Today’s cock-up by the Bristol Post, from a story entitled ‘Man on lilo rescued after drifting out to sea off Weston-super-Mare’, has gained Bristol’s newspaper of record a seat in homophone corner.
For the benefit of passing Post journalists a homophone is “a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning. The words may be spelled the same, such as rose (flower) and rose (past tense of “rise”), or differently, such as carat, caret, and carrot, or to, two, and too.”
Now let’s see (or sea. Ed.) what landed the Post this particular accolade.
Today’s a sad day in the IT news world: The H is closing down. For the last few years it has been an excellent source of IT news in the fields of free and open source software, security and software development, or as it said in its own words: “The H brings you the in-depth coverage of the world of IT, communications, data security and the politics of technology.”
Earlier today editor DJ Walker-Morgan (aka Codepope. Ed.) posted the message below on The H’s website.
Although The H has produced many widely read stories, it has not been possible to effectively monetise that traffic to produce a working business model.
Because of this, after four and a half years as The H and six years online, The H is, sadly, closing its doors. We thank all our readers for their deep interest and engagement. Work is taking place to create an archive to ensure that the content of the site will remain publicly accessible.
Best regards
DJ Walker-Morgan and the entire team at The H
The H was produced in association with Heise Online, a major German IT news site and one I’d recommend.
So farewell, The H and thanks for providing quality news for the last few years and best wishes for the future; you’ll be missed.
The second AshesTest match is currently underway at Lord’s in London between England and Australia.
Over the years I’ve become a fan of the live coverage provided by the Test Match Special team on Radio 4 LW; local Bristol community station BCfm interferes with the signal on Radio 4’s FM signal where I live.
Geoff BoycottAs a consequence, I’ve got to know and appreciate the consummate broadcasting skills of Aggers, Blowers and company, including Geoff Boycott, regarded by some as the ‘greatest living Yorkshireman’.
One of the joys of listening to the coverage is the banter between the team, especially the ribbing of Boycott and the interplay between him and Aggers in particular.
Now Geoffrey is not known for keeping his counsel to himself, being a man of strong opinions. Like all of us, he’s got little foibles in his speech and recurring phrases, affectionately known as ‘Boycottisms‘. These Boycottisms have been used to produce ‘Boycott bingo’ cards like the example below.
KDE is one of the 2 major providers of GUIs and applications for Linux systems (some KDE applications are also now available for Windows too! Ed.).
It’s currently holding the KDE Akademy 2013, a free, non-commercial event organised by the KDE community, in Bilbao in the Basque Country of Northern Spain from 13th to 19th July.
The local public transport company has also picked up on this event and is advertising it on its ticket machines; and in 3 languages too!.
Free software advertising – Bilbao
Would London Underground or the UK’s train operating companies do likewise?
I’ve written before of my dislike of advertising (posts passim), but advertising for community-based projects – even if those communities are scattered throughout the world – is something for which I’ll make an exception.
Below is a screenshot of the story in today’s Bristol Post reporting on Professor Peter Higgs – one of the team that postulated the existence of the particle named after him back in the 1960s – being granted the freedom of the city of Bristol.
Headline quality control in action. Click on image for full size version.
It’s always a good idea to keep one’s ears open walking around the city – or anywhere for that matter.
Yesterday lunchtime when crossing St Philips Bridge (below) my ears heard a real treat – a peregrine falcon in the heart of Bristol.
St Philips Bridge and the former Bristol Tramways power station. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Peregrine falconFollowing the sound, I spotted the peregrine perched on a ledge near the top of the old Bristol Tramways power station, the building whose end is covered in scaffolding in the picture.
I’ve seen peregrines before near Bristol, particularly down the Avon Gorge, where I’ve spotted them nesting in the Gorge’s old quarries, but never before in the heart of the city.
Naturally, I was quite excited by this and asked Bristol’s Twitter users how unusual this was. After a couple of hours, I received a reply from naturalist and broadcaster Ed Drewitt, who informed me there was a “family of 3 chicks around Cabot Circus way” (they might help keep the city centre’s gull and feral pigeon population under control. Ed.).
Around my home patch of Easton I have over the years seen both sparrowhawks and kestrels, whilst moving further afield the patchwork of open grassland and woodland on Purdown and Stoke Park is ideal buzzard territory.
Finally, there’s one bird of prey I believe I’d heard that I’d really love someone else to corroborate. Returning home some years ago, I could have sworn I heard a tawny owl hooting in the vicinity of the railway embankment between Stapleton Road and Lawrence Hill railway stations. If anyone else has heard hooting there too, I’ll know I wasn’t imagining things. 🙂
According to its website, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community where its member organisations, a full-time staff and the public work together to develop web standards, whose mission is to lead the Web to its full potential.
These standards have so far been characterised by complete openness: all web standards are open standards.
However, these open standards are now under attack.
There’s a proposal currently before the W3C’s HTML5 Working Group to build DRM (aka Digital Restrictions Management by openistas. Ed.) into the next generation of core web standards. The proposal is called Encrypted Media Extensions or EME.
The people behind EME are the major media companies; having failed to push such illiberal measures as SOPA and PIPA through the US legislature, the Big Media moguls are now going through non-governmental channels to try to sneak digital restrictions into every interaction people have online.
Hollyweb? No thanks, W3C!
Netflix, Google, Microsoft and the BBC are all rallying behind this ludicrous proposal, which – as stated above – flies in the face of the W3C’s mission.
However, a petition has already been set up to oppose the addition of DRM to HTML5 and 3rd May 2013 has been designated the International Day Against DRM.
I’d urge everyone interested in open standards and all other forms of openness – such as open data and open source – to sign the petition; I’ve already done so.
