sight below.

Note the electric wire and turntable. It’s a plastic peregrine which looks very realistic to the local gull population. It rotates on its turntable, flaps its wings and also calls like a real falcon from time to time. It won’t fool me again.

Update 09/04/15: Today I discovered the Redcliff Street plastic peregrine has a brother not far away in the city. He’s called Brian, lives on the roof of At-Bristol and has a Twitter account.
Evolve OS changes name to Solus

03/04/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Politics, Tech

This blog reported yesterday that the developers of the Evolve OS Linux desktop operating system had received a letter from lawyers acting for the UK’s Department for Business, Innovation & Skills informing them that BIS’ OS trade mark was being infringed and that the developers would have to pick a new name.

Ikey Doherty of the development team has now posted the following statement on Google+:

Thank you, everyone for helping us in the naming process! In that time, one name cropped up time and time again. A name we do own, and one indicative of our history and roots. Most importantly, the longevity, history and direct, traceable link of this name provides absolute and irrefutable evidence of prior art, and all rights to the name within this context. We have purchased solus-project.com and solus-project.net. Thus, Evolve OS will now be known (once again) as Solus. The full name for the operating system component of the project (i.e. the Linux distro) is Solus Operating System – the entirety of the project is the Solus Project.
LibreOffice 4.4.2 released

02/04/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

The Document Foundation has today announced the release of LibreOffice 4.4.2, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 4.4 “fresh” family, with over 50 fixes compared with LibreOffice 4.4.0 and 4.4.1.

New features introduced by the LibreOffice 4.4 family are listed in the release notes.

The Document Foundation suggests to deploy LibreOffice in enterprises and large organizations when backed by professional support by certified people, of whom the Foundation maintains a list.

People interested in technical details about the release can see the changelogs for the bugs fixed in RC1 and bugs fixed in RC2 respectively.

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 4.4.2 is immediately available for download from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation. Money collected will be used to improve the project’s infrastructure and support marketing activities to increase the awareness of the project at both global and local levels.

I’ve been using version 4.4.2 for a while now since I downloaded a pre-release development build (version 4.4.2.2) and have found it both stable and easy to use.
Evolve OS name change forced by trade mark dispute with UK government

02/04/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Politics, Tech

The Evolve OS desktop Linux distribution is being forced into a change of name due to potential trade mark problems with the UK government, Softpedia reports.

The bone of contention is not the Evolve element, but OS, which is apparently a trade mark registered to registered to the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, whose trade mark agents are a company called Field Fisher Waterhouse LLP.

In its headline, Softpedia describes this trademark registration as “stupid“.

Writing yesterday on Google+, the developers stated:

This is not an April Fools post

We will be required to change the name of the Evolve OS project, to avoid unnecessary legal action. All I will say right now is that the dispute is UK specific, and I have been informed that the relevant trademarks are held by the Secretary of State.

The letter goes beyond asking for a withdrawal of trademark application and asks we stop using the “mark”.

Clearly this is going to be an expensive and painful road in either direction, so we shall go with a rename.

The developers have also asked for the help of the free and open source community to come up with a new name that would be free of trademark infringements.

Reposted from Bristol Wireless.
Debian Jessie target release date announced

02/04/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

Niels Thykier of the Debian release team has announced the release date for the forthcoming version 8 of Debian, codenamed Jessie. Jessie should be ready on Saturday 25th April. The could only change, Thykier writes, if something really critical pops up or it is not possible to publish the release on time for technical reasons.

There is still time until 18th April for final bug fixes; there should be no further changes to Debian in the final week before release. Managers of packages with bugs must therefore work speedily on getting them fixed. Until the release packages with critical bugs could still be removed from the distribution. Thykier writes that there are currently at least twelve release-critical bugs which could result in the removal of the packages concerned from Debian 8.
World’s less spoken languages get a boost with Openwords

27/03/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Source
Over half of the world’s people, i.e. those that speak a language with less than 100 million native speakers, do not have a language learning mobile app suited for their language or needs, according to Opensource.com.

Most of these languages are disregarded by mobile app developers, but Openwords is a start-up that aims to address this problem.

Openwords can mine massive, existing public data resources such as Wiktionary or the Apertium open machine translator and will thus be able to provide content quickly for populations without language learning apps. Other companies would need to build this content themselves, but Openwords uses pre-existing open data.

Openwords has already proved this concept can work by collating content for more than 1,000 languages and will be running a campaign to raise funds to complete the Openwords app that will provide a language learning platform for this open content collection.

Emphasis on freedom

The Openwords app will emphasise freedom. Whereas many existing apps do not allow learners to decide what they will learn, whereas Openwords will give learners this freedom while also allowing them to follow a default curriculum. It will also be free (gratis) for learners.

Most importantly, Openwords’ content is in the public domain. This means all Openwords’ educational content is copyleft and owned by the public. This is the major philosophical difference between Openwords and proprietary language learning apps. The Openwords app will function as a reader of open content. Whenever Openwords content is added or improved, contributors will be building something for everyone’s benefit.

Openwords aims to provide:
- Free, open domain, educational material.
- Diverse education material for populations without electronic foreign language learning content.
Openwords is asking the open source community for guidance on how to fulfill all obligations to the open source community successfully. Openwords has made a lot of progress in making the Openwords database available and has constructed an HTTP API available through Openwords.org, which hosts the Openwords word and language problem database.
EU Commission updates its open source strategy

27/03/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

The European Commission has announced the updating its strategy for internal use of open source software. The Commission, which is already using open source for many of its key IT services and software solutions, will further increase the internal role of this type of software. The renewed strategy puts a special emphasis on procurement, contribution to open source software projects and releasing more of the software developed within the Commission as open source.

Highlights

The specific objectives of the renewed strategy are:

Equal treatment in procurement

The Commission will ensure a level playing field when procuring new software. This means that open source and proprietary software will be assessed on an equal basis, being both evaluated on the basis of total cost of ownership, including exit costs.

Contribution to communities

The Commission services will increasingly participate in open source software communities to build on the open source elements used in the Commission’s software.

Clarification of legal aspects

To enable easy collaboration with the open source communities, Commission developers will benefit from appropriate legal coaching and advice on how to deal with the intellectual property aspects of open source software.

Open source and interoperable software developed by the Commission

Software produced by the Commission departments, and particularly software produced for use outside the Commission, will be released as open source under the European Union Public License (EUPL) and published on the Joinup platform. The software produced should aim to be interoperable and use open technical specifications.

Transparency and better communication

The updated strategy emphasises improved governance, an increasing use of open source in the field of security and this strategy’s alignment with the EC’s ISA Programme, enabling the modernisation of cross-border and cross-sector eGovernment services.

Reposted from Bristol Wireless.