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Community litter pick in Barton Hill on Saturday 26th

18/09/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

The last email newsletter from Up Our Street that arrived earlier this week announced that a another community litter pick will be taking place in the very near future.

It will be held on Saturday 26 September from 11am to 1pm and the venue will be Barton Hill’s Urban Park, Strawbridge Road, Bristol, BS5 9XE (map).

The meet-up point will be the grassy area in front of the park.

If the event follows the usual pattern, protective gloves and litter-pickers will be provided.

The news that it will be held in Barton Hill will no doubt go down well in many quarters as Barton Hill is one of those forgotten corners of east Bristol.
Tomorrow is Software Freedom Day 2015

18/09/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

Besides being International Talk Like a Pirate Day, 19th September 2015 is also a date for the diaries of people advocating free and open source software; it’s Software Freedom Day 2015.

The idea of Software Freedom Day (SFD) is for everyone without a vested interest in proprietary software to unite and educate the world about the ideals of Software Freedom and the practical benefits of Free Software. August 28th 2004 was the first ever Software Freedom Day and was initiated group of FOSS believers – Matt Oquist, Henrik Omma and Phil Harper – with the idea of distributing The OpenCD – a collection of free and open source software for Windows – to everyone.

SFD has since extended around the world with events being organised on every continent.

Why is software freedom important?

The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a set of basic human rights that most people would agree would be a bare minimum. Not often are our basic rights thought of in the context of technology, but as more and more our lives are dependent on technology, it is a rapidly growing concern. Technologies that matter to our freedom are used in our voting systems, our leisure, our work, education, art and our communication. What does this mean to you? It means that the basic human freedoms you take for granted are only as free as the technologies you use.

Transparent and sustainable technologies are vital to ensuring we can protect our freedoms.

Think about any software you use everyday that is proprietary and the consider that you can’t be sure what it is actually doing. Does your email system send copies of your mail to a third party? Is your web browser, logging and automatically sending your browsing history to someone?

As more and more of the world’s population starts using technology, getting online and developing the next major life-changing event of the future (such as the internet was for many of us), ensuring open, transparent and sustainable approaches are considered best practice is important; i.e. important to a future where technology empowers everyone equally, where knowledge is forever and where our basic human freedoms are strengthened, not hampered, by technology.

Reposted, with some edits, from Bristol Wireless.
LibreOffice & ODF to be adopted by Italian military

16/09/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

The Italian military is moving to LibreOffice and Open Document Format (ODF), according to Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website. This will be Europe’s second largest migration to a free and open source office suite and open standards since the Italian Defence Ministry will be installing LibreOffice on 150,000 machines.

The migration will begin in October 2015 and is expected to be completed at the end of 2016.

The deployment of LibreOffice will be jointly managed by Libreitalia and the Italian Defence Ministry, with the former providing trainers and the Ministry devising course materials, which will later be released under a Creative Commons licence.

An agreement between the Ministry and LibreItalia was signed on 15th September in Rome by Rear Admiral Ruggiero Di Biase, General Manager of the Italian Ministry of Defence’s Information Systems and LibreItalia president Sonia Montegiove.

The Ministry of Defence is the first Italian central government organisation to migrate to open source software for office productivity. On the other hand, many regional public sector organisations have already made this move, such as the Emilia-Romagna region, the provinces of Perugia, Cremona, Macerata, Bolzano and Trento, the cities of Bologna, Piacenza and Reggio Emilia, the Galliera Hospital in Genoa and healthcare ASL 5 in Veneto, to name but a few.

The Italian Defence Ministry project is also one of Europe’s largest migrations to date to a free and open source office suite. The largest European public sector organisation using free software office suites is currently the French Interior Ministry with some 240,000 desktops. Many French ministries use open source office suites including the Tax Agency, the Finance Ministry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Agriculture. LibreOffice is deployed on some 72,000 PCs within the French Gendarmerie, which also uses Ubuntu Linux as its operating system of choice.

In June 2014, the autonomous regional government of Extremadura (Spain) confirmed that 10,000 PCs in its healthcare organisation are running open source office applications and that the same is planned for its own 22,000 PCs. In Germany the city of Munich runs also runs LibreOffice on over 17,000 Linux workstations.
Fouling FoI

16/09/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

One topic which all newly elected local councillors anywhere in the country will encounter in their correspondence is dog fouling, especially as the UK’s dog population was estimated to be 9 million in 2014.

