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Connect St Helena

25/10/2012 Steve WoodsTech

In terms of world history, not a lot happens on remote Saint Helena. According to Wikipedia, St Helena “is one of the most isolated places in the world, located in the South Atlantic Ocean more than 2,000 kilometres (1,200 mi) from the nearest major landmass. The nearest port on the continent is Namibe in Southern Angola, the nearest international airport the Quatro de Fevereiro Airport of Angola’s capital Luanda.”

It has a population of 4,255 (2008 census) and a total area of 122 km2 (47 sq mi). Its chief role in history seems to have been as a place of exile for those Great Britain thought undesirable, ranging from Napoleon Bonaparte to 5,000 Boer War prisoners.

There’s one more interesting fact about St Helena: it has dreadful internet access. According to the Connect St Helena campaign website, the island’s current internet connection to the internet consists of a single 7.6 m diameter satellite dish installed in 1989; this provides the island’s only internet and international telephone connection. It uses a C band transponder on Intelsat 707 for a link to the UK with 10 MBit/s downstream and 3.6 MBit/s upstream through which all data and voice traffic is being routed. This satellite was launched in March 1996 and had a predicted lifetime of 11 years, which is already exceeded by five years now. The connection has a a total bandwidth of 10 MBit/s downstream, which is partly reserved for certain customers while the remaining capacity is shared by all other customers on the island resulting in very low effective bandwidth, often in the two-digit kbit/s range, roughly matching analogue modem speeds used in the late 1990s. Thus many internet applications like YouTube or Skype are hardly or not usable and the internet service on the island cannot be considered as “broadband” by any current definition.

Connect St Helena campaign logo

Not only is St Helena’s internet access slow by modern standards, it also prohibitively expensive. The most expensive access package costs £119.99 per month for a download speed of 384 KBit/s and 128 KBit/s upload. This package is capped to 3,300 MB/month data, with any excess charged at 9p/MB. By contrast the cheapest package costs £19.99/month for speeds of 128/64 KBit/s respectively and a 300 MB data transfer cap; exceeding the cap incurs a charge of 12p/MB (not very good is it? Ed.).

However, there is currently a once-in-a-liftime opportunity to change this. Plans exist for a super-fast transatlantic submarine optic fibre cable called South Atlantic Express (SAEx) between Brazil, Angola and South Africa. If this cable also made landfall at St Helena, the islanders could finally join the information society, which would improve standards of education and healthcare, as well as offering new economic prospects, as shown on the map below.

Proposed route of the SAEx cable and suggested change to connect St Helena

To enable the island to be connected to SAEx would require the British Government to stump up the cash. At Bristol Wireless we believe they should since we have always believed that access to information and knowledge via the internet is not a privilege, but a right. This is echoed in the closing paragraph of the Connect St Helena campaign website:

Please support us in bringing broadband internet to St Helena and improve life on this picturesque island. Being separated by a distance of 2,000 km from the next hospital, library and university, reliable broadband internet access would mitigate many problems resulting from St Helena’s isolation. There is probably no other place in the world that could profit so much from the merits of broadband telecommunications than St Helena.

Hat tip: Stefan Goodchild

This post first appeared on the Bristol Wireless website.
McDonald’s: “Do you want hacking with that?”

24/10/2012 Steve WoodsTech

News arrives via E Hacking News that the official Mcdonald’s website in Thailand (www.mcthai.co.th) has been compromised by a chap called “Maxney” from the Turkish Agent Hacker Group.

The security breach resulted in the harvesting of details for some 2,000 accounts, including users’ names, email addresses, postal addresses and phone numbers.

Amongst the details leaked by the group were the login for the Administrator account and a link to McDonald’s Thailand Office Mail Login. The password of the administrator is in plain text. They are using a weak password; the password is ‘password’.

If all other multinational corporations took the same rigorous precautions as McDonald’s…
The Chaos of English

22/10/2012 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities

Lurking in Bristol Wireless’ IRC channel earlier this morning, I was made aware of the poem The Chaos by Gerald Nolst Trenité (1870-1946), who was a Dutch writer, traveller and teacher.

The Chaos demonstrates many of the idiosyncrasies of English spelling and first appeared as an appendix to his 1920 textbook, Drop Your Foreign Accent: engelsche uitspraakoefeningen*.

It is reproduced below in all its glory for your delight.

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.

Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.

Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.

Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.

Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.

Pronunciation — think of Psyche!
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.

Finally, which rhymes with enough —
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!

Source: Wikisource

* = English pronunciation exercises
Amazon integration – the last thing I want from Ubuntu

20/10/2012 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech
The Inquirer yesterday carried a report in which Canonical, purveyors of Ubuntu Linux, claim that Amazon integration is what users want in Ubuntu.

