Steve Woods

Written by a human.

  • 5 decades on

    Steve WoodsOddities

    Last week I paid a brief visit for the day to Market Drayton in Shropshire, my home town. In the forty years since I left it has changed gradually but inexorably. For instance, its current population is now nearly 12,000, compared with 7,000 when I left the town for university in the early 1970s.

    Going through the family photograph albums, I came across this 1965 photograph of Market Drayton’s Salisbury Road, where the family used to live. We actually spent 10 years there in total and my youngest sibling Andrew was born at home at 87 Salisbury Road.

    picture of Salisbury Road, Market Drayton in the mid-1960s
    Salisbury Road, Market Drayton, in the mid-1960s. Click on the image for a larger version.

    You’ll see 2 boys standing by the lamppost outside no. 87; of these I’m the one on the right. I believe the other lad is Adrian Clarke who used to live round the corner. Note the complete absence of motor cars. A minority of working class people living in council houses (for that is what they were/are. Ed.) owned motor vehicles in those days, or seemed to. I believe at the time the picture was taken my late father had only recently acquired a moped to travel to work, having hung up his bicycle clips. The row of council houses shown was relatively new when the above photograph was taken, only having been built some 5 years earlier; I can recall the back gardens being levelled by bulldozer when we first moved in in 1960. Some of these houses are now privately owned and are currently changing hands for well over £100,000 as Drayton is a popular place for people to live while commuting to work in Shrewsbury, Telford or the Potteries.

    Now here’s a picture of the same road from roughly the same spot 5 decades on.

    image of Salisbury Road, Market Drayton, in 2014.
    Salisbury Road, Market Drayton, in 2014. Click on the image for a larger version.

    Note the increase in the number of motor vehicles evident – 8 in all – and the increased number of lampposts – from 1 in the 1960s to 3 now.

    Did you live in Salisbury Road or Market Drayton in the 1960s? Perhaps you still live there. Anyway, leave your memories in the comments below.

  • Debian Installer Jessie Alpha 1 release

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    Debian logoThe first alpha of the installation media for Debian 8 (codenamed Jessie) GNU/Linux comes with the lightweight Xfce desktop as standard. The reloading of firmware is not working in this initial version.

    The Debian installer team has released an initial alpha for Debian 8 (Jessie). The standard images for testing the Jessie installation are supplied with the Xfce desktop as standard. However, it is currently uncertain whether this will be retain for the actual Debian 8 release as the developers want to discuss the standard desktop once more in August. If necessary, the decision taken then will be considered once again, which is possible since the main development phase doesn’t end until 5th November; this “freeze” is typically followed by a stabilisation phase lasting several months before the distribution is finally released.

    However, some of the features introduced with the alpha might not be altered any further. Thus there is no alpha version for Itanium (IA-64) processors because the Debian Project will not be supporting this processor architecture in future. In addition, the IBM S390 architecture has been replaced with the S390x architecture.

    The AMD64 edition of the first alpha of Jessie takes up three DVDs and uses a kernel which is based on Linux 3.13. Amongst this releases known problems is a bug that missing firmware files cannot be reloaded.

    I’m already running Jessie on one of my machines, but did an upgrade on an existing machine, rather than a fresh install, and am finding it very reliable and stable. Read about my experience.

  • Virtute et Industrial

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language

    The motto of the city of Bristol is Virtute et Industria (Virtue and Industry).

    However, one feature of Bristol’s local dialect is the addition of a final, intrusive ‘L’ – a so-called terminal L – to words ending in a vowel.

    Consequently, area, say, becomes ‘areal‘, whilst Clifton’s Princess Victoria Street mutates into Princess Victorial Street, so Industria naturally becomes Industrial.

    The terminal L is beautifully illustrated in Virtute et Industrial, a song written by Adge Cutler (posts passim), and sung here by the late Fred Wedlock.

  • South Tyrol region to save €1 mn. with free software

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Politics

    Südtirol coat of armsThe government of Italy’s Autonomous Province of South Tyrol wants to save &euro 1 mn. per year by using free software, according to a press release issued last week.

    Public sector organisations took the first step towards the use of free software nearly one year ago with the change to the LibreOffice productivity suite (news passim). On 11th March 2014 the regional government decided to continue to pursue this route and to resort to the use of open source where possible. “We are expecting savings of one million Euro per year through free software,” declares governor Arno Kompatscher.

    “The use of proprietary or free software has in the meantime degenerated into almost a religious war, not only in the public sector, but also in private businesses,” Kompatscher continued, speaking after a regional government meeting.

    During the preceding legislature period the region and regional government had already made a decision in principle to opt for the use of free software. In June last year the first major step towards free software was made with the change from MS Office to LibreOffice. The regional government alone migrated 7,000 to the open source office suite.

    Governor Kompatscher stressed that it was not a matter of using free software exclusively, but to find the best solution as regards citizens: “We’re standing by using free software. However, it’s not a matter of deciding between free and proprietary software, but between requirements.” Free software, according to Kompatscher, is not always suitable, but: “Citizens must always have access to public sector documents without having to resort to paid-for software as well. That is the key issue”.

    The city of Munich is acting as an example for the use of free software in government. “For example, Munich’s city council is using free software; in spite of this ten per cent of its computers are still running proprietary programs. We’re aligning ourselves with this. There will be no either or; the principal objective is friendliness towards citizens,” Kompatscher emphasises.

    The governor also refers to the potential savings arising from free software: “A very, very large amount of money is involved. The target is savings of one million euro per year.” Just from its first major step, switching to LibreOffice should save the regional government paying Microsoft some €600,000 in licence fees in the next few years.

  • Thee’s got’n where thee cassn’t back’n hassn’t?

