Monthly Archives: November 2012

  • Italy’s Emilia Romagna prefers open source for smart city projects

    Steve WoodsBristol, Open Source

    Emilia Romagna flagI was recently invited to take part in some smart city sessions organised in Bristol by Knowle West Media Centre, so I was most interested to learn of recent smart cities developments in part of Italy.

    According to the EU’s Joinup open source news site, open source software is a key element in many of the Smart City projects developed by a group of IT specialists and researchers for Italy’s Emilia Romagna region. Lucia Mazzoni, an IT project manager involved the region’s smart city projects said: “We prefer to use open source modules. This type of software allows scalable and easy to configure combinations.”

    The group is building applications to monitor atmospheric conditions and air quality and collect and present data on surface waters. They are also working on IT solutions to increase energy efficiency and are building software to monitors the condition of cultural monuments and help preserve them.

    Mazzoni gave a presentation on Emilia Romagna’s smart city research projects at the Smart City Exhibition held in Bologna between 29th and 31th October last.

    One application presented was ‘Smart Catcher’, a location-aware Android phone application which allows users to locate useful urban objects, such as bookshops, filling stations, hospitals, restaurants and hotels.

    The smart city developers are also involved in building middleware software for use in vehicle to vehicle communication. The idea is to create smart vehicles that can use the information to plan their routes more efficiently. Other projects are working on using smart sensors, video cameras and personal sensors.

    NB: This is an edited version of a post originally appearing on the Bristol Wireless site.

  • Election special: 80% of voters don’t bother

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

    It cannot have escaped anyone’s notice that there was an election for an elected Mayor in Bristol on Thursday.

    The fact that George Ferguson – affectionately known as Red Trousers after his preferred choice of leg coverings – received a total 37,353 votes and was declared the winner.

    George’s win is being described by all the political pundits as a consequence of the people of Bristol being fed up with party politics.

    However, there’s another analysis. Turnout in the mayoral election was under 28%. That means George was elected by a tiny minority of electors who could be bothered to turn out and vote for him. Indeed, George’s winning total means just 11.7% of Bristol’s 320,000 voters put a cross next to his name.

    Meanwhile the vast majority of voters – 78% of the on Bristol’s electoral roll – stayed away from the polls.

    The figures for the Police and Crime Commissioners suffered from even lower turnouts right across the country, with a national average of 15% in the 41 English and Welsh police areas. In the Avon and Somerset area, turnout was 19.59%, meaning 80% of the electorate didn’t bother and winning candidate Sue Mountstevens, who received a total of 125,700 votes, was likewise given a mandate by about 10% of voters.

    Representative democracy doesn’t seem to be faring very well at present and one must question the legitimacy of the mandates received.

  • 2nd LibreOffice Hackfest coming soon

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

    The second LibreOffice Hackfest 2012 will take place from November 23-25 in Munich, Bavaria.

    The event is being supported by Munich City Council’s LiMux project, which is migrating the council’s IT from proprietary systems to free and open source alternatives.

    LibreOffice Hackfest logo

    The hackfest is being jointly organised with the Debian community’s Munich Bug Squashing Party (posts passim).

    For full details such as venues, agenda and travel, consult the event’s page on the LibreOffice wiki.

  • Debian bug squashing parties announced

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    Debian logoDebian is a great Linux distribution. Indeed, besides being a distribution in its own right, it acts as the foundation for the very popular Ubuntu distro, as well as my favourite, Mepis, and countless others.

    The Debian Project is now in the final stages of preparing for its next release – codenamed Wheezy – and has just announced that Bug Squashing Parties (“BSPs”) will take place in several countries in the next few weeks. The main focus of a Bug Squashing Party is to triage and fix bugs, but it is also an opportunity for users less familiar with the Debian bug tracking system to make other contributions to the Debian project, such as translating package descriptions or improving the wiki. Debian developers will be present to help contributors understand how the project works and to help get fixes into Debian.

    A list of confirmed Bug Squashing Parties follows, even though the project advises checking the events page to see if any more are being planned.

    • November 10-11, Banja Luka, Republika Srpska: a BSP will be held at the University Computer Centre. More information here.
    • November 14, Helsinki, Finland: a mini BSP will be held in Kamppi. See the mail announcement for information.
    • November 23-25, Essen, Germany: a BSP will be held at the Linuxhotel. More information.
    • November 23-25, Munich, Germany: a BSP will be held at the LiMux Office, together with the LibreOffice Hackfest. More information is available on the wiki page.
    • November 24-25, Paris, France: a BSP will take place during the second Paris Mini-DebConf. More information can be found on the event page.
    • November 24, Tokyo, Japan: a BSP will be held at the Plat’Home Office. Further information here.
    • December 15-16, Mechelen, Belgium: a BSP will be held at the NixSys Office. More information on the event’s wiki page.

