Steve Woods

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  • West Midlands Police consulting on interpreting contract with Capita

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

    According to a couple of my Twitter contacts, West Midlands Police are currently looking at their interpreting contract with Capita Translation & Interpreting, a name not unfamiliar this blog.

    The first indication of this came yesterday from Agata McCrindle.

    This was followed later by Geoffrey Buckingham, Chairman of the Association of Police & Court Interpreters (ACPI).

  • GNU licences now adapted to Swiss legal language

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    According to www.opensource.ch, reading the original text of open source licences is very challenging. Swiss IT legal specialist Wolfgang Straub has made a new translation into German of three major open source licences, the GNU GPL, GNU LGPL and GNU Affero GPL and aligned them with Swiss legal language. In addition, he is also providing an introduction to the law on open source licences and various checklists for download free of charge at www.opensource.ch.

    The licences of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) have been amongst the most frequently used open source licences for many years. In 2007 the FSF published version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPL), the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL). The Berne-based IT legal specialist Wolfgang Straub has now made a new translation of the text of these three licences.

    Linguistically, the initial German translations of the GNU GPL and the GNU LGPL by Peter Gerwinski are based as closely as possible on the original English text. They are based upon German legal language. Wolfgang Straub has made a new translation of the licences and adapted them to Swiss legal language. The wording and presentation are aimed at the best possible comprehensibility. The new translations are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 licence and are available for download free of charge at the Swiss Open Source Portal www.opensource.ch as PDF and ODF files.

    Wolfgang Straub is the author of several publications on Swiss information technology law. He is also the author of the book “Softwareschutz – Urheberrecht, Patentrecht, Open Source” (Software Protection – Copyright, Patent Law, Open Source) published by Dike Verlag in 2011. The chapter on open source software is now available free of charge for download (PDF). It contains a systematic overview of legal matters concerning open source licences, a bibliography and various checklists for practical use.

  • Art up the Feeder

    Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities

    In recent years, Bristol has hosted two very successful public arts trails.

    Wow! Gorillas was a project sponsored by Bristol Zoo Gardens in 2011 that displayed 61 decorated life-sized fibreglass gorilla sculptures on the city’s streets. It coincided with the zoo’s 175th anniversary. At the end of the event the sculptures were auctioned off, raising £427,300 for gorilla conservation work and for local Bristol charity Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Appeal.

    2013 saw Gromit Unleashed take to the streets of Bristol. This saw 1.18 million people visiting the Gromit Unleashed trail and associated exhibition over the 10 weeks of the event last summer. Church Road at Lawrence Hill was one of the sites chosen for a Gromit; it hosted one named Lodekka (posts passim) after the fondly remembered Bristol double-decker bus commonly in use when I first moved to the city in the 1970s.

    After these events, the places where any remaining sculptures can be seen on public display can be counted on the fingers of one hand. One gorilla can be seen in North Street, Bedminster and one Gromit adorns the bows of one of the Bristol Ferry Boat Co.’s ferries plying the city docks.

    However, there’s one place where both a gorilla and a Gromit can be seen together – Feeder Road alongside the Feeder Canal, historically an area associated with grime and industry, not art of public view.

    If you look up a couple of hundred yards beyond the traffic lights, you see them.

    sculpture of the roof of Manor Scrap

    Both were bought at the respective charity auctions by Manor Scrap. According to their website, Manor also acquired another gorilla, but this cannot be viewed from the road from what I could see.

    Chatting to Pete, the boss of Manor Scrap recently, I understand that the next sculpture trail to be organised in the city will be based on another Aardman animated character – Sean the Sheep.

    Will Shawn end up down the Feeder too?

  • Bristol Post: England invests £168 in roads

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities, Politics

    Road works traffic signAccording to yesterday’s online edition of the Bristol Post, the Department of Transport is to invest the princely sum of £168 – the largest amount it has spent on tarmac for four decades – in England’s road network.

    Of this total, the amount earmarked for local authorities in the Bristol area swells magically to more than £2 mn., according to a this piece by an unidentified Post hack.

    The second paragraph of the report reads as follows:

    The handout from a £168 funding pot which will see more than £3 million potholes filled is part of what is being billed as “the biggest investment in roads since the 1970s”.

    For those who prefer their information unmangled by the illiterates of the local media, the original Department of Transport press release is available here.

  • LibreOffice 4.2.5 released

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    The release of LibreOffice 4.2.5, codenamed “Fresh”, has been announced by The Document Foundation. This is the fifth minor release of this free and open source office suite. However, for more conservative users, The Document Foundation suggests they continue using LibreOffice 4.1.6 “Stable”.

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

    More than 800 contributors have helped develop both LibreOffice 4.2.5 and LibreOffice 4.1.6 since the launch of the LibreOffice project in September 2010. “This is a wonderful
    achievement”, said Thorsten Behrens, Chairman of The Document Foundation. “We have managed to attract at least three new contributors per month for 46 months in a row, with an average of more than 200 new contributors per year.”

