Steve Woods

Written by a human.

  • NL: PSV Eindhoven introduces wifi at stadium; fans protest

    Steve WoodsOddities, Social Media, Tech

    PSV Eindhoven logoPSV Eindhoven supporters launched a vehement protest against the introduction of wifi at the their Philips Stadion ground during their side’s 6-1 home victory over NAC Breda in their opening game of the season, according to yesterday’s Guardian.

    Fans displayed one banner reading: “F*ck Wi-Fi, support the team”. Placards with crosses running through the wifi signal were also held aloft before the match. Supporters’ groups believe the introduction of wifi is just the latest of a series of decisions by the club intended to gentrify the crowd at home matches.

    However, the club’s website has a slightly different take on the introduction of wifi. The game against NAC Breda marked the test phase of the ‘Connected Stadium’ project. All visitors had free access to the internet, social media and email via the ‘PSV’ network. This is the first time in the Netherlands that a stadium has been equipped with a wifi network. The club is also asking users for feedback.

    First posted on Bristol Wireless.

  • Builder’s English?

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language

    Seen this morning on Church Road, Lawrence Hill, Bristol.

    sign stating smile your on camera

    The person who wrote the copy must have fallen asleep in English classes when the difference between the abbreviated second person conjugation of the verb ‘to be’ and the second person possessive adjective was being explained.

    Never mind, poor English skills don’t seem to have been a barrier to employment with Cleverley Builders of Whitchurch, Bristol or Swann Security; it was uncertain to your correspondent as to who had produced the sign. However, the ability to lie on signage is also valued by Cleverley Builders and/or Swann Security as no evidence of the physical presence of video surveillance equipment could be discerned.

    If the author of the sign happens to read this, help is at hand to assist you in learning the distinguish them.

    Neither of my parents, both of whom left school at 14 years of age and received not much more than a primary education in rural Norfolk in the 1930s and 1940s would not have made such a glaring mistake in English – a mistake which seems all too commonplace amongst the beneficiaries of the modern British education system.

  • West Country confusion

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

    The Western Daily Press is a stablemate of the Bristol Post and seems to share many of the latter’s afflictions – the same ugly Brutalist building on Bristol’s Temple Way, poor English, dodgy photo captions and the like.

    It was therefore no surprise to encounter a prime example of confused reporting this morning, as illustrated by the screenshot below.

    screensot of garbled article from Western Daily Press

    If one examines the article to which the news page above relates, three disparate elements seem to have been combined by reporter Geoff Bennett (who also writes for the Bristol Post. Ed.) and his associates, i.e.:

    • a headline referring to widespread outbreaks of salmonella food poisoning in hospitals in England;
    • a cuddly kittens picture and apposite caption; and
    • a report on the court case of the alleged groping barber (who was cleared by the court. Ed.) which gave rise to Friday’s sexist Bristol Post front page (posts passim).

    There is nothing like good, unambiguous reporting of the news – and the Western Daily Press is capable of nothing like it!

  • Bristol Post Balls – bad punning and sexism

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

    Regular readers will be aware that the Bristol Post is not renowned for the quality of its journalism.

    However, the dreadful pun and sexism of today’s front page of the dead tree edition marked a new low in the paper’s already woeful standards.

    image of Bristol Post front page with sexist pun

    Bad puns are annoying in headlines at the best of times and sexism is tolerated far less than when the fifty-something males in charge of producing Bristol’s daily work of fiction first started out in what was then called journalism.

    There has been a steady stream of criticism of the Bristol Post on Twitter throughout the day.

    However, the paper has not sought to respond to any of its critics, presumably because the person in charge of the Twitter account has yet to notice the ‘reply’ button.

    In addition, some of Bristol’s Twitterati have also been alerting the national media to The Post’s disgraceful front page seeking to trivialise a sexual assault.

    With front pages like the one above, is it any surprise that the Post’s circulation figures (as measured by ABC) are falling by nearly 11% per year? Not to me it isn’t!

    Update 18/08/14: Bristol 24-7 is reporting today that Bristol City councillor Naomi Rylatt has written to the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) over the above front page headline, describing it as a “disgusting attempt at humour“.

  • Eiffel Tower deploys wifi

    Steve WoodsTech

    image of Eiffel TowerLe Monde Informatique reported on Wednesday this week that, at the end of 2013, the Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel (SETE) decided to provide a high bandwidth wireless connection for both its employees and visitors to the Eiffel Tower and more particularly for customers using the Salon Gustave Eiffel for private events. Two sites therefore had to be equipped – the public and non-public parts of the Tower itself and the company’s headquarters. Users also had to be able to move between the two sites retaining the same wifi connection.

    To achieve these objectives, SETE turned to BSO Network Solutions. The infrastructure installed enables a 100 Mb/s connection with a firewall cluster managed by BSO Network Solutions. This supplier monitors all of the infrastructure from its Network Operation Centre.

