Tech

  • Greek municipality of Kalamarià installs LibreOffice

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

    the LibreOffice logo
    The free and open source advocacy organisation GreekLUG reports that the northern Greek Municipality of Kalamarià near Thessaloniki is in the process of installing the cross-platform LibreOffice productivity suite on all of the council’s 170 workstations.

    According to the press release (PDF), some 120 installations have been done to date.

    It is believed that this move will save the council some €38,000 in licensing fees (including VAT) compared with renewing and/or buying new licences for MS Office. As the Greek public sector is extremely short of money (and getting increasingly shorter thereof in many cases. Ed.), to say the least, this is a very smart move.

    GreekLUG welcomes this move, which means that Kalamarià now joins the pioneering municipalities of Heraklion in Crete and Pilea-Hortiatis in pioneering the use of free and open source software in the Greek public sector.

  • Are social media destroying the rest of the internet?

    Steve WoodsBristol, Social Media, Tech

    That was one question discussed yesterday evening over a couple of pints of Cotswold Spring’s Stunner ale in Bristol’s Seven Stars pub with a couple of friends from the Easton Cowboys. More specifically, it the question could be rephrased as: are the likes of Facebook and Twitter pulling in so much traffic that they detract from everyone else’s content?

    Two of us run websites, so the matter is quite pertinent and can be broken down into a couple of simple aspects.

    Firstly, some people thank that if they just post on their organisation’s Facebook wall, everyone in that organisation will see it. They are, of course, mistaken. Some people avoid Facebook for privacy reasons, in addition to which Facebook’s APIs are so obscure, it’s difficult for an organisation’s webmaster to scrape content from Facebook and place it on the organisation’s website.

    Turning to Twitter, is the ubiquitous 140 character tweet replacing proper debate on blogs? We noted that if one blogs and tweets a link to the post, feedback is more likely these days to come via tweets than from actual comments on the blog. One of the great aspects of blogging is that comments on posts can encourage debate. This debate has now been reduced to soundbites of no more than 140 characters. However, the situation is more complicated than that. Whereas at one time, the ability to comment was restricted to blogs, the traditional media have now started to catch up, allowing comments on articles and thus have more interaction with their readers instead of just broadcasting at them.

    In answer to the question of whether social media are destroying the rest of the internet, only time will tell and the jury is still out. You can help the deliberations by commenting below.

    Finally, note that this discussion took place down the pub. Don’t forget that pubs, cafés and their cultural equivalents elsewhere in the world are the original social networking sites. 🙂

  • The long tail of LibreOffice

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Open Source, Tech

    In recent years, the term ‘long tail‘, which was originally coined in 2004 by Chris Anderson, has certainly caught on. Anderson’s coining of the phrase drew on a February 2003 essay by Clay Shirky entitled “Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality”, which noted that a relatively few blogs have many links to them, but there’s a “the long tail” of millions of blogs with only a handful of links each. Anderson described the effects of the long tail on current and future business models and later developed it into a book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, published in 2006.

    You may be asking what has all this to do with LibreOffice, the popular open source office suite? Well, the Document Foundation, the organisation behind LibreOffice, has recently published a blog post showing a long tail graph in relation to the developers working on LibreOffice.

    image of the long tail in action on LibreOffice. Click on the image for a full size version. Image courtesy of The Document Foundation
    The long tail in action on LibreOffice. Click on the image for a full size version. Image courtesy of The Document Foundation

    The image depicts developers who worked on LibreOffice’s code base in 2012. Last year a total some 320 developers worked on improving LibreOffice’s code. Of these, a majority were volunteers and a minority were people paid by major open source companies such as SuSE, RedHat and Canonical, as well as many smaller organisations such as Lanedo, which provides customisation services for open source products such as LibreOffice.

    The graph of the individual contributions has the shape of a “long tail”, whilst the pie chart illustrates the work done by the top 33 developers with 100+ commits, consisting of 16 volunteers and 17 paid developers (11 from SUSE, 5 from RedHat and 1 from Canonical).

  • Microsoft burgled; nothing of value stolen

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    It’s long been known that Microsoft keeps an eye on its competitors, such as open source. As far back as 2006, its open source laboratory at Redmond housed more than 300 servers collectively running more than 15 versions of UNIX and 50 Linux distributions. That facility was in those days run a team of senior-level programmers and system administrators, some of whom were architects of popular Linux distributions or authors of well-regarded books. Doubtless very little has changed.

    It also keeps tabs on Apple and develops applications for Apple’s products at its research and development centre in Mountain View.

    Courtesy of The Guardian, I was made aware of a recent burglary at Microsoft’s research and development centre.

    scan of newspaper article on MS Palo Alto raid
    Palo Alto Daily Post report of the incident

    As can be seen, nothing of value was taken. 🙂 By far the most interesting part is that no MS products at all were purloined (was the thief a cool thief? Ed.).