Canonical released Ubuntu 12.10 on Thursday. This new release introduced tighter integration with Amazon in system search results – a move which has provoked criticism from the Ubuntu community. Canonical asserts that Amazon integration in Dash is something users expect and it will integrate other online services in future Ubuntu releases.

The move was defended by Steve George, Canonical’s Vice-President of communications and products, who told The Inquirer that: “Users increasingly expect to search. It is driven by two things, firstly the fact that online they search, so naturally they think about searching and the other thing is the total amount of content. […] The Dash has previously been restricted to only the things that were on your desktop, so where we are taking the Dash so we are trying to pull it so that everything – your personal cloud – all of your online and offline, everything you have in your universe around you, the Dash will be able to search that and find those things for you.”

Thanks for that Steve. I’ve been using Ubuntu happily on my laptop for two and a half years now, but if you’re going to clamber into bed with the likes of Amazon, I’m putting Debian on that machine when the long term support on my present Ubuntu install runs out.

Update 21/10/12: Bruno Girin has been in touch since I wrote this post and informed me there are 2 options for disabling the Amazon search – turning it off in the system settings and removing the package respectively – as follows:
1. Option 1: system settings -> privacy -> include online search results = off
2. Option 2: sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping
Court Language Services Forum launched

19/10/2012 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

It’s not just the Public Accounts Select Committee that’s taking an interest in the court interpreting and translation services shambles currently being presided over by ALS/Capita (posts passim).

The Justice Committee is naturally also taking an interest and has just launched a Court Languages Forum as part of its inquiry.

The following notice was issued to coincide with the forum’s launch:

The Justice Committee has launched an inquiry into the provision of interpretation and translation services since Applied Language Solutions (ALS) began operating as the Ministry of Justice’s sole contractor for language services in February 2012. The Committee had an excellent response to its call for written evidence. We have been given many examples which highlight apparent under-performance but most of these have been provided by third parties and relate to the first few months of operation.

The Justice Committee has heard that some stakeholders may be reticent to provide formal written evidence. These may include: court and tribunal service staff; members of the judiciary and magistracy; legal practitioners and other practitioners; defendants in criminal cases and parties in civil and family cases and interpreters providing services on behalf of ALS. We would encourage these individuals to submit their experiences through this web forum using an anonymous user name.

The Justice Committee would like to hear from individuals with direct experience of the provision of interpreting and translation services by Applied Language Solutions (ALS). The Justice Committee would particularly like to hear about direct examples of recent performance issues (during September and October 2012) surrounding the operation of the Framework Agreement between the Ministry of Justice and ALS.

Comments will be pre-moderated before being posted on this web forum. Comments will be moderated at least every working day. Where possible we will aim to publish accepted posts within 24 hours. This forum is pre-moderated and comments that breach the online discussion rules will not be posted. Please avoid naming particular courts or court cases. Any such responses may not be posted on the forum by moderators. This forum will close on 2 November 2012.
Interpreting: courting disaster

18/10/2012 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

Earlier this year, the Ministry of Justice made a massive cock-up when it changed the method by which courts in England and Wales procured interpreters. It handed a £ 43 mn. contract for court interpreting services to an outfit called Applied Language Solutions (ALS), an outfit totally incapable of and unprepared for handling such a large contract.

Once it had laid its hands on the court interpreting contract, ALS sought to change the terms and conditions under which interpreters are engaged, introducing a savage pay and expenses cut, resulting in a boycott of ALS which is still continuing as many interpreters are not prepared to do a professional job of work for a rate of pay that now works out at less than the minimum wage once expenses have been deducted.

To attempt to make good the shortfall, ALS resorted to hiring unqualified translators, including a rabbit called Jajo.

Earlier this week the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee examined the MoJ/ALS fiasco (footage here). The senior civil servants in charge of the project did not put in a good performance. To call them incompetent would be too praiseworthy.

Just as the Select Committee were settling in to their deliberations, the latest edition of Private Eye had also picked up the ALS story.

As the Eye piece points out, ALS has since been acquired by Capita and rebranded Capita Translation and Interpreting.

Private Eye spells Capita with an additional ‘r’. Say no more.
More North Somerset Luddism

18/10/2012 Steve WoodsPolitics, Tech

There must be something in the water in North Somerset that induces idiocy and Luddism in that unitary authority’s councils.

Not far away from schizophrenic Clevedon, where members of the public can use social media to their hearts’ content during council meetings, but councillors cannot (posts passim), is Nailsea.

Today’s Bristol Post reports on yesterday’s meeting of Nailsea Town Council which, with typical bureaucratic perspicacity, voted to ban councillors from using iPads and laptops during meetings over concerns that councillors would use them to either surf the internet, send emails or post messages on networking sites.

