tech

  • Borked in Bristol

    The last time your ‘umble scribe visited Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery was before the first pandemic lockdown over two years ago. There’s always lots to see and the first thing I observed was the major changes to the art exhibits. Local talent features prominently in these, including the 19th century Bristol School of Artists and prominent portrait painter and local lad Sir Thomas Lawrence PRA. Furthermore, the ceramics section has a fine selection of ware from the late 17th and early 18th century Brislington Pottery.

    However, the excellence of local art and crafts was not matched by local artefacts from the period of Roman occupation, being limited to the Thornbury Hoard (although 3,000 Roman coins on display is quite impressive. Ed.), one Samian ware bowl and a solitary drinking vessel, which is pretty poor considering the major influence and changes wrought by the Romans during the three and a half centuries that Britannia was a province of the Roman empire and ample evidence of Roman settlement and economic activity in the area. These include. for example, Abona Roman port at the confluence of the River Trym and Bristol Avon, visible remains of of Roman roads, villa sites, plus the 2 Roman pigs of lead found in 1865 in Wade Street in St Judes whilst excavations were underway on the old bank of the River Frome).

    On the other hand, the museum does have a fine natural history section, especially in respect of extinct fauna – the giant Irish elk skeleton with its antlers spanning a width of 3 metres is most impressive – and fossils and dinosaurs in particular.

    As is well known, generations of children have displayed a passion for dinosaurs. Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery has catered for this passion by installing interactive displays. Nevertheless, any child currently wishing to learn more of the life and times of Doris the Pliosaurus would have been disappointed at the time of my visit as Doris’ display was – to use a technical term borked.

    Windows 7 not behaving for an interactive museum display Close-up of Windows 7 screen and options

    The bottom picture clearly clearly shows Microsoft’s Windows 7 misbehaving, a not uncommon undocumented feature of the Beast of Redmond’s alleged operating systems.

    If anyone desires to see more borkage in public, your ‘umble scribe would refer such readers to The Register IT news site, which has a dedicated bork section/archive.

  • Brexit – the gift that keeps on giving

    The departure of the English Empire (which some still call the United Kingdom. Ed.) from the European Union is the gift that keeps on giving, especially for anywhere located outside that backward country and in another member EU member state.

    The latest news from the unlit uplands mired in unicorn manure comes from Computer Weekly which reports on research from analysts Forrester that London has dropped down the tech rankings post-Brexit due, inter alia, to immigration woes, no doubt exacerbated by the Home Office’s hostile environment.

    Helsinki South Harbour
    Helsinki – Europe’s leading IT skills cluster, according to Forrester
    As regards digital skills, Forrester’s research reveals hat post-Brexit regulatory obstacles are preventing UK cities from being ranked as a leading skill cluster in Europe: the top 10 metropolitan areas with the best skills and talent clusters across Europe are Helsinki, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berlin, Hamburg, Oslo, Munich, Vienna, Zurich, and Amsterdam, whilst London, which was often formerly recognised as Europe’s tech hub, was ranked 19th (the heyday of Silicon Roundabout seems so long ago. Ed.), whilst other British cities also slid down the rankings.

    The Forrester report’s authors state that European businesses increasingly understand the need to attract individuals with specific sector expertise as well as soft skills, commenting: “Leading businesses place diversity, partner ecosystems and innovation centres at the heart of their talent management strategies.” Furthermore, IT and business need to understand where Europe’s top skill clusters are located before they can attract and retain the best talent and to source the right skills.

  • EU eyes Apple

    If you have an iPhone, you can use Apple Pay for contactless payments; and only Apple Pay. The European Union (EU) wants to change that, according to French technology news site Frandroid.

    The European Commission has officially announced that it has notified Apple in respect of the latter’s restrictions which prevent the use of third party services to access the iPhone’s NFC (Near-Field Communication or ‘tap and go’. Ed.) capabilities, thus restricting competition in the field of contactless payments.

    Paying for a coffee with an iPhone and Apple Pay
    Paying for a brew with an iPhone and Apple Pay. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

    The European Commission has informed Apple of its preliminary view that it is abusing its dominant position in markets for mobile wallets on iOS devices. By limiting access to a standard technology used for contactless payments with mobile devices in stores (‘Near-Field Communication (NFC)’ or ‘tap and go’), Apple restricts competition in the mobile wallets market on iOS.

    The Commission takes issue with the decision by Apple to prevent mobile wallets app developers, from accessing the necessary hardware and software (‘NFC input’) on its devices, to the benefit of its own solution, Apple Pay.

    The EU has the power to impose fines of up to 10% of Apple’s worldwide turnover ($36 bn. or €34.10 bn.) and impose changes in commercial practices, although any fine could turn out to be lower.