    IT news site The Register suggests that the thief might have hold of some unreleased Microsoft apps with his or her Apple devices.

    El Reg’s piece concludes:

    The office also houses Microsoft Exchange hosting servers, a less tempting target for a light-fingered thief.

    Well, most servers do weigh a tad more than your average fondleslab. 🙂

    Finally, this comment on The Guardian’s report raised a smile and a laugh:

    According to some reports, they stole 50 Microsoft Surfaces at the same time, but they broke back in the next day to return them.

  • An error message from Microsoft

    Steve WoodsTech

    I’m indebted to Charlie Harvey for drawing my attention to the following error message courtesy of the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

    Error Message: Your Password Must Be at Least 18770 Characters and Cannot Repeat Any of Your Previous 30689 Passwords

    This error message affects the following MS products:

    • Microsoft Windows 2000 Server SP1
    • Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server SP1
    • Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional SP1

    Microsoft’s support for Windows 2000 is now close to running out. Nevertheless, isn’t it reassuring to know that Microsoft is capable of producing such high quality products? 😉

    Mind you, some people have difficulty remembering a password of under 10 characters. How could they possibly cope with one of nearly 19,000?

  • Complex Text Layout in LibreOffice

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Source, Tech

    ODF file iconI’m currently translating a tender document from a North African Arabic-speaking country. Even though the source language of the translation is French, when I first opened the file in LibreOffice, my office suite of choice, I noticed that the cursor was responding back to front and realised immediately this was going to slow down my progress with the job unless it was sorted out.

    Fortunately, a little bit of research and a couple of configuration tweaks soon had it sorted out. Firstly, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi and Thai come under what LibreOffice describes as Complex Text Layout (CTL) languages.

    To deal with CTL languages, these first have to be enabled in LibreOffice under Tools > Options > Language Settings.

    That done, the LibreOffice Help wiki has instructions for working with CTL.

    Currently, LibreOffice supports Hindi, Thai, Hebrew, and Arabic as CTL languages.

    If you select the text flow from right to left, embedded Western text still runs from left to right. The cursor responds to the arrow keys in that Right Arrow moves it “to the text end” and Left Arrow “to the text start”.

    You can change the text writing direction directly be pressing one of the following keys:

    • Ctrl+Shift+D or Ctrl+Right Shift Key – switch to right-to-left text entry
    • Ctrl+Shift+A or Ctrl+Left Shift Key – switch to left-to-right text entry
    • The modifier-only key combinations only work when CTL support is enabled.

    Once CTL is enabled, LibreOffice also adds a couple of change text direction icons to the text formatting toolbar too.

    image of LibreOffice Formatting toolbar showing text direction change icons
    Formatting toolbar showing text direction change icons

  • Microsoft deal protested by Egyptian openistas

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Politics, Tech

    A group of technology activists gathered in front of the Cabinet office in Cairo on Sunday 30th December to protest an Egyptian governmental deal with software giant Microsoft to buy software for the public sector, the English language Egypt Independent news site reports.

    On 26 December, the official Facebook page of Hesham Qandil, the Egyptian Prime Minister, announced that the Cabinet had concluded a deal with Microsoft for the next 4 tax years to buy and maintain licensed software worth nearly $44 mn. for the government.

    “What the government is buying is the licence to use software and not new [software],” says Ali Shaath, co-founder of the Egyptian Association for Free and Open Software and the Arab Digital Expression Foundation.

    The activists’ main contention with the deal is that Microsoft products bought by the government are imported, expensive and their code source is usually closed and protected by rigid copyright rules which do not allow for knowledge sharing and generation. Meanwhile, an alternative lies with locally conceived, less expensive software, whose open code source enables copying, sharing and building more software.

    “We’re talking about the same computers, the same software, no extra development and no extra training,” Shaath said, explaining that the free and open software alternative will cost zero in comparison since its licences are free of charge and its only cost is derived from customisation and training.

    The activists believe that free and open software developers is could readily provide the software the government needs. A case in point was the portal developed with free and open software to provide voters with information ahead of the March 2011 referendum.

    NB: this post was originally published on Bristol Wireless.

  • Czech libraries protect and show historic documents with open source

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Source, Tech

    In August 2002 a week of heavy rains in central Europe caused serious flooding, resulting damage running to billions of euros in the Czech Republic, Austria, Germany, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Croatia.

    Amongst the items damaged were a large number of books in the Czech Republic’s archives and libraries. While the damaged documents were being recovered, a decision was taken to make digital copies publicly accessible.

    Joinup, the EU’s open source news website now reports that libraries in the Czech Republic are sharing and re-using a specialised open source content management system, Kramerius, to preserve historic documents and make them available online. Kramerius was developed with the support of the Library of the Academy of Sciences, the National Library (both in Prague), and the Moravian Library in Brno.