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language

    As with elsewhere in the country, the Bristolian dialect is not as strong as it once was, mainly due to the influence of mass media and the spread of received pronunciation.

    Here from a few years ago is a fine example of the local dialect delivered in song by Adge Cutler & the Wurzels many years ago at the Webbington Country Club, Loxton, Somerset.

    Adge was born in Long Ashton, just outside Bristol.

    Hat tip: Patrick Wise.

  • Bloggers under attack as pingback abused

    Steve WoodsLinux, Media, Open Source, Tech

    WordPress logoWordPress’ pingback function can be abused to mount a denial of service (DoS) attack on blogs without their owners noticing, Germany’s Heise IT website reports. It is unlikely that the problem will be remedied with an update.

    Security company Sucuri reports on an attack on one WordPress installation in which more than 162,000 other WordPress sites were misused as a DDoS platform. In this instance the attacker used the software’s pingback function in order to cripple the target website. With a pingback, one WordPress site can notify another that it has quoted its blog post.

    The attack works in such a manner that an attacker searches for a legitimate blog which has pingback activated (currently the default configuration for new WordPress installations) and then simulate a pingback from the victim’s site. The victim’s blog then queries the victim for the post which was quoted in the faked pingback. If the attacker does this with many sites, the flood of traffic is difficult for the target site to black as the queries look completely legitimate and originate from trustworthy sources.

    In the attack observed by Sucuri randomly generated URLs were quoted in the fake pingbacks for the victim’s ostensible posts. This results in WordPress’ caching mechanism does not take effect and the web server is so overloaded since the database must attempt to deliver the supposed posts for each request. Of course, in reality the server just serves up 404 error pages, since there are no pages for the random URLs. Nevertheless, if there are many such requests, this is sufficient to cripple the WordPress installation’s database. On Unix and Linux systems such an attack can be launched very simply by using the curl command on the command line.

    As the attack is misusing the ordinary working of the pingback function, it cannot be assumed that WordPress developers are going to do something about the problem. Site owners can prevent their blog being miused in this way by deactivating their installation’s pingback functions. Sucuri itself is proposing source code for a WordPress plug-in which should block the attacks, as follows:

    add_filter( ‘xmlrpc_methods’, function( $methods ) {
    unset( $methods[‘pingback.ping’] );
    return $methods;
    } );

    Use Sicuri’s WordPress DDoS Scanner to check if your site is being used for launching such attacks on other websites.

  • OmegaT, the basics

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Source, Tech

    OmegaT is a free and open source translation memory application written in Java. It’s a tool intended for professional translators.

    OmegaT has the following features:

    • Fuzzy matching
    • Match propagation
    • Simultaneous processing of multiple-file projects
    • Simultaneous use of multiple translation memories
    • User glossaries with recognition of inflected forms
    • Document file formats include:
      Open Document Format (the native format of the LibreOffice, OpenOffice and Calligra office suites)
      Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx)
      XHTML and HTML
      MediaWiki (Wikipedia)
      Plain text
      …plus about 30 other file formats
    • Unicode (UTF-8) support: can be used with non-Latin alphabets
    • Support for right-to-left languages
    • Integral spelling checker
    • Compatible with other translation memory applications (TMX, TTX, TXML, XLIFF, SDLXLIFF)

    OmegaT is cross-platform: it will run on any system on which the JRE (Java Runtime Environment) has been or can be installed.

    Over on YouTube, user weasel75 has produced a short (10 minutes) tutorial on the basics of OmegaT. Hopefully you’ll find it as useful as I did.

  • 2 weeks to Document Freedom Day

    Steve WoodsOpen Standards, Tech

    logo for Document Freedom Day 2014Document Freedom Day is a day for celebrating and raising awareness of open standards and formats; it takes place on the last Wednesday in March each year. On this day people who believe in fair access to communications technology teach, perform and demonstrate.

    Document freedom means documents that are free can be used in any way that the author intends. They can be read, transmitted, edited, and transformed using a variety of tools. Documents that aren’t free – like Microsoft Office’s .docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc. – are locked to some particular software or company. Their author cannot choose how to use them because they are controlled by technical restrictions. This is akin to having a racehorse and never letting get above a trot.

    However, document freedom is about more than spreadsheets, presentations and word processing documents. Document freedom embraces all forms of data, including artwork, sheet and recorded music, emails and statistics. These can all be stored in ways which empower users, but they can also be stored in formats which constrain and manipulate us at enormous cost.

    Open standards are formats which everybody can use free of charge and restriction. They come with compatibility “built-in” – the way they work is shared publicly and any organisation can use them in their products and services without asking for permission. Open Standards are the foundation of cooperation and modern society. Today we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the world wide web – a vital resource that relies on open standards to work. Read more on open standards.

    You can get involved in Document Freedom Day by organising local activities, distributing fliers, adding a banner on your blog, donating money, and much more. See the Document Freedom Day site for more ideas and information.

  • Applications open for new round of Gnome OPW internships

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

    OPW logoThe Gnome Outreach Program* for Women (OPW) helps women get involved in free and open source software and has just announced the opening of a new round of internship applications. Women can apply for an internship to contribute to an open source project from May to August; and OPW is not just asking for applications from programmers.

    Successful applicants can obtain a Gnome Foundation internship from 19th May until 18th August 2014 under the aegis of the OPW. The outreach programme is intended to increase the proportion of women in open source projects and twice a year promotes the contribution of women to projects such as Gnome, Wikimedia and OpenStack. The deadline for applications for the next round is 19th May 2014.

    As previously stated, the programme is not restricted to women with programming skills; those with design, documentation or marketing skills can also apply. All participants will be supported by a mentor in the participating organisations. Details on how to apply are on the Gnome Foundation’s dedicated OPW site.

    * = It’s an American institution, hence the US spelling.

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