Tech

  • France’s Elysée Palace makes modest contribution to open data

    Steve WoodsOpen Data, Politics, Social Media, Tech

    Le Monde Informatique reports that the website of the Elysée Palace, the official residence of the French president is taking a step towards open data. In a tweet on 16th September, it announced it was opening up its data in a new open data section of its website.

    picture accompanying tweet announcing Elysée open data site

    At present this open data section consists essentially of the diary of President François Hollande which has been appearing since last December at the top of the site’s home page in the form of a timeline. The data in this timeline are offered in two formats: XML and JSON.

    The Elysée is also releasing the origin of visits made to its website during the previous week in JSON format. Some 41% of its visitors originate from Google, 30% reach the site directly, 8% are referred by Twitter and 4% by the Elysée’s Facebook page. There are also daily statistics for the site’s servers (energy consumption, load) and visits displayed in graphical form: number of visitors, number of pages viewed per hour and the source of visits.

    Since the announcement of the the French government’s open data portal data.gouv.fr in February 2011, several public sector organisations, publicly-owned companies (e.g. SNCF and RATP) and local and regional authorities have opened up some of their data.

  • LibreOffice improves support for OOXML

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    the LibreOffice logoAccording to Heise, Suse and Lanedo have completed a project to improve the interoperability of the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite with OOXML, the format used by Microsoft Office files. The requirements were jointly defined by several bodies, including Munich City Council, the Swiss Federal Court and the French Ministry of Culture and Communication and the project received total funding of €160,000.

    The improvements have been incorporated into LibreOffice versions 3.6, 4.0 and 4.1. The code is licensed under the LGPL and MPL 1.1 3, but may also be used under the Apache 2 licence, so it can also be incorporated into Apache OpenOffice.

  • Switzerland launches open data portal

    Steve WoodsOpen Data, Politics, Tech

    Swiss state coat of armsThe Swiss Federal Government launched its open data portal opendata.admin.ch comprising over 1,600 public data sets, including election results, key figures for cantons and local authorities, as well as demographic information and data at the start of the Open Knowledge Conference 2013 in Geneva, the German technology news site Heise reports. The portal will provide a central point of access for the open data portfolio in Switzerland. The website already features the first applications based on the data made available.

    Open Data currently ranks fairly high up the Swiss political agenda: last week the National Council called for a master plan for open government from the Swiss Federal Council. The Swiss Federal Council in turn announced the development of a national open data strategy by 2014, which, amongst other things, should clear the way for the repeal of restrictive usage rights, as well as the abolition of fees on public data.

  • Know Your Place now better

    Steve WoodsBristol, Social Media, Tech

    Know Your Place, Bristol City Council‘s historical mapping service that allows you to explore the city through historic maps, images and linked information, has been featured before on this blog before (posts passim).

    Earlier today Pete Insole, archaeologist for Bristol City Council, announced via Twitter that Know Your Place has now been augmented by the addition to the Hartley Collection layer of original architects’ drawings for the reconstruction of Bristol after World War 2.

    Bristol was the fifth most heavily bombed British city of World War 2. The presence of the city docks and the Bristol Aeroplane Company made it a target for bombing by the Luftwaffe whose pilots were able to trace a course up the River Avon from Avonmouth into the heart of the city using reflected moonlight on the waters.

    A screenshot featuring the new one of the new additions – one of the drawings for what ultimately became Broadmead shopping centre – is shown below.

    screenshot of Know Your Place website
    Now improved – Know Your Place. Click on the image for the full version

  • Orca screen reader improves Braille functions

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    Orca logoOrca, the screen reader for the GNOME desktop used on Linux machines, is now at the Beta 2 stage for its forthcoming 3.10 release. According to Softpedia, the 3.10 Beta 2 release fixes the broken text attribute presentation for Gecko, the new sliders are now present in GNOME Shell, partially-implemented value interfaces with range of 0 to 1 are now handled and a workaround has been added for Delete and Backspace text changed events.

    Moreover, Braille functions are now performed only when Braille is enabled and object:active-descendant-changed has been added to events that may be part of an “event flood”.