    Kramerius is intended for use for digitised library collections, monographs and periodicals. It can also be used for maps, musical scores and illustrations and to provide access to selections of documents, articles and chapters.

    In addition, Kramerius is part of a larger Czech Digital Library Project which aims to digitise the greater part of the resources of the National Library and the Moravian Library and thus to help to preserve them and make them accessible for future generations. It is hoped that over 50 million pages, or approximately 300 thousand volumes will be digitised by 2019.

    The Czech Digital Library project has a budget of CZK 20 million (about €800,000) over the next 3 years.

    As a matter of course, the Kramerius source code is also available online.

    The software itself is named after Václav Matěj Kramerius (1753–1808), who was a Czech writer, journalist and publisher. At a time when there was only a single Czech newspaper in print, Kramerius started his own paper and, following its commercial success, established a printing shop and publishing house for Czech language works. The majority of Czech language books were published by his publishing house at that time. Kramerius himself wrote about 80 books.

    There’s also an English language summary (PDF) of the Kramerius project available.

  • Seasonal good GNUs

    Steve WoodsLinux, Politics, Tech

    Once again, there’s been a bit of seasonal silliness going on courtesy of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), but in a good cause, as the FSF’s news pages report that, in the run-up to Christmas, FSF activists visited a local Microsoft store in Boston, Massachusetts during its “Tech for Tots” session to wish shoppers a Merry Christmas with copies of the Trisquel GNU/Linux operating system, a free software replacement for Windows 8. The activists were accompanied by a gnu (free software’s buffalo-like mascot) and sported Santa hats in the spirit of the season. Their action drew smiles from shoppers who had expected to see costumed people giving gifts, but not quite like this.

    image of FSF's pre-Christmas action in Boston, MA
    Spreading the good GNUs about free software

    On its Windows 8 campaign site, the FSF criticises Windows 8 for restricting computer users’ freedom to modify and share the software on their computers. This action follows a similar one at a Windows 8 launch event in October, when the FSF made international news announcing its campaign to ask computer users to skip Windows 8 in favour of free software (posts passim).

    FSF executive director John Sullivan said, “Tablets and laptops are popular gifts for the holidays, but people often overlook the restrictions that manufacturers slip under the wrapping paper. These restrictions end up locking people into one company’s products, and complicating things that should be simple like moving programs from an old laptop to a new one. We invite people to join us by going to http://fsf.org/windows8 and signing the pledge to switch to a free operating system. If you already use one, help a friend or family member switch.”

    Hat tip: Roy Schestowitz

  • Five! Four! Three! Two! One! Anderson has gone!

    Steve WoodsTech

    image of Gerry Anderson with Parker & Lady Penelope
    Gerry Anderson, 1929-2012
    For many people like me in their late 50s, the puppet shows of Gerry Anderson helped define their childhood.

    The first I remember – albeit vaguely – seeing was Four Feather Falls about 1960 starring Tex Tucker (who was voiced by Nicolas Parsons). There then followed Supercar, which was the first to feature ‘Supermarionation’, Gerry’s technique for synchronising the puppets’ mouth movements with the voice actors’ dialogue. In 1962 there followed the futuristic space adventure Fireball XL5, which is the first series I remember with any great clarity. Two years later came Stingray, the first children’s TV series in the UK to be filmed in colour, although my childhood home remained resolutely monochrome until I left the nest at 18 years of age in 1973.

    After Stingray came perhaps Gerry’s biggest success – Thunderbirds – which came to the small screen in 1965 when I was 10 years old. The episodes in this series were 50 minutes long, twice the length of Stingray et al. Thunderbirds featured the unforgettable character of Parker the butler, who dropped his aitches where he should have said them and said them where they shouldn’t have been. Gerry revealed in an interview many years later that Parker had been based on a snooty Cockney waiter he encountered in a restaurant in Ascot.

    Thunderbirds was succeeded by Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons in 1967 and Joe 90 in 1968, the last of the Supermarionation series.

    I suppose what resonated with my generation was that at the time we were being promised a miraculous future in the 21st century – with jet packs and holidays on the Moon for everyone by the year 2000. Gerry Anderson’s series from Supercar right through to Joe 90 brought that future right into your living room in the 1960s. Back in real life in the 21st century, I’m still waiting for both my jet pack and my annual 14 days on the Moon. 🙁

    One critic on BBC Radio 4 yesterday was bleating that the puppets’ strings could be seen in Anderson’s shows. Indeed they could… occasionally. It was a point of pride with the production team that extreme measures were taken to try and conceal the strings, which showed a lot less in an Anderson show than any other puppet series of the time.

    Another great feat achieved by Anderson’s team was their special effects: they gained a great reputation for making very spectacular looking explosions that were very small at the same time.

    Yesterday, Boxing Day, came the sad news that Gerry had passed away aged 83. 🙁

    RIP Gerry and thank you for some lovely childhood memories.

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