    If you want to organise a BSP, potential organisers can find all the necessary information on the wiki. The Debian Project invites all users and contributors to attend these events and make Wheezy ready for release sooner.

  • “Cutlass supplied”

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Oddities

    Skull and crossbonesEvery now and again there’s a job advertisement that’s so unusual it deserves wider circulation: and there’s a great example on the tourist business website Destination Bristol at the moment.

    Bristol Pirate Walks are looking for an Assistant Pirate to join Pirate Pete.

    The Assistant Pirate should be confident and outgoing with a bubbly personality and be ready to meet and greet visitors to Bristol from across the world, from children and families to corporate groups.

    This is a part-time role with full training given on the history of this port, and would be of interest those who enjoy meeting people and leading walking groups around the harbour.

    Cutlass supplied

    As pirates are typically portrayed as folk whose speech requires little grammar, I wonder if the “full training given” will include lessons in ignoring English syntax. 😀

    Of course, Bristol, being a port city, has close associations with the sea and hence maritime crime of all kinds, including piracy, as well as having pirates amongst its sons and daughters. Edward Teach, otherwise known as Blackbeard, was born in the (now comfortably fragrant and middle class) Redland area of the city in 1680.

  • Crapita lives up to its name – again

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Tech

    Yesterday’s Daily Mirror reports that Birmingham City Council‘s new £11 mn. automated telephone system, which features computerised speech recognition technology, is a massive failure for the simple reason that it cannot cope with the local Brummie accent.

    Hundreds of locals have complained they are unable to get through to council services, such as the rent arrears department. To add insult to injury, when callers encounter difficulties, the recorded voice of a woman with a Geordie accent tells them: “I can’t understand that, could you please repeat it?”

    Victoria Square, Birmingham, with the city council headquarters. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

    Indeed the system is so abysmal that each call is costing the city council – the UK’s largest local authority – the equivalent of £4.

    Last year the council axed its call centre, which used to employ 55 people and contracted Capita IT Services (whose home page reads: “Capable. Our experts are able to create improved business performance with our customers”. Ed.) to supply the new, unusable system.

    Could this be a sister company of Capita Translation and Interpreting, the outfit responsible for the court interpreting fiasco (posts passim)?

  • Bristol Post exclusive: city has a literate cricket ground

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Social Media

    Ever since I arrived in Bristol, I’ve been both dismayed and amused in equal amounts by the abysmal standards of English in the local press.

    This ancient tradition’s greatest proponent has been the alleged local paper of record, the Bristol Evening Post, whose publication is now reduced to 5 days a week as sales of the dead tree edition decline; its name has likewise been truncated to the Bristol Post.

    Today the Post revealed an exclusive. Bristol has a literate cricket ground, presumably able to speak and write, as evidenced by the following Post quote:

    The ground, in Nevil Road, St Andrew’s, released a statement this morning.

    If the ground really does talk, Gloucestershire [County] CC should be very proud of it since this particular skill is far more impressive than its cricketing record. 😉

    Update: 6th November 2012: Jon Eccles has since remarked that the County Ground is “the first sports facility of any kind to pass the Turing test“.

  • Your chance to vote for the UK’s fishiest outsourcing firm

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

    Over at False Economy, the anti-public spending cuts website, you can now cast your vote for the UK’s fishiest outsourcing firm.

    Government ministers are privatising and outsourcing ever more of our public services. Yet some of the companies taking over have a dismal performance record, while others have avoided tax, given suspiciously large political donations or even helped to write the policies from which they will profit.

    False Economy’s shortlist currently comprises 10 outsourcing firms:

    • A4e
    • Atos
    • Capita Translation and Interpreting (posts passim)
    • Care UK
    • Circle
    • FirstGroup
    • G4S
    • McKinsey & Company
    • Serco
    • Virgin Care

    False Economy gives a brief summary of the finer points of the rip-offs practised by all of the above.

    These people are doing a poor job and trousering huge amounts of taxpayers’ money for the privilege.

    It’s high time they were stopped from doing so.

    If you think that False Economy has missed any company out, you can always remedy that omission.

    Hat tip: Madeleine Lee

  • LibreOffice 3.6.3 now available

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    the LibreOffice logoThe Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 3.6.3, the latest version of the leading free and open source office suite.

    This maintenance release fixes some 90 bugs, including fixes for layout problems, overflowing margins, a regression in chart complex category placements and problems in importing and exporting ODF documents. Several problems that caused crashes when, for example, deleting the last cell in a table, importing tables from .docx files or following an incomplete print have likewise been corrected.

    Versions of LibreOffice 3.6.3 for Linux, Windows and Mac platforms are available from the LibreOffice download page, as is the source code.

    If anyone readers need convincing to try LibreOffice, do this simple test. How much lighter will getting an office suite leave your bank balance?

    Furthermore, LibreOffice’s functionality can be enhanced by means of extensions, such as MultiSave (posts passim).

Posts navigation