    Finally, it’s worth noting that on Android it is possible to change the default contactless payment service. This is not possible on iPhones where Apple Pay is mandatory.

  • Humour and social media

    I’ve been on Twitter for 13 years now and there’s never a dull moment on the platform.

    One of my old college friends told me earlier this week he’d left the platform, describing it as a bear pit.

    Twitter can indeed by a rough and unforgiving place if one discusses politics and especially when one tries to debate with those with views diametrically opposed to one’s own. However, your ‘umble scribe has noticed over the decades that public discourse has become less respectful and courteous.

    Nevertheless, the Twitter is not all ursine-baiting gloom and doom. There are those who post photos of nature, their gardens, pets and the like which leavens the gloom and doom.

    Furthermore, there is a lot of humour on the platform too. Some of the best political quips I relate in other places have usually originated from Twitter.

    However, the humour extends to other fields than politics and its practitioners and can be gentler in such areas, as per the example below, which will appeal to lovers of language and English in particular.

    Tweet reads A truck loaded with thousands of copies of Roget's Thesaurus spilled its load leaving New York. Witnesses were stunned, startled, aghast, stupefied, confused, shocked, rattled, paralyzed, dazed, bewildered, surprised, dumbfounded, flabbergasted, confounded, astonished, and numbed.

  • Free software explained in under 3 minutes

    Your ‘umble scribe has long been an avid user of free and open source software. For a long time, read for over 2 decades.

    Indeed, GNU/Linux (often simply termed Linux. Ed.) has been my operating system of choice for over 17 years.

    But what exactly do the terms free software and open source actually mean? How does software bearing these labels differ in comparison to the proprietary software used by most people and organisations? And finally, why does any of this actually matter?

    To answer these questions, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has recently produced the video embedded below. It takes under 3 minutes to watch and provides succinct answers to the questions posed above.

  • New Turkish LibreOffice guide

    Yesterday the blog of The Document Foundation – the German non-profit organisation behind the free and open source LibreOffice suitereported on the release of a Turkish language guide for the productivity software.

    Cover of LibreOffice Turkish user guide
    Image courtesy of The Document Foundation

    The guide has been translated from the English Getting Started Guide by Ayhan Yalçinsoy, a member of The Document Foundation and Board of Directors deputy.

    Ayhan comments:

    I’ve been using LibreOffice since 2010. It makes me happy to support and contribute to this application that I use with pleasure. For this reason, I have been trying to contribute by translating the interface and help text since the day I started using it. I know that every contribution counts in the open source world.” says Ayhan. “I would like to thank Muhammet Kara for what he has done for LibreOffice here. I learned from him how I can contribute to LibreOffice apart from interface translation. I solved some easyhack issue with his support.
    After all these contributions, we established a certification team. We started the translation work for the LibreOffice Getting Started Guide 6.2 about a year ago, but for some reasons we could not continue. This issue remained in my mind. Finally, with the encouragement of Muhammet Kara and the sponsorship of TUBITAK/ULAKBIM, I completed the translation of Getting Started Guide 7.2.

    Ayhan is currently working on a Turkish guide for Calc, LibreOffice’s spreadsheet program and is also appealing for volunteers to help him with this task, as his ultimate aim is to make Turkish language guides for all of LibreOffice’s constituent applications.

  • NASA – Open MCT 2.0.0 has landed

    US space agency NASA is an extensive user of free and open source software (posts passim). Today German tech news site heise reports on the release of Open MCT 2.0.0.

    With version 2.0.0 has released an update of the Open Mission Control Technologies open source framework. Open MCT was developed at California’s Ames Research Center and is used by NASA as a mission control framework for data virtualisation on desktop and mobile devices.

    Screenshot of the WARP software showing a layout that includes plots, images, and other display elements
    Image courtesy of NASA

    NASA utilises Open MCT for analysing space missions and for planning and implementing experimental rover systems. Included in the latest release is a plug-in which enables adaptation of the framework to be used as an API from Angular to node.js, which is now supported. Critical bugs have also been fixed. Firstly, newly created items which shared a name with an existing object were not displayed in the tree structure. Furthermore, a faulty CSS selector prevented the correct mapping of plans in the timestrip display.

    Additional changes include two bug fixes and seven Open MCT maintenance and testing problems, including a display error in which a grid remained visible when the inspector was closed and an error message that popped up during client-side URL redirection. The project is working on four aspects on the maintenance side: the event generator has been adapted from the Angular-based legacy API for node.js and re-implemented.

    Besides its use for space missions with NASA Open MCT is an open source framework that could be adapted, according to the developers, for applications as varied as:

    • Monitoring of IoT devices;
    • Drones;
    • CubeSats;
    • Robotics;
    • High altitude balloons;
    • Electronic health monitoring;
    • Computer and network performance monitoring;
    • Enterprise data visualisation; and
    • Process control monitoring.

