Steve Woods

Generic carbon-based humanoid life form.

  • The long tail of LibreOffice

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Open Source, Tech

    In recent years, the term ‘long tail‘, which was originally coined in 2004 by Chris Anderson, has certainly caught on. Anderson’s coining of the phrase drew on a February 2003 essay by Clay Shirky entitled “Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality”, which noted that a relatively few blogs have many links to them, but there’s a “the long tail” of millions of blogs with only a handful of links each. Anderson described the effects of the long tail on current and future business models and later developed it into a book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, published in 2006.

    You may be asking what has all this to do with LibreOffice, the popular open source office suite? Well, the Document Foundation, the organisation behind LibreOffice, has recently published a blog post showing a long tail graph in relation to the developers working on LibreOffice.

    image of the long tail in action on LibreOffice. Click on the image for a full size version. Image courtesy of The Document Foundation
    The long tail in action on LibreOffice. Click on the image for a full size version. Image courtesy of The Document Foundation

    The image depicts developers who worked on LibreOffice’s code base in 2012. Last year a total some 320 developers worked on improving LibreOffice’s code. Of these, a majority were volunteers and a minority were people paid by major open source companies such as SuSE, RedHat and Canonical, as well as many smaller organisations such as Lanedo, which provides customisation services for open source products such as LibreOffice.

    The graph of the individual contributions has the shape of a “long tail”, whilst the pie chart illustrates the work done by the top 33 developers with 100+ commits, consisting of 16 volunteers and 17 paid developers (11 from SUSE, 5 from RedHat and 1 from Canonical).

  • Microsoft burgled; nothing of value stolen

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    It’s long been known that Microsoft keeps an eye on its competitors, such as open source. As far back as 2006, its open source laboratory at Redmond housed more than 300 servers collectively running more than 15 versions of UNIX and 50 Linux distributions. That facility was in those days run a team of senior-level programmers and system administrators, some of whom were architects of popular Linux distributions or authors of well-regarded books. Doubtless very little has changed.

    It also keeps tabs on Apple and develops applications for Apple’s products at its research and development centre in Mountain View.

    Courtesy of The Guardian, I was made aware of a recent burglary at Microsoft’s research and development centre.

    scan of newspaper article on MS Palo Alto raid
    Palo Alto Daily Post report of the incident

    As can be seen, nothing of value was taken. 🙂 By far the most interesting part is that no MS products at all were purloined (was the thief a cool thief? Ed.).

    IT news site The Register suggests that the thief might have hold of some unreleased Microsoft apps with his or her Apple devices.

    El Reg’s piece concludes:

    The office also houses Microsoft Exchange hosting servers, a less tempting target for a light-fingered thief.

    Well, most servers do weigh a tad more than your average fondleslab. 🙂

    Finally, this comment on The Guardian’s report raised a smile and a laugh:

    According to some reports, they stole 50 Microsoft Surfaces at the same time, but they broke back in the next day to return them.

  • An error message from Microsoft

    Steve WoodsTech

    I’m indebted to Charlie Harvey for drawing my attention to the following error message courtesy of the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

    Error Message: Your Password Must Be at Least 18770 Characters and Cannot Repeat Any of Your Previous 30689 Passwords

    This error message affects the following MS products:

    • Microsoft Windows 2000 Server SP1
    • Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server SP1
    • Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional SP1

    Microsoft’s support for Windows 2000 is now close to running out. Nevertheless, isn’t it reassuring to know that Microsoft is capable of producing such high quality products? 😉

    Mind you, some people have difficulty remembering a password of under 10 characters. How could they possibly cope with one of nearly 19,000?

  • Complex Text Layout in LibreOffice

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Source, Tech

    ODF file iconI’m currently translating a tender document from a North African Arabic-speaking country. Even though the source language of the translation is French, when I first opened the file in LibreOffice, my office suite of choice, I noticed that the cursor was responding back to front and realised immediately this was going to slow down my progress with the job unless it was sorted out.

    Fortunately, a little bit of research and a couple of configuration tweaks soon had it sorted out. Firstly, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi and Thai come under what LibreOffice describes as Complex Text Layout (CTL) languages.