    Finally the Polish and Slovenian translations have been updated in Orca 3.10 Beta 2.

    See the fairly basic change log for all changes since the last release.

  • Under 3 weeks to LibreOffice Conference

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    The LibreOffice Conference will officially open in less than three weeks at the University of Milan on Wednesday, 25th September, the blog of The Document Foundation reminds us. The opening session will be held in the historic Cà Granda building, while all technical sessions and tracks will be hosted by the Department of Computer Science.

    image of LibreOffice Mime type icons
    LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

    The conference is being sponsored by Canonical (the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. Ed.) and open source consultancy Collabora, whilst Google and CloudOn will be sponsoring the live ‘hackatons’ happening on Wednesday and Thursday evening and open source consultancy Lanedo sponsoring the food for the conference breaks.

    The conference will close on Friday, 27th September with the traditional Q&A session, where project members can question The Document Foundation’s board of directors.

    The conference tracks will cover the following:

    • Open Document Format (ODF);
    • LibreOffice Development;
    • Community Development;
    • Best Practice for Deployments and Migrations; and
    • Building a Business with LibreOffice.

    For the first time during a conference, there will be a chance of sitting together with LibreOffice developers to hack the code, or just discuss the next feature.

    “LibreOffice Conference comes to Italy at the right time, as during 2012 and 2013 there have been several migrations to LibreOffice in the public administrations at regional and local level,” says Italo Vignoli, a member of The Document Foundation’s board of directors and the leader of the conference team. “Meeting with the project members will encourage other public administrations and enterprises to undertake the migration to LibreOffice”.

    Conference sessions will be broadcast online, as well as being recorded and made available on the conference website.

  • Linux for Munich

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    Munich Linux CDMunich City Council has announced that a total of 2,000 Linux CDs featuring the Ubuntu 12.04 Long Term Support (LTS) distribution will be given away from next Monday in Munich’s public libraries according to the German technology news site Heise. The city’s Administration and Personnel Commission decided to take this step on 19th June 2013 because Microsoft is finally ending support for Windows XP on 8th April 2014 and will not be providing any more security patches for the operating system from that date onwards.

    Bavaria’s capital city thus wants to make sure first and foremost that computers which have been using Windows XP do not end up as electronic waste. Furthermore, Munich wants to be regarded as an “innovative expert in the open source sector”.

    Nevertheless, the council points out that it cannot provide any support at all for the chosen Linux distribution and that users should refer to for this to suppliers in the database of the local Chamber of Commerce & Industry (IHK) and ubuntuusers.de.

  • Canonical and Dell launching Ubuntu computers in 1,000+ shops in China

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    The Canonical blog reports that Dell and Canonical will be launching Dell machines running Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux operating system in more than 1,000 outlets in China in the next few weeks.

    Dell and Canonical will be jointly extending a range of Dell hardware pre-loaded with the Chinese language version of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS across a swathe of major Chinese cities. Sales in the original stores have proven so successful that the companies have agreed to expand to beyond 1,000 outlets.

    Ubuntu's Chinese store promotional materials
    Ubuntu’s Chinese store promotional materials

    This is the latest of a series of developing partnerships in China for Ubuntu. In March 2013 it was announced that the Chinese Ministry for Industry & Information Technology had selected Ubuntu as the basis for its reference architecture for operating systems (posts passim).

  • Free commuter coaches with free wifi from N. Somerset

    Steve WoodsBristol, Tech

    Today’s Bristol Post reports North Somerset commuters travelling to Bristol during November and December will be able to travel to work for free under a scheme set up by North Somerset Council and coach operator The Kings Ferry Ltd.

    The service will link Weston-super-Mare, Clevedon and Portishead with major employment areas around Bristol, including Aztec West, Rolls Royce, Royal Mail and Airbus. Two routes will be operated: one starting in Weston and picking up in Clevedon and the other starting in Portishead.

    The coaches to be used will be equipped with luxury seats, air conditioning, power sockets, drinks machines, toilets and free wifi.

    This new commuter coach service will be free throughout November and December for everyone who registers at www.bristolcommute.com by the end of October.

    Reposted from Bristol Wireless.

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