December | 2012 | Steve Woods

The Golden Bull Awards 2012

11/12/2012 Steve WoodsLanguage

The Golden Bull, the ultimate accolade for gobbledygook
I might not always agree with everything done by the Plain English Campaign, but I must commend them for their excellent work in combating the spread of impenetrable and confusing jargon by both public sector organisations and the private sector with their annual Golden Bull Awards. The Golden Bull Awards are presented annually for the year’s ‘best’ examples of gobbledygook.

This year’s awards were announced yesterday, 10th December, and there are some real corkers amongst the winners.

For instance, there’s the following from the newly created Cheshire, Warrington and Wirral NHS Commissioning Support Service:

A unique factor of the NHS Cheshire Warrington and Wirral Commissioning support organisation is its systematised methodology for project and programme management of small, medium, large service re-design and implementation…Building in equality and risk impact assessments the options are taken through a process to arrive at the content for an output based specification and benefits foreseen as a result of the implementation.

The service is inclusive of full engagement with Clinical Commissioning Groups who direct at decision-making points how they wish the proposal to be deployed (re-commmisson, de-commission or changes to current services/providers), and lastly an implementation team who see the service redesign through to evaluation and benefits realisation.

Another fine example comes from the London Borough of Enfield for this extract from a letter about a building’s change of use.

NOTIFICATION OF THE MAKING OF ARTICLE 4 DIRECTION (REF: Art 4/HMO) RELATING TO HOUSES IN MULTIPLE OCCUPATION

I am writing to inform you that on the 15th October 2012, the London Borough of Enfield made a direction (reference: Art 4HMO) under article 4(1) of the Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) Order 1995 as amended.

The direction relates to development consisting of a change of the use of a building to a use falling within Class C4 (houses in multiple occupation) of the Schedule to the Town and Country Planning (Use Classes) Order 1987 from a use falling within Class C3 (dwellinghouses) of that Schedule, and removes permitted development rights for this type of development from the date when the direction comes into force.

Finally, a private sector example. Can you decode this extract from the Investors’ Report of December 2011 from The Children’s Mutual?

UBS believe that the ‘New Normal’ economic environment of relatively low growth means that the ability to differentiate between secular and cyclical growth opportunities becomes more important and that for the foreseeable future the main driving influence on market sentiment will be the structural adjustments and the political capital required to help mitigate the contractionary influence of low growth.

What this means for portfolio construction is that in a low growth, low return, capital constrained environment, competitive advantage favours a combination of income generative, conservatively funded, self sustaining businesses – groups that UBS class as “dividend aristocrats” and who are experiencing secular growth. This leads UBS to their long-term core investment objective of being invested in high quality businesses.

If any passing reader can render the above quotations into plain English, please feel free to do so in the comments below.
Joint Parliamentary Committee rejects Snooper’s Charter

11/12/2012 Steve WoodsPolitics, Tech

The Joint Committee of MPs and Lords today published its report into the draft Communications Data Bill, otherwise dubbed the Snooper’s Charter. The Committee has spent six months scrutinising the proposals, receiving a substantial amount of oral and written evidence. The final report is available from the Joint Committee website.

As rumoured yesterday (posts passim), the Joint Committee has given the draft Bill the thumbs down, stating that it pays “insufficient attention to the duty to respect the right to privacy, and goes much further than it need or should”.

Furthermore, the committee report is extremely critical of the Home Office, calling their figures “fanciful and misleading”.

In addition to these criticisms, the report reckons the overall cost to the taxpayer is likely to exceed the predicted £1.8 bn. “by a considerable margin”.

Finally, both the Joint Committee and the Intelligence and Security Committee, which was also examined the draft Bill, were critical the lack of consultation by the Home Office. Indeed, some major ISPs and communications providers were not consulted at all and were only sent a copy of the draft Bill after its publication.

In conclusion, both the Joint Committee and the Intelligence and Security Committee believe that the Home Office’s proposals need rethinking.

According to BBC News, a spokesman for the prime minister said the PM accepted the criticism from MPs and peers of the draft Communications Data Bill and would re-write it.

In view of the PM’s views, we are forced to ask the following question: what do you call an organisation that ignores the views of 2 parliamentary committees? Answer: Her Majesty’s Government. 🙂
LibreOffice 4.0.0 Beta1 released

10/12/2012 Steve WoodsOpen Source

IT news website The H Online reports that The Document Foundation has announced the release of the first beta of version 4.0 of LibreOffice, the free and open source office suite for Linux, Windows and MacOS.