    To deal with CTL languages, these first have to be enabled in LibreOffice under Tools > Options > Language Settings.

    That done, the LibreOffice Help wiki has instructions for working with CTL.

    Currently, LibreOffice supports Hindi, Thai, Hebrew, and Arabic as CTL languages.

    If you select the text flow from right to left, embedded Western text still runs from left to right. The cursor responds to the arrow keys in that Right Arrow moves it “to the text end” and Left Arrow “to the text start”.

    You can change the text writing direction directly be pressing one of the following keys:

    • Ctrl+Shift+D or Ctrl+Right Shift Key – switch to right-to-left text entry
    • Ctrl+Shift+A or Ctrl+Left Shift Key – switch to left-to-right text entry
    • The modifier-only key combinations only work when CTL support is enabled.

    Once CTL is enabled, LibreOffice also adds a couple of change text direction icons to the text formatting toolbar too.

    image of LibreOffice Formatting toolbar showing text direction change icons
    Formatting toolbar showing text direction change icons

  • More everyday sexism from Asda

    Steve WoodsOddities

    It’s just gone New Year and the sound of breaking resolutions can be heard all around.

    However, that doesn’t stop our major supermarket chains leaping on the keep fit bandwagon following the festive blow-out and Asda is no exception. It also provides Asda with an excuse to indulge in a bit of everyday sexism.

    Apparently, only women are suitable targets for dieting and keeping fit, as the image and copy below from its website reveal.

    image of Asda Fitness Competition - men not welcome.
    Asda Fitness Competition – men not welcome.

    There’s 25% off home fitness equipment on Asda Direct in our Big Sale – including treadmills, rowing machines and exercise bikes.

    To help kickstart your home fitness routine we’re giving away this York Fitness cycle (down from £398.99 to £333 on Asda Direct) and stylish gymwear from George including this crop top, vest top and leggings pictured above.

    For a chance to win simply enter your details below and tell us what your New Year’s resolution is. The winner will be selected at random after the prize draw closes at noon on January 9th 2013.

    Below the quoted text is a form for personal details, including entrants’ clothes sizes: “What size gymwear would you prefer? (eg 12, 14, 16) *.

    In Asda-land men obviously don’t exercise, get fit or wear clothes!

  • Is spring on its way?

    Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities

    Celandines (aka Ranunculus ficaria) are normally one of the first signs of spring, emerging around Easter time when the trees overhead have no leaves and the ground around is clear of competitors. Celandines usually flower between March and May each year.

    However, even I was amazed to find celandines in bloom in Bristol on 3rd January on the Bristol & Bath Railway Path at Clay Bottom while coming back from a shopping trip to Fishponds. Gilbert White, the celebrated naturalist who chronicled the natural history of Selborne in Hampshire in the 1800s, only managed to record them as early as 21st February

    A celandine in bloom on 3rd January 2013
    A celandine in bloom on 3rd January 2013

    Is this unprecedentedly early blossoming yet more evidence of climate change? Comments welcome.

  • Crapita cocks it up again!

    Steve WoodsOddities

    Is there anything that Capita can’t cock up?

    Following on from the courts interpreting fiasco overseen by Crapita Translation and Interpreting (posts passim) and Birmingham City Council’s unusable telephone system (posts passim), the BBC now reports that Capita is making a cock-up of its contract with the UK Border Agency (UKBA) to track down 174,000 illegal immigrants in the UK. The contract’s value is believed to be up to £40 mn. and what the firm will be paid depends on how many actually leave the UK permanently.

    People living legally in the UK have been incorrectly told to leave the country by Crapita by telephone, email and text message.

    Those contacted in these ways included a woman with a UK passport (i.e. a full card-carrying British citizen) and a man with a valid visa who had invested £1 mn. in a UK business.

    The standard text message sent to victims by Crapita reads: “Message from the UK Border Agency. You are required to leave the UK as you no longer have the right to remain.” Recipients are then advised to contact the UKBA.

    When approached to provide a reason for its cock-ups, Crapita blamed the UKBA, stating some of the information with which it had been provided may have been inaccurate.