    A total of 150 bugs have been fixed in the latest release. Details are available for bugs fixed in both release candidates, RC1 and RC2.

    LibreOffice 4.2.5 and LibreOffice 4.1.6 are both available for download. In addition, extensions and templates to complement the installation of the software and to add specific features are available at http://extensions.libreoffice.org/.

  • Court adjournments continue due to interpreter absences

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics

    A quick search of the local media reveals that every week courts all over England and Wales are having difficulty booking interpreters when they need them since Capita T&I gained the contract for providing them for the Ministry of Justice.

    On Tuesday The Bolton News reported that a suspected cannabis farmer had to have his court hearing adjourned because his Vietnamese interpreter did not attend.

    The defendant, Hiep Thai, was remanded in custody by Bolton Magistrates Court.

    Meanwhile in Swansea Crown Court, four Latvian defendants were unable to enter pleas in a case concerning an alleged kidnapping and assault in Carmarthen, according to the Carmarthen Journal on Wednesday.

    The defendants were unable to enter any pleas because the court had been unable to arrange for a Latvian interpreter to be present.

    Judge Peter Heywood ordered the 4 defendants to return to Swansea Crown Court on 5th September (will Crapita be able to arrange an interpreter at such short notice? Ed.) for their next hearing, when they will be asked to enter pleas. In addition, the court was informed that a Latvian, Polish and a Bulgarian interpreter would probably be required for the trial to take place.

    One defendant, Juris Udrins, remains on remand in Swansea Prison, whilst the other 3 – Aleksandrs Turcans, Armands Nikiferovs and Guntis Goldins were bailed.

  • Fresh LibreOffice 4.3 bug hunting session announced

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    The Document Foundation (TDF), the organisation behind the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite, has announced the dates for the second bug hunting session for the 4.3 version release of LibreOffice. This will run from 20th to 22nd June. The LibreOffice community has already made a huge collective effort to make LibreOffice 4.3 the best ever, based on automated stress tests and structured tests by Quality Assurance volunteers.

    LibreOffice banner

    Business and private LibreOffice users can now contribute to the quality of this free office suite by testing the 4.3 release candidate (RC) to identify any issues with their preferred configuration.

    Taking part in the bug hunting session Participating is easy. Details of the bug hunting session are on TDF wiki. The list of new features for LibreOffice 4.3 needing testing for bugs and regressions, is also on the wiki.

    Prospective participants will need to have a PC running either Linux, MacOs or Windows and a copy of LibreOffice 4.3 RC1 (which can be downloaded from http://www.libreoffice.org/pre-releases). Previous LibreOffice Quality Assurance experience is not mandatory.

    Experienced volunteers who will be available via the QA mailing list (libreoffice-qa@lists.freedesktop.org) and QA IRC channel (irc://irc.freenode.net/#libreoffice-qa) to assist newcomers in filing bugs.

  • Photo captions: out of focus

    Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Oddities

    There’s a certain art to captions for photographs used to illustrate news pieces; photographs provide additional interest to what could otherwise be a dull bit of prose.

    Today the Bristol Post features one story which seems to provide an element of unintentional comedy, as shown by the following pictures and their captions used in a slideshow in the piece in question.

    image of police car with wrong caption
    Foxtrot Oscar?
    image of dancers with police car caption
    Thank you for a lovely evening on the beat…

    The International Journalists Network has published guidance on writing photo captions. Its first paragraph states:

    Photo captions are often the first elements of a publication to be read. Writing photo captions is an essential part of the news photographer’s job. A photo caption should provide the reader basic information needed to understand a photograph and its relevance to the news. It should be written in a consistent, concise format that allows news organizations to move the photo to publication without delay.

    I’ll note quote the rest of the photo captions advice, but would recommend it be read – and acted upon – by the residents of Bristol’s Temple Way Ministry of Truth. 🙂

  • Costa Rica’s UCR to launch advanced digital signature extension for LibreOffice

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    The Computing Centre of the University of Costa Rica (UCR) will be launching an advanced digital signature extension for LibreOffice on 19th June, Costa Rica’s El Pais reports.

    LibreOffice banner

    The launch, which will take place in the auditorium of the Economic Science Faculty of UCR’s main Rodrigo Facio site, aims to explain and publicise the working of the extension added to the LibreOffice office suite.

    It will enable a document to be validated with a timestamp. This is the first time that such a free extension of this kind has been implemented in Costa Rica.

    It should be pointed out that UCR’s Computing Centre is the first organisation within Costa Rica to develop an open source digital signature component. It will enable Open Document files to be signed in the advanced XADES X-4 format.

    As Juan Carlos Romero, the extension’s developer, explained “open code libraries were used to develop this extension, along with the reuse of code from Belgium, a country which has a very robust free digital signature platform; based on this code we started to develop the 100% free software component for LibreOffice”.

    Finally, according to information provided by UCR’s Information Centre, which has spent more than 40 years developing and managing technology projects for education, it is presumed that the extension will be adapted within months to be compatible with all versions of LibreOffice.

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