    More information on this latest release may be found on GitHub.

  • No Microsoft account, no Windows 11

    French tech news site Frandroid reports that there has been a very unobtrusive but significant change to the installation procedure for Windows 11, but one with major implications for users’ privacy and security.

    Since the launch of Windows 11, users of the home edition have been obliged to have a Microsoft account and an internet connection for the initial configuration of a machine if a fresh installation is involved. The company could soon extend this obligation to the operating system’s Professional edition.

    Windows 11 desktop
    Do I look like a Mac in this?
    Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

    This week Microsoft has released build 22557 to members of the Windows Insider programme. This is a rather ambitious new version of Windows 11 packed with new “features“, including a change in policy regarding Windows 11 Pro.

    As Microsoft wrote on its blog announcing the release:

    Similar to Windows 11 Home edition, Windows 11 Pro edition now requires internet connectivity during the initial device setup (OOBE) only. If you choose to setup device for personal use, MSA will be required for setup as well. You can expect Microsoft Account to be required in subsequent WIP flights.

    As you have read, Microsoft has stated in black and white that people will need to have an internet connection and a Microsoft account, even from Windows 11 Pro to enable a machine’s personal use (as distinct from business or educational use).

    As a matter of fact, Microsoft is stating what the obligation will be included in all future versions of Windows 11 in the Insider programme. It can therefore be assumed that this new constraint only affects the initial configuration of machines with versions of Windows 11 from the Insider programme.

    We will have to await the next major update of Windows 11 which incorporates the new features of build 22557 to check if having a Microsoft account has really become mandatory for the operating system’s Pro edition.

    The use of an online account has long been required by Apple and Google on iOS and Android respectively, but less so for Windows, since historically there has not been any Microsoft account to connect, much to the chagrin of the software publisher. Users are therefore not accustomed to such a requirement, which Microsoft has been trying to promote since the launch of Windows 8

  • Google and Microsoft finance open source security campaign

    A new initiative by the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) should improve the security of open source applications, German news site heise reports. The campaign, called the Alpha-Omega Project, is the result of negotiations at the White House between representatives of technology companies, US authorities and non-profit organisations. The initial funding of $5 mn. is being financed jointly by Google and Microsoft.

    Image courtesy of opensource.com

    OpenSSF is organising the project in two parts – Alpha and Omega. In the Alpha section expert groups are analysing the security situation of the most-used open source applications to find and remedy vulnerabilities. This should train software operators and users in security awareness. In the Omega section a team of software developers is working on automated tests for over 10,000 distributed open source project to propose possible security measures to their user communities.

    Open source projects and libraries are widely used in software development. The Log4Shell vulnerability in the widely-distributed Log4j Java library recently showed how critical an attack can be. Even after a month and a half it still remains unclear whether companies have survived the worst. Users and companies should therefore investigate their own systems for vulnerable instances of the Log4j library and install current patches.

    More details of the Alpha-Omega Project can be found in the official announcement.

  • LibreOffice 7.3 to support Klingon

    The forthcoming point release of LibreOffice, the free and open source office suite, will feature support for two constructed languages – Klingon and InterslavicNeowin reports. TDF logo

    Klingon insigniaKlingon is of course well known to lovers of the US science fiction Star Trek media franchise created by Gene Roddenberry as the language of the alien race of the same name and created by US linguist Mark Okrand, actor James Doohan (who played chief engineer Montgomery “Scotty” Scott. Ed.) and scriptwriter and producer Jon Povill.

    The Klingon language is first mentioned in the original Star Trek series episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” (1967), but is not heard until 1979 in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

    Interslavic flagInterslavic is a pan-Slavic auxiliary language whose purpose is to facilitate communication between people from different Slavic nations, as well as allowing those who do not know any Slavic language to communicate with Slavs by being understandable to most, if not all Slavic speakers without them having to learn the language themselves.

    When it comes to classification, Interslavic can be described as a semi-constructed language, being in essence a modern continuation of Old Church Slavonic, but it also draws on the various improvised language forms Slavs have been using for centuries to communicate with Slavs of other nationalities.

    These are not the first constructed languages for which there is support in LibreOffice. Esperanto is already catered for in the form of a LibreOffice Esperanto extension which provides a spellchecker and hyphenation.

    Commenting on the support for Klingon, The Document Foundation remarked:

    Even if Klingon and Interslavic support sounds like a novelty, it shows how versatile free and open source software is. As mentioned, LibreOffice is available in over 100 languages, and we’d like to expand that even further. The more languages the better, especially if we can help to boost IT skills in places which don’t otherwise have software in their native languages!

    The LibreOffice wiki provides a full list of languages supported by the office suite.

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