Steve Woods

Written by a human.

  • Tidy BS5: reporting online

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics, Tech

    Everywhere one travels in the United Kingdom, the common perception of residents is that their council is useless and costs too much.

    Bristol is no exception to this commonly accepted opinion of local authorities.

    In the past your correspondent has been no stranger to criticising Bristol City Council. However, there is one aspect of its operations where praise is due; and that’s its online presence. Compared with some local authority websites I have visited, Bristol City Council’s ranks amongst the best in my opinion. Indeed this blog has in the past praised Know Your Place, where one can get an intimate knowledge of the city and its long, proud history (posts passim). The open data section is worth a browse too.

    fly-posting on Easton Way Bristol
    Fly-posting: report it online

    This amazingly useful online presence is also apparent if one is concerned with street care and cleaning in Bristol. This is where one can report and obtain information on all kinds of problems encountered in urban steets.

    The following can all be reported online:

    graffiti on communal bin
    Graffiti or overflowing bin? Report it online

    Reporting road and cleaning problems online is by far the most convenient way of letting the council know of any problems encountered and as such can help to expedite their remedying, so get reporting. Most problems seem to be resolved within the promised 2 working days, although I must point out to any passing councillors and/or BCC officers that the system does occasionally break down.

  • Inspirational motto meets immovable object

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities

    When I worked for Imperial Tobacco many decades ago, I used to hate the inspirational texts that came on the desk calendars with which all office staff were issued. Another pet hate is company mottoes, which usually have that same inspirational or aspirational element.

    Given my hostility to these forms of literature, the photograph below could do nothing else but provoke a smile: a truck driver – presumably on the road to success – tries do effect a short cut of his own and reduce the height of his trailer to 10 feet using a convenient railway overbridge.

    truck with text on trailer reading on the road to success there are no shortcuts trapped under bridge

    Hat tip: Harry Tuttle.

  • Afghan interpreters living in fear in UK

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

    Yesterday’s Mirror reports that Afghan linguists who assisted British troops in Afghanistan as part of George Bush Jr.’s so-called War on Terror (how can one wage war on an abstract noun anyway? Ed.) face a double dilemma.

    Firstly, there’s the threat of attacks by UK extremists.

    Secondly, there’s the threat of being killed by the Taliban if they return to Afghanistan.

    So even with the first threat hanging over them, most are now fighting for visas to remain in the United Kingdom.

    Regarding the threat from the Taliban, the Mirror writes:

    One, Mohammed Rafi Hottak, last week urged High Court judges to watch a video of the Taliban beheading translators [sic] as “traitors”.

    Talking of the threat facing him in the UK, one linguist told the Mirror:

    “There are a lot of lunatics in this country and I’m scared.

    “There are really extreme people here. I have met them. One told me he wanted to hang me by the tongue. That’s how much he hated me.”

    Other countries including the US and Germany have already granted their interpreters asylum while the UK continues to drag its feet, as per usual. Some 260 Afghan interpreters have applied for asylum in the UK but only a handful have so far been granted visas.

    Only last month The Guardian reported on the case of one Afghan interpreter who had been refused asylum in the UK. The Guardian piece quotes Stephen Hale, chief executive of the charity Refugee Action, as saying: “Afghan interpreters put their lives on the line to work with British forces, as well as the lives of their families. We cannot abandon them.”

  • Braking bad

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

    The Bristol Post, no stranger to the pages of this blog, has a sister paper, the Western Daily Press.

    Both used to be produced in Bristol and were printed at the – now vanished – print hall of the Temple Way Ministry of Truth.

    There used to be an old Bristol joke about the local press. It ran as follows: there are 2 newspapers in Bristol; there’s the Western Daily Press, which carries stories about far-flung corners of the West Country such as London, Manchester and Edinburgh (or any other 3 major UK cities of your choice. Ed.), and the Bristol Evening Post (as it was then called. Ed.), which carries stories about far-flung corners of the West Country such as London, Manchester and Edinburgh and 50 pages of classified advertising.

    However, both the Post and the Press have more in common than their heritage and ownership. They are both badly written.

    Thursday’s Press carried a piece which puts it firmly in homophone corner with a dunce’s hat on its head, as shown by the following screenshot.

    text reads Motorists reported the lorry broke hard as it approached a roundabout

    For the benefit of passing Press “journalists”, here’s where your anonymous colleague went wrong.