The stable version of LibreOffice 4.0 is scheduled for release in February 2013.

The Document Foundation advises that this version should not be used for “mission-critical” jobs and the main purpose of the beta release is to find and report bugs, notify developers of regressions, confirm bugs already reported in 4.0 and verify existing bug fixes.

The main changes from previous releases are set out in the release notes.

For those interested in even more bleeding-edge binaries of our current development, The Document Foundation recommends checking out its nightly builds. However, these are are potentially even less suitable for productive work and come with the warning caveat emptor.
Snooper’s Charter – rumours that Parliament is unimpressed

10/12/2012 Steve WoodsPolitics, Tech

IT news website The Register reports today that the joint parliamentary committee of members of the Commons and Lords scrutinising the government’s draft Communications Data Bill – also known as the Snooper’s Charter (posts passim) – will publish its report tomorrow (Tuesday, 11th December).

It is believed that most of the committee’s members felt the Home Office had failed to make a convincing case for the scale of requested draconian powers required to monitor British citizens’ activities online. The message likely to come from the joint parliamentary committee will probably be to encourage the police and law enforcement agencies to devise a much simpler scheme that the public can trust, along the lines of “go back to the drawing board and come and talk to us when you have something fresh”.

The cost of the scheme – some £1.8 bn. – will also come in for criticism from the committee at a time when police resources are being severely cut.

NB: This is a revised version of a post originally published on the Bristol Wireless site.
A government of snollygosters

09/12/2012 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

I’ve just finished reading Utopia by Sir Thomas More (1478-1535).

Utopia contrasts the contentious social life of European states with the perfectly orderly, reasonable social arrangements of Utopia and its environs (Tallstoria, Nolandia and Aircastle). In Utopia, with communal ownership of land, private property does not exist, men and women are educated alike and there is almost complete religious toleration.

Woodcut by Ambrosius Holbein for the 1518 edition of Thomas More’s Utopia. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

One passage in the final chapter (entitled ‘Of the religions of the Utopians’) in particular struck a chord with me. It’s reproduced below.

Therefore I must say that, as I hope for mercy, I can have no other notion of all the other governments that I see or know, than that they are a conspiracy of the rich, who, on pretence of managing the public, only pursue their private ends, and devise all the ways and arts they can find out; first, that they may, without danger, preserve all that they have so ill-acquired, and then, that they may engage the poor to toil and labour for them at as low rates as possible, and oppress them as much as they please; and if they can but prevail to get these contrivances established by the show of public authority, which is considered as the representative of the whole people, then they are accounted laws; yet these wicked men, after they have, by a most insatiable covetousness, divided that among themselves with which all the rest might have been well supplied, are far from that happiness that is enjoyed among the Utopians…

Did Thomas More foresee the present UK government and its failed austerity policy? Hardly likely, but his words still have a ring of truth to them, which tells me that very little has changed in in general in governments since More’s time six centuries ago, apart from the introduction and gradual widening of the franchise to give the snollygosters an air of democratic respectability.

In case you’re wondering, a snollygoster is a person, especially a politician, who is guided by personal advantage rather than by consistent, respectable principles. As a word, it originated in the fast-expanding USA of the nineteenth century.

More’s Utopia is available for free in various formats from Project Gutenberg (posts passim).
Pinnies at prayers

09/12/2012 Steve WoodsOddities, Politics

A protest by women will be taking place today in the Anglican Diocese of Hereford, which covers Herefordshire and parts of South Shropshire.

They’ll be wearing their pinafores and aprons in church in protest at the Church of England’s recent rejection of women bishops.

One of the organisers of the protest, Christine Walters, from Stoke Lacy in Herefordshire, said: “The idea is that women wear an apron or pinafore on top of their clothes as a mockery of the idea that they are fit only for tea making. We all know that women contribute so much to the church and especially our women priests who need our support at the moment. We are asking men to wear a purple ribbon”.

The hardcore pinny protesters of Stoke Lacy

One report also suggests the pinny protest is to show they are not tied to their church by apron strings.

Church of England bishops are due to meet tomorrow (Monday) to discuss the fallout from the lay vote in Synod that defeated the proposal.
Bristol politics – subtle comment

08/12/2012 Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

One of the first acts of Bristol’s recently elected mayor, George Ferguson (whose best known foible is his sartorial predilection for red trousers), was to rename the Council House (aka Counts Louse to Bristolians. Ed.), transforming it into City Hall.