All those dogs have to eat and dispose of the subsequent waste products estimated by Keep Britain Tidy (PDF) to weigh in at a 1,000 tonnes per day.

Local authorities and town and parish councils have a variety of powers called Dog Control Orders to control the handling and behaviour of dogs on areas of land within their jurisdiction; these include an offence of failing to remove dog faeces.

The maximum penalty for committing an offence under a Dog Control Order is £1,000 in a Magistrates Court. However council officers may alternatively issue a Fixed Penalty Notice, usually set at £75.

Dear Bristol City Council,

This is a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act.

Kindly disclose the number of:

a) fixed penalty notices issued
b) prosecutions brought

in the last 5 years for dog fouling

1. within the entire local authority area
2. specifically within Easton & Lawrence Hill wards

Yours, etc.

The answer was received earlier this week.

You sent us a Freedom of Information request on 12/08/2015

Your request number is CRN00017902

Our reply to your request is:

This response should answer your request in full.

a) fixed penalty notices issued in the last 5 years for dog fouling

1. within the entire local authority area – 79
2. specifically within Easton & Lawrence Hill wards – 20

b) prosecutions brought in the last 5 years

1. within the entire local authority area – 32
2. specifically within Easton & Lawrence Hill wards – 4

One striking thing is just how low the overall figures for both fixed penalty notices and prosecutions are for a city of some 430,000 inhabitants, but then again the city council has a very small number of enforcement officers (posts passim) who also have to deal with fly-posting, fly-tipping, litter and other environmental crimes besides dog fouling.

As can also be seen from the statistics, the city’s Easton and Lawrence Hill wards – the areas in which Tidy BS5 campaigners are active – account for about one quarter of fixed penalty notices issued for dog fouling throughout the entire city. Given the city council’s low levels of enforcement in other Easton and Lawrence Hill for enforcement officers’ other areas of responsibility, this figure is quite astounding. This figure could have been influenced by the dog fouling campaign carried out in both wards 2 years ago by Up Our Street.

Dog fouling in Bristol can be reported online to the city council.

In addition, for elsewhere in the UK, the Gov.uk website has a handy dog fouling reporting page.
Robins named stand after folker Fred

10/09/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Oddities

There’s an astonishing revelation in today’s Bristol Post, the city’s most unreliable source of news: the late Fred Wedlock (pictured right), the local folk singer best known for his UK hit single “The Oldest Swinger In Town”, has had a stand named after him at Bristol City‘s ground at Ashton Gate.

This emerges from a report written by Ian Onions, the Post’s political editor, over a lifelong Robins fan’s wait for the club to honour its pledge over its 1990s ‘Buy-a-Brick’ campaign.

A screenshot of the article is also shown as confirmation of the existence of the Fred Wedlock Stand.

Ian may be a knowledgeable chap when it comes to politics and the skulduggery down at the Counts Louse (Bristolian for “City Hall” © Mayor George Ferguson. Ed.), but when it comes to the beautiful game, he really doesn’t know his onions, since it was dear old Fred’s grandfather Billy (pictured left) who played for and captained the Robins, as well as playing for the England squad and it is after him that the stand is named.

Ashton Gate also has a Williams stand. I wonder if Post reporters believe this was named after Andy of that surname rather than a former player. 😉
Response to fly-posting FoI request

08/09/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

One of the many irritants and banes of urban life which can be reported online to Bristol City Council is fly-posting (unauthorised advertising).

Fly-posting in St Judes, Bristol reported to council earlier this year

Your correspondent recently submitted a Freedom of Information (FoI) request to Bristol City Council via the excellent WhatDoTheyKnow on fly-posting enforcement in Bristol as a whole and the 2 inner city wards of Lawrence Hill and Easton in particular.

The text of the FoI request reads:

Dear Bristol City Council,

This is a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act.

Kindly disclose the number of:

a) fixed penalty notices issued
b) prosecutions brought

in the last 5 years for fly-posting

1. within the entire local authority area
2. within Easton & Lawrence Hill wards

Yours etc.

The council has now replied. The salient part of the response – minus the copyright notice and procedure for those dissatisfied with the reply – reads as follows:

You sent us a Freedom of Information request on 12/08/2015

Your request number is CRN00017905

Our reply to your request is:

FPNs – 68 with 2x in Easton/Lawrence Hill wards

Pros – 6x with 3x in in Easton/Lawrence Hill wards

This response should answer your request in full.

