Daily Archives: Thursday, May 25, 2017

  • Better news for a Tidy BS5

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

    Tidy BS5 logoFollowing on from the last rather gloomy post on residents’ efforts to get Bristol’s Easton and Lawrence Hill wards (roughly covered by the BS5 postcode. Ed.) tidier, some more positive news has been received from Up Our Street.

    Celia, the community engagement officer, has emailed to report on a meeting she organised with some traders on Stapleton Road and commercial waste contractors earlier this week.

    She writes:

    It was a lively meeting, but some progress I think was made, and SUEZ, Bristol Waste and Biffa are going to visit their clients on the road to encourage people to move away from large bins on the highway to sack collection. Most traders seemed to agree that removal of the bins would help by taking away the focal points which attract so much dumping. Bristol City Council are going to have two additional enforcement officers working in the area soon, with a focus on collecting evidence so hopefully this will increase the speed and number of enforcement actions against illegal waste dumping.

    cfly-tipping in Nicholas Road
    Additional enforcement is coming to Nicholas Road and the rest of Easton & Lawrence Hill

    Getting traders to stop using the 1280-litre Eurobins (also known by some as skip bins. Ed.) would be great news, besides which additional enforcement from the city council will also be welcome. It might just help to break the back of the fly-tipping problem. However, one has to ask what’s being done about education and encouragement, the 2 other words beginning with an “e mentioned in my previous post.

    There’s nothing on education measures in Celia’s email but there is some encouraging news on other matters.

    Celia continues:

    Another area of progress was that we got our first two businesses to sign the Tidy BS5 Pledge! Tovey’s Seafood and First Choice Florists. I think it would be timely to visit all businesses on Stapleton Road inviting them to sign the pledge.

    Finally, Up Our Street, local residents and Easton councillor Afzal Shah, amongst others, are also working on a motion to be presented to Bristol City Council for a cumulative impact area*. This would amongst other things stop planning permissions for new hot food takeaways of which both wards already have plenty and which are a major source of litter (not to mention food for the local gull and rat population. Ed.). Celia concludes by noting this proposals was also supported at the meeting with local traders.

    * – Bristol currently has 5 cumulative impact areas covering the city centre, Gloucester Road, Whiteladies Road and Southville and Bedminster areas.

  • LibreOffice uses Google’s OSS-Fuzz for quality improvements

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    For the last five months, The Document Foundation, the non-profit organisation behind the popular free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite, has made use of OSS-Fuzz, Google’s effort to make open source software more secure and stable, to improve the quality and reliability of LibreOffice’s source code still further. Developers have used the continuous and automated fuzzing process, which often highlights problem just hours after they appear in the upstream code repository, to solve bugs – and potential security issues – before the next binary release.

    LibreOffice 5.3.3 running on the author's Debian GNU/Linux laptop
    LibreOffice 5.3.3 running on the author’s Debian GNU/Linux laptop

    LibreOffice is the first free office suite in the marketplace to make use of Google’s OSS-Fuzz. The service, which is associated with other source code scanning tools such as Coverity, has been integrated into LibreOffice’s security processes – under the leadership of Red Hat – to improve the source code’s quality significantly.

    According to Coverity Scan’s last report, LibreOffice has an industry leading defect density of 0.01 per 1,000 lines of code (based on 6,357,292 lines of code analysed on 15th May 2017). “We have been using OSS-Fuzz, like we use Coverity, to catch bugs – some of which may turn into security issues – before the release. So far, we have been able to solve all of the 33 bugs identified by OSS-Fuzz well in advance over the date of disclosure”, says Red Hat’s Caolán McNamara, a senior developer and LibreOffice’s security team leader.

    Further information about Google OSS-Fuzz is available on the project’s GitHub homepage and on the Google Open Source Blog.

  • Mumblin’ Harry Wales

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics

    Who’s he?

    Some obscure blues artist?

    Not quite.

    Read on.

    a membling overprivileged aristocratGermany’s federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) has decided to cut out part of an English exam including a speech by a a member of Britain’s so-called royal family after thousands of students complained that they could not understand him, The Local reports.

    On Tuesday North Rhine Westphalia’s school ministry announced it would be discarding part of a final English exam for 100,000 16 year-olds which involved their listening to a speech by young ‘Arry and then answering questions on it.

    More than 45,000 examination candidates signed a petition after the test last week calling for a retake because of Mr Wales’ “mumbly” enunciation and the recording’s poor quality.

    Regional teachers’ organisation Lehrer NRW commented that even mother tongue English teachers struggled to understand what he was saying.

    There were also complaints about poor vocabulary preparation for other parts of the examination.

    In response to the controversy, the NRW education ministry explained that markers would be given more leeway in assessing other areas of the test to account for what was taught in class.

    In a press release (German), Lehrer NRW said that what was being proposed was a “fair solution“.