The silos are shown in the full glory in happier times. The older one on the left was built in the 1920s and is one of the few industrial buildings in Bristol with Art Deco features. The younger silo on the right was built in the 1950s. They used to supply mills on the same site; the mills themselves were demolished some 30 years ago.
Now disappearing from the Avonmouth skyline – CWS’ silos.