    However, it seems to me that Crapita has merely applied the skills it has learnt over many years from administering TV Licensing, including the harassment those without a television (and thus those who need no television licence) to suspected illegal immigrants.

    Crapita clearly cares little about the cock-ups as long as the profits keep rolling in from the public sector.

  • Microsoft deal protested by Egyptian openistas

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Politics, Tech

    A group of technology activists gathered in front of the Cabinet office in Cairo on Sunday 30th December to protest an Egyptian governmental deal with software giant Microsoft to buy software for the public sector, the English language Egypt Independent news site reports.

    On 26 December, the official Facebook page of Hesham Qandil, the Egyptian Prime Minister, announced that the Cabinet had concluded a deal with Microsoft for the next 4 tax years to buy and maintain licensed software worth nearly $44 mn. for the government.

    “What the government is buying is the licence to use software and not new [software],” says Ali Shaath, co-founder of the Egyptian Association for Free and Open Software and the Arab Digital Expression Foundation.

    The activists’ main contention with the deal is that Microsoft products bought by the government are imported, expensive and their code source is usually closed and protected by rigid copyright rules which do not allow for knowledge sharing and generation. Meanwhile, an alternative lies with locally conceived, less expensive software, whose open code source enables copying, sharing and building more software.

    “We’re talking about the same computers, the same software, no extra development and no extra training,” Shaath said, explaining that the free and open software alternative will cost zero in comparison since its licences are free of charge and its only cost is derived from customisation and training.

    The activists believe that free and open software developers is could readily provide the software the government needs. A case in point was the portal developed with free and open software to provide voters with information ahead of the March 2011 referendum.

    NB: this post was originally published on Bristol Wireless.

  • Czech libraries protect and show historic documents with open source

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Source, Tech

    In August 2002 a week of heavy rains in central Europe caused serious flooding, resulting damage running to billions of euros in the Czech Republic, Austria, Germany, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Croatia.

    Amongst the items damaged were a large number of books in the Czech Republic’s archives and libraries. While the damaged documents were being recovered, a decision was taken to make digital copies publicly accessible.

    Joinup, the EU’s open source news website now reports that libraries in the Czech Republic are sharing and re-using a specialised open source content management system, Kramerius, to preserve historic documents and make them available online. Kramerius was developed with the support of the Library of the Academy of Sciences, the National Library (both in Prague), and the Moravian Library in Brno.

    Kramerius is intended for use for digitised library collections, monographs and periodicals. It can also be used for maps, musical scores and illustrations and to provide access to selections of documents, articles and chapters.

    In addition, Kramerius is part of a larger Czech Digital Library Project which aims to digitise the greater part of the resources of the National Library and the Moravian Library and thus to help to preserve them and make them accessible for future generations. It is hoped that over 50 million pages, or approximately 300 thousand volumes will be digitised by 2019.

    The Czech Digital Library project has a budget of CZK 20 million (about €800,000) over the next 3 years.

    As a matter of course, the Kramerius source code is also available online.

    The software itself is named after Václav Matěj Kramerius (1753–1808), who was a Czech writer, journalist and publisher. At a time when there was only a single Czech newspaper in print, Kramerius started his own paper and, following its commercial success, established a printing shop and publishing house for Czech language works. The majority of Czech language books were published by his publishing house at that time. Kramerius himself wrote about 80 books.

    There’s also an English language summary (PDF) of the Kramerius project available.

  • Henbury Loop petition

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

    It’s not very often I agree with a Tory – and even less often that I agree with an elected Tory MP – but Bristol North West MP Charlotte Leslie has started a petition to lobby for the inclusion of the Henbury Loop in any future local rail plans.

    Charlotte’s petition reads as follows:

    We, the under-signed [sic], believe that a Henbury ‘spur’ would be a disastrously missed opportunity of a generation; that a Henbury Loop Line would not only be well used, but transform Bristol’s transport infrastructure; and want to make the strongest possible case for demand for a Loop not a spur.

    Being a regular rail user, I’ve signed Charlotte’s petition.

    Perhaps you should too.

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