The move hasn’t gone down well with one member of the town council – Councillor Mary Blatchford, who also represents Nailsea on North Somerset Council. Cllr. Blatchford has good reason to feel aggrieved: she has a hand injury; the latter makes it hard for her to write. She therefore quite sensibly uses her iPad for taking notes during meetings. It’s therefore hardly surprising she described the move as “archaic” and has moreover threatened to resign in protest.
Put icons back in church where they belong

15/10/2012 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

Once upon a time the only place one would see anything “iconic” was in a Greek Orthodox or Russian Orthodox Church. A gilded frame, copious amounts of gold leaf and a halo or haloes were usually involved.

However nowadays – much to my dismay – something just has to exist to be regarded as an icon: no veneration is necessary and the word has become hackneyed and synonymous with lazy journalism, as in this piece from today’s Bristol Post, where the undeserving victim is traditional British fish and chips.

Let’s see what the Guardian Style Guide says about iconic:

In danger of losing all meaning after an average three appearances a day in the Guardian and Observer, employed to describe anything vaguely memorable or well-known – from hairdressers, storm drains in Los Angeles and the Ferrero Rocher TV ads to Weetabix, the red kite and the cut above the eye David Beckham sustained after being hit by a flying boot kicked by Sir Alex Ferguson. Our advice, even if our own writers rarely follow it, is to show a little more thought, and restraint, in using this term.

Turning to icon, the Style Guide lists the following objects which were described in the Guardian as “iconic” in a single fortnight in 2010:

Archaeopteryx
bluefin tuna
Castro’s cigar
David Beckham wearing an anti-Glazer scarf
Grace Kelly in casual wear
Imperial War Museum North
Liberty prints
limestone stacks in Thailand
Nigel Slater
Mad Men
Variety
the John Hughes films Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Weird Science
postboxes
prints of the Che Guevara image
Stephen Fairey’s Obama Hope design
the parliamentary constituency of Hove
the Brandenburg Gate
Bach’s St Matthew Passion
a community-owned wind turbine
Kraft cheese slices
salmon farming
the blue and white stripes of Cornishware pottery
Penarth Pavilion, Cardiff
the Norwegian church and Pierhead Building in Cardiff Bay
a multimillion-pound arena in Leeds
a “rock-built engine house at Bottalack near St Just”
the Royal Albert Hall
wind turbines (“iconic renewable energy technology”)
Wembley Arena
the video for Kylie Minogue’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head

This abuse of language has gone on far too long. Let’s put icons back where they belong: in an Orthodox church, in a gilt frame and covered in gold leaf; is that too much to ask?
Reading for all

14/10/2012 Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Source
One thing I meant to mention (but forgot!) in the recent Reading for Boys post (posts passim) was the vast wealth of e-books available to read for free from one of the gems of the internet – Project Gutenberg.

Lenin – just one of the thousands of authors available for free from Project Gutenberg. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Project Gutenberg was founded by Michael S. Hart, who died in 2011. Hart’s other claim to fame is as the inventor of the electronic book (or ebook). In Gutenberg’s early days, Hart is reputed to have produced many of the texts himself.

The aims of Project Gutenberg are to:
- Encourage the creation and distribution of ebooks;
- Help break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy;
- Give as many ebooks to as many people as possible.
Gutenberg offers over 40,000 free ebooks in various formats – epub, Kindle, PDF, HTML, plain vanilla text, etc. – in 60 languages as at September 2011.

All the authors featured are out of copyright in the USA. Consequently, Gutenberg’s catalogue contains thousands of works in all fields: authors from ancient Greece and Rome, medieval literature, politics, philosophy, children’s literature and so on. If these are your desire, why pay the likes of Amazon for the privilege of acquiring a text that’s in the public domain when the same work is more than likely free of charge from Gutenberg or its partners and affiliates? Of course, Gutenberg accepts donations to support the work of its volunteers and keep the servers running.
GBeers – open source and beer

13/10/2012 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

GNOME – enjoy with a beer!
Phoronix reports that 2 of my favourite things – beer and open source – are being combined in GBeers (GNOME + Beers = GBeers), a world-wide initiative for GNOME meet-ups with lightning talk presentations taking place while drinking beer. Madrid in Spain recently hosted the very first GBeers event. Other GNOME users and developers are being encouraged by the GNOME project to arrange GBeers in their own towns and cities.

The proposed format of GBeers events is one hour of lightning talks (with each talk lasting 5-10 minutes. Ed.) on unrestricted topics every month, with the talks possibly being recorded for internet distribution. A further possibility is for virtual GBeers through Skype or Google hang-outs.

GBeers have so far been organised in Madrid, Las Palmas, A Coruña, Seville (all Spain), Chicago (USA) and Lima (Peru). Further information about this initiative can be found on the GNOME Live Wiki.

Hat tip: Roy Schestowitz.

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