    The project comprises 25 wifi access points, 13 of which have already been deployed. The outstanding part of the project mainly concerns areas of the monument not open to the public in order to assist maintenance operations by engineers. The project’s overall cost has not been disclosed.

  • Lombardy to move to open source

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Politics, Tech

    flag of LombardyFree software for public sector organisations will become a reality, at least in the Lombardy region, according to Italy’s Today news site. An agenda item submitted by the Five Star Movement, which makes provision for promoting the use of free computer systems in the public sector, has been approved by the regional council.

    “In Europe and in forward-looking Italian organisations, open source has been adopted comprehensively and is useful in saving public funds; in fact it also ensures financial savings due to the possibility of public sector organisations re-using software,” explains the Five Star Movement’s Eugenio Casalino, who presented the agenda item in the regional council.

    In 2012 the Italian government did away with a grant of €40 mn. to provide Italian public sector organisations with Microsoft software.

    Hat tip: Paolo Vecchi.

  • Telegraph on prolonged peace mission

    Steve WoodsMedia, Oddities

    A typographical error in a headline on the Telegraph’s website envisaged a long lull in the present conflict between the Palestinians in Gaza and the state Israel which has now been raging for more than 3 weeks.

    headline stating 72-year ceasefire agreed by both sides

    The error has since been corrected to read Gaza conflict: 72-hour ceasefire agreed by both sides.

  • LibreOffice 4.3 ready for download

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    Via its blog, The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 4.3; this is the 8th major release of the free and open source office suite since the birth of the project in September 2010.

    image of LibreOffice Mime type icons
    LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

    LibreOffice 4.3 offers a large number of improvements and new features, including:

    • Document interoperability: support for MS’ OOXML Strict, OOXML graphics improvements (DrawingML, theme fonts, preservation of drawing styles and attributes), embedding OOXML files inside another OOXML file, support for 30 new Excel formulas, support for MS Works spreadsheets and databases, as well as Mac legacy file formats such as ClarisWorks, ClarisResolve, MacWorks, SuperPaint and more.
    • Comment management: comments can now be printed in the document margin, formatted in a better way, and imported and exported – including nested comments – in ODF, DOC, OOXML and RTF documents, for improved productivity and better collaboration.
    • Intuitive spreadsheet handling: Calc now allows several tasks to be carried out more intuitively, thanks to the smarter highlighting of formulas in cells, the display of the number of selected rows and columns in the status bar, the ability to start editing a cell with the content of the cell above it and the user being fully able to select text conversion models.
    • 3D models in Impress: support of animated 3D models in the new open glTF format, plus initial support for Collada and kmz files that are found in Google Warehouse, in order to add a fresh new look and animations to keynotes (support for this feature is currently on Windows and Linux versions only).

    LibreOffice 4.3 also supports “monster” paragraphs exceeding 65,000 characters in length. This is an example of an 11 years old bug solved thanks to the modernization of the old OpenOffice source code. In addition, the accessibility technology on Windows has become a standard feature, thanks to the improvements based on IBM’s IAccessible2 framework.

    The full list of new features and improvements of LibreOffice 4.3 is available on the wiki.

    According to the Coverity Scan service, the quality of LibreOffice source code has improved dramatically during the last two years, with a reduction of the defect density per 1,000 lines of code from an above the average 1.11 to an industry leading 0.08. Read Coverity’s report for more information.

    LibreOffice 4.3 and LibreOffice 4.2.6 – which will be released on Friday – are available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions and templates to enhance the software’s functionality and add specific features can be found at http://extensions.libreoffice.org/.

  • Cricket explained

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities

    The second Test series between England and India is currently taking place in Southampton (it’ll be day 3 today. Ed.) and my radio is tuned to the epic poem that is the BBC’s Test Match Special from 10.25 until the close of play each day, with the likes of Aggers, Blowers, Tuffers and Geoffrey Boycott (posts passim) filling the air with their wise words and wit.

    Cricket is a complex game that can take a long time to understand fully and I’m still occasionally baffled by the commentators. For the uninitiated, the many different laws and the strange names for positions on the field can seem overwhelming. For instance, which other game has a position on the field called ‘cow corner’*?.

    Below is a simple explanation for the uninitiated, which I originally heard at school decades ago as a brief summary of the game for foreigners.

    You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that’s in the side that’s in goes out, and when he’s out he comes in and the next man goes in until he’s out. When they are all out, the side that’s out comes in and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out. When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in. There are two men called umpires who stay out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out. When both sides have been in and all the men have been out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game.

    For those who need help with fielding positions, Wikimedia Commons has helpfully provided the following graphic.

    image of cricket fielding positions

    Note that the fielding positions would be reversed for a left-handed batsman.

    * Cow corner = the area of the field (roughly) between deep mid-wicket and wide long-on. So called because few ‘legitimate’ shots are aimed to this part of the field, so fielders are rarely placed there – leading to the concept that cows could happily graze in that area.

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