Considering that Bristol is a city of 430,000 people, these figures do seem rather small, but then again so is the city council’s enforcement team (posts passim) which deals not just with fly-tipping, litter dog fouling and the like, but also fly-posting.

Perhaps consideration should also be given to redeploying the council’s excessive numbers of press and PR staff.
Bing Translator shows its cluelessness again

05/09/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Oddities, Tech

This blog recently drew attention (posts passim) to the fact that Microsoft’s Bing Translator tool had difficulty distinguishing English from Norwegian.

It now seems this is not the only two languages with which it has trouble since it also cannot differentiate between Dutch and English, as per the following screenshot of a tweet from Hallen FC from my Twitter feed this afternoon.

I wonder if the rest of the Beast of Redmond’s software offerings are as reliable as Bing Translator. 😉
Greenwash Capital news: streets of Bristol to get filthier

01/09/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Politics, Social Media

In a move that will put yet another black mark against they city’s undeserved year as European Green Capital, the streets of Bristol are set to get even filthier than they are already.

Today’s Bristol Post reports that the number of street cleaners in Bristol has been cut by nearly a fifth since Bristol City Council took waste management and street cleansing back in-house last month from contractors Kier Group, those well-known supporters of former worker blacklisting outfit The Consulting Association.

Fly-tipping on Pennywell Road, Easton

According to the Post, the council-run Bristol Waste Company (BWC) has notified “30 to 40” agency workers at the Hartcliffe depot that they would no longer be required as of yesterday (Monday). This will cut their numbers by about one-fifth. These workers deal with street cleaning and collecting fly-tipping.

In addition, the Hartcliffe staff claim they have not been consulted on the cuts and accused the council of trying to save money at the expense of cleanliness (Bristol City Council has a long and proud tradition of avoiding and/or messing up consultation. Ed.).

Furthermore, the Hartcliffe depot staff also claim they been provided with inadequate equipment to do the job. One anonymous worker is quoted by the Post as saying:

Some of the guys haven’t been given clean gloves or protective gear, and many are still working with Kier equipment. The protective clothing is not adequate, and we have to deal with needles and dog poo and stuff.

If there are insufficient staff available at BWC for the job in hand, perhaps Bristol City Council could reassign staff from elsewhere: ideal candidates for redployment and kitting out with a fluorescent uniform, safety gloves, boots and a broom would be those working in the local authority’s overstaffed press and PR department.

In other Greenwash Capital news, it would appear that Bristol Mayor George Ferguson couldn’t really care less about the city’s cleanliness according to the tweet below from Kerry McCarthy MP.

Synonyms for unimpressed include apathetic, disinterested, unconcerned, undisturbed, untroubled and unmoved.

If Kerry’s report of her meeting with the Mayor is accurate, that is a most disturbing development in the person whose supposed job is to take care the best interests of the city and its welfare.
Can’t tell Norwegian from English? It must be Bing Translator

31/08/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Social Media, Tech

According to Wikipedia, Bing Translator “is a user facing translation portal provided by Microsoft as part of its Bing services to translate texts or entire web pages into different languages.”

Or it would be if only it could actually recognise languages accurately.

Twitter uses Bing Translator as an interface ostensibly to help users with languages they do not know.

However, Bing Translator still has some way to go before it recognises languages accurately, as shown by the following screenshot.

Whilst it is understandable that online machine translation tools can occasionally get confused between closely related members of the same language family (Google Translate has been known to confuse Norwegian and Danish. Ed.), this is the first time I can recall such a back end helper being a real tool and getting muddled over languages as distinct from one another as English and Norwegian.

Perhaps any passing Microsoft developers would care to explain this anomaly in the comments below.
Separated at birth?

31/08/2015 Steve WoodsOddities, Politics

As a fan of Private Eye’s Lookalikes section, the other day I couldn’t help noticing there was more than a passing similarity between Michael Fabricant, the implausibly-coiffed Tory Member of Parliament for Lichfield, and Iggy Pop, that occasional insurance salesman and singer-songwriter, musician and actor, better known to the US Internal Revenue Service as James Newell Osterberg, Jr.

Why is software freedom important?

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