A local wag has now amended the new sign outside the Counts Louse to reflect the change of regime.
First alpha of Ubuntu 13.04 released

07/12/2012 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

I’ve been running Ubuntu Linux on one of my machines for almost 3 years now and have found it to be very stable and reliable. Ubuntu is a Linux distribution with a very regular release cycle, with a new version coming out roughly every six months and every other release being offered with long term support (LTS), which has now been increased to 5 years.

Yesterday an announcement was made on the Ubuntu mailing list that the first alpha release of what is to become Ubuntu 13.04, codenamed Raring Ringtail, has been made available.

Making the announcement, Stéphane Graber wrote:

The first Alpha of the Raring Ringtail (to become 13.04) has now been released!

This alpha features images for Edubuntu and Kubuntu.

At the end of the 12.10 development cycle, the Ubuntu flavour decided that it would reduce the number of milestone images going forward and the focus would concentrate on daily quality and fortnightly testing rounds known as cadence testing. Based on that change, the Ubuntu product itself will not have an Alpha-1 release. Its first milestone release will be the Final Beta Release on the 28th of March 2013. Other Ubuntu flavours have the option to release using the usual milestone schedule.

Pre-releases of Raring Ringtail are *not* encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting and fixing bugs as we work towards getting this release ready.

Alpha 1 includes a number of software updates that are ready for wider testing. This is quite an early set of images, so you should expect some bugs.

While these Alpha 1 images have been tested and work, except as noted in the release notes, Ubuntu developers are continuing to improve Raring Ringtail. In particular, once newer daily images are available, system installation bugs identified in the Alpha 1 installer should be verified against the current daily image before being reported in Launchpad. Using an obsolete image to re-report bugs that have already been fixed wastes your time and the time of developers who are busy trying to make 13.04 the best Ubuntu release yet. Always ensure your system is up to date before reporting bugs.

Edubuntu:
Edubuntu is the educational flavour of Ubuntu. Based on the standard Ubuntu desktop, it features educational tools and content for schools and at home.

The Alpha-1 images can be downloaded at:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/releases/raring/alpha-1/

More information on Edubuntu Alpha-1 can be found here:
http://www.edubuntu.org/news/13.04-alpha1

Kubuntu:
Kubuntu is the KDE based flavour of Ubuntu. It uses the Plasma desktop and includes a wide selection of tools from the KDE project.

The Alpha-1 images can be downloaded at:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/raring/alpha-1/

More information on Kubuntu Alpha-1 can be found here:
https://wiki.kubuntu.org/RaringRingtail/Alpha1/Kubuntu

Regular daily images for Ubuntu can be found at: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com

If you’re interested in following the changes as we further develop Raring, we suggest that you subscribe to the ubuntu-devel-announce list. This is a low-traffic list (a few posts a week) carrying announcements of approved specifications, policy changes, alpha releases and other interesting events.

http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-announce
Turnip Prize awarded

06/12/2012 Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities

News can sometimes travel slowly in the West Country, so it’s only this afternoon that I’ve become aware of this year’s Turnip Prize – the antidote to the better known Turner Prize.

The magnificent Turnip Prize trophy

The Turnip Prize is awarded annually at the New Inn in Wedmore on the Somerset Levels, far away from the glitz of metropolitan London.

This year’s winner was midwife Sarah Quick, from Clutton, who was presented with the award’s customary winnner’s trophy of an old turnip mounted on a six-inch nail, as seen above. Sarah’s winning entry was entitled ‘The Three Tenas’ and consisted of a pack of women’s Tena incontinence pads with three sticking out of the top.

Three Tenas – thias year’s Turnip Prize winner

Competition must have been more intense this year with 86 entries, 17 more than last year. Popular rumour has it that Bristol’s famous son Banksy has entered in the past, but has been disqualified for making too much of an effort!

Hat tip: Rich Higgs
LibreOffice 3.6.4 released

06/12/2012 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 3.6.4, for Linux, MacOS and Windows. According to the Foundation, this new release of the free and open source office suite is another step forward in the process of improving the suite’s overall quality and stability for any kind of deployment on personal desktops or inside organisations and companies of any size.

LibreOffice 3.6.4 is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions to enhance the functionality of LibreOffice are available from the following link: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center. If you work in multiple file formats like I do, I thoroughly recommend the MultiSave extension (posts passim)

To coincide with this release The Document Foundation is inviting LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members to support its work with a donation. There is a donation page – with many options including PayPal and credit cards – at http://donate.libreoffice.org to support the TDF’s fundraising campaign for 2013.

For regular news about LibreOffice, follow The Document Foundation blog.

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