• Linguists still missing court appointments

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics

    Despite the bluster of senior civil servants and ministers at the Ministry of Justice, the courts and tribunals interpreting contract with Capita is still causing delays and extra expense to the public purse (posts passim).

    The latest evidence of this comes from today’s Grantham Chronicle, which reports as follows:

    The case against a Lithuanian national had to be adjourned because there was no translator [sic] available in court.

    Algirdas Gerbenis, of Railway Terrace, Grantham, is accused of drink driving on St Catherine’s Road in the town and failing to stop after an accident on October 10.

    The case was adjourned to December 16.

    Mr Gerbenis was granted unconditional bail.

    As the Grantham Chronicle is apparently having some difficulty telling translators and interpreters apart, I suggest the paper makes my illustrated guide to translators and interpreters compulsory reading for its journalists. 🙂

    Hat tip: RPSI Linguist Lounge.

  • Bristol Post Balls: the return of the greengrocer

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

    The Bristol Post is no stranger to the greengrocer’s (or superfluous) apostrophe (posts passim).

    There’s a fine example in the headline for a photo gallery in today’s online edition.

    screenshot of Bristol Post article
    Santa’s 2013 what, Bristol Post?

    The mandatory screenshot is included above as the occupants of the Temple Way Ministry of Truth may have realised or been alerted to their mistake (I’m sure they wait use your daily review of the paper’s contents as a proofreading tool. Ed.) by the time you read this.

  • A salutary lesson in social media for business

    Steve WoodsOddities, Social Media, Tech

    A message to all businesses: if you sack a member of staff, you should consider changing your Twitter password, particularly if that person had access to the account.

    The Plough, a pub in Great Haseley, Oxfordshire, didn’t… and at the time of posting it has nearly 1,700 followers.

    You can enjoy the results in the screenshot below.

    screenshot of tweets

    Update 12 noon, 16/12/13: According to Buzzfeed, Jim Knight, the chef in question, created the Twitter account with the permission of his now former employers. Furthermore, he has also now been offered a new job, in which I wish him well. 🙂

    Hat tip: Eugene Byrne

  • French Post Office using its data to offer additional services

    Steve WoodsOpen Data, Tech

    La Poste logoLast week Le Monde Informatique reported that La Poste, the French Post Office, has just initiated its DataPoste programme. New services based on La Poste’s open data should see the light of day between now and the end of the first quarter of 2014.

    La Poste has announced the launch of DataPoste, its open data and open innovation programme. The objective for La Post is to open up a certain number of datasets in a very short time to enable the emergence of new services designed and implemented by third parties. The target is to have the first services based on these open data available within three months.

    The first stage took place on 4th December. Named DataHorizon, a private meeting of representatives from various departments of La Poste sought to define what value could be derived from such data. This entailed plotting the broad strategic outlines for opening up and adding value to the group’s data.

    A second meeting will be held on 8th January. This time the group’s employees will getting together with technology start-ups, commercial partners, designers and developers. Using customer needs as a starting point, La Poste will participate in defining use scenarios, timetables for releasing data and the stages of the plan of action. Finally, the prototypes of services to meet the requirements identified in the previous stage will be developed within the scope of a “collaborative sprint” in February 2014.

  • Norway’s National Library digitising its collection

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Open Data, Open Standards, Tech

    The National Library of Norway has announced it is digitising its entire collection. The Norwegian Legal Deposit Act requires that all published content in all media – i.e. paper, microforms, photographs, combined documents, electronic documents and the radio and television recordings from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation – be deposited with the National Library of Norway.

    The Library’s collection is also being expanded through purchases and gifts. The digital collection contains material dating from the Middle Ages up to the current day.

    Digital deposit

    In parallel with digitising analogue material, the National Library of Norway is working to expand the scope of publications covered by legal digital deposit legislation. The Library wishes to receive the digital source of the publication and thus the collection’s digital content.

    The digitising programme started in 2006 and it is estimated that it will take 20–30 years for the Library’s entire collection to be digitised.

    image of Dickens engraving being digitised
    A Dickens engraving being digitised. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

    Furthermore, The Atlantic reports that people accessing the Library’s digital collection from a Norwegian IP address will be able to access all 20th-century works – even those still under copyright. Non-copyrighted works of any age will be available for download.

    Hat tip: Mike Ellis

  • Canonical forks Gnome Control Centre*

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    Ubuntu logoRobert Ancell of Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, has announced on the Ubuntu desktop mailing list that Canonical is forking the Gnome Control Centre.

    Robert’s email is reproduced in full below.

    Hi all,

    Ubuntu makes use of a heavily patched gnome-control-center (61 patches) and we will in future move to the new Ubuntu System Settings [1] once we achieve convergence. We are already running an old version of gnome-control-center (3.6) and the value for Ubuntu in upgrading this is low since it would take a lot of work to update our changes. Running an old version until convergence blocks those who do use GNOME (i.e. Ubuntu GNOME).

    For these reasons it has been discussed that we should fork gnome-control-center 3.6 for Unity into unity-control-center [2].

    To be very clear, this is a fork with a limited lifespan. We don’t expect to make significant changes to it outside of stability and security fixes.

    This change affects a number of packages, and I have attempted to find and fix all the side-effects (See bug 1257505 [3]). The proposed changes are in a PPA [4].

    Please test this PPA and post any problems in the bug report. I’d like to land this change into the archive if there are no reasons to block it.

    I also have a fork of gnome-settings-daemon for the same reasons which I am running successfully, I will do a similar call for testing when we have landed the control center changes.

    Thanks,
    –Robert

    [1] https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-system-settings
    [2] https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-control-center
    [3] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-control-center/+bug/1257505
    [4] https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-desktop/+archive/unity-control-center

    * = Spelling in title and author’s text localised to EN-GB! 🙂

  • Felix Road Adventure Playground – latest

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics, Social Media

    I live not very far away from Felix Road Adventure Playground, which for four decades has provided opportunities for play for inner city children in Easton.

    image of Felix Rd Adventure Playground
    Felix Rd Adventure Playground

    As regular readers will be aware, the playground has been under threat of closure ever since Bristol City Council made a mess of outsourcing play facilities around the city.

    In response to this calamitous cock-up, local Easton residents organised a petition to save Felix Road (posts passim).

    According to the Save Felix Road Twitter account, a debate on the playground will be held at a full meeting of Bristol City Council on 17th December as the petition has gained more than the required number of signatures to trigger a discussion in the council chamber.

    I’ll await developments with interest as it’s not right that children in one of the most deprived parts of the city suffer when Bristol City Council cocks things up.

  • Bristol Open Data meet-up next month

    Steve WoodsBristol, Open Data, Politics, Tech

    open data stickersThere’s an open data meet-up taking place in central Bristol next month.

    It will be held on 30th January 2014 at the Watershed, 1 Canon’s Road, Bristol, BS1 5TX (map) from 7 pm to 10 pm.

    The few details that are available at present can be seen here.

    Topics to be discussed will include licensing, linked open data, open data and open government.

    Speakers are due to be announced in due course and I’ll keep readers updated of developments as the event gets nearer.

    Hat tip: Jukesie

    Originally posted on Bristol Wireless.

Posts navigation