    You confused the heterographic verbs to break and to brake.

    The former, which you used, is a strong verb, also called an irregular verb; these verbs form the past tense or the past participle (or both) in various ways but most often by changing the vowel of the present tense form. In this instance, break (present tense), broke (past tense), broken (past participle).

    The latter, which you should have used in this case, is a weak verb. These (also called regular verbs) form the past tense by adding -ed, -d, or -t to the base form (or present tense form) of the verb (e.g. call, called).

    Got it now?

    Good! 🙂

  • LibreOffice 4.4.3 released

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    Yesterday The Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice 4.4.3, the third minor release of the LibreOffice 4.4 “fresh” family, with over 80 fixes compared with the previous version, LibreOffice 4.4.2. The new features in LibreOffice 4.4.3 are listed on The Document Foundation wiki.

    People interested in technical details about the release can access the change logs for RC1 fixes and RC2 fixes respectively.

    Download LibreOffice 4.4.3

    LibreOffice 4.4.3 is available for immediate download. By following the download link, more conservative users can find the more tested LibreOffice 4.3.7. The document Foundation recommends all users update their installations to one of these two LibreOffice releases for security reasons.

    Get involved: LibreOffice 5.0 and LibreOffice Conference

    The LibreOffice community is actively working at next major release, LibreOffice 5.0, expected in late July 2015 and your correspondent is already using a development release, LibreOffice 5.0.0.0 alpha1. Pre-release versions such as this are available from http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/pre-releases/.

    LibreOffice 5 alpha screenshot

    The first bug hunting session on the 5.0 beta release is scheduled from 22nd to 24th May. Details of this session are on The Document Foundation wiki.

    Furthermore, the Call for Papers for LibreOffice Conference 2015 is open 15th July. The conference itself will be hosted by the Danish city of Aarhus from 23rd to 25th September.

    The LibreOffice community is growing, and the bug hunting session and conference represent exceptional opportunities to join the fun together with over 900 developers who have contributed to the code and over 3,000 volunteers who have localised the software, squashed bugs, written the manuals, spoken at conferences and acted as advocates for LibreOffice both at global and local levels.

  • Ubuntu takes to the air

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    The world’s first drone powered by the Ubuntu Linux distribution has arrived, Softpedia reports.

    Erle Robotics, a Spanish company known for all types of robots powered by Linux, launched the world’s first Ubuntu-powered drone on 3rd May.

    The Erle-Copter has a flight time of some 20 minutes and can handle a payload of 2 kg.

    As regards price, the Erle-Copter Ubuntu Core special edition drone costs €399 for the very basic version, which won’t fly. If you want to buy an Erle-Copter that flies and has the basic components, you will have to pay at least €574.

    “Erle-Copter Ubuntu Core special edition drone is a Ubuntu-powered quadcopter that includes official support for new app store for drones and robots. It has official ROS support, capable of the different flight modes and [is] ideal for outdoor operations,” says Erle Robotics’ Alejandro Hernández.

    The version of Ubuntu used by the Erle-Copter is Snappy Ubuntu Core, a new version of Ubuntu for clouds and devices comprising a minimal server image with the same libraries as the conventional Ubuntu distribution, but applications are provided through a simpler mechanism.

  • Openwords on Kickstarter

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Data, Open Source, Tech

    Openwords, the foreign language learning app for the world’s open language data the world’s under-served languages, which was reported on some weeks ago by this blog (posts passim), recently launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.

    At the time of writing the Kickstarter campaign has 16 days to go and aims to raise $10,000 to take the project to the next stage.

    Foreign language learning with open data

    There are millions of people around the world who can’t learn the languages in which they’re interested.

    While the learning of major languages like Chinese, Spanish and French are supported by large companies, these firms tend to ignore lesser-known languages.

    Openwords is doing things differently to solve this problem. Openwords is mining data from the public domain assets like the Wiktionary to provide educational content for all the languages, large and small.

    Openwords graphic

    So far Openwords has mined data for 1,000 languages.

    The Openwords app has various learning modules for vocabulary, hearing, typing, amongst others. In addition, the Openwords developers are working on simple sentence translation problems. Furthermore, learners have control over the content they want to learn.

    Openwords on mobile phone

    Finally, Openwords will be an open source project.

    The aim of the Kickstarter campaign is to raise $10,000, which will be enough to develop a beta model of the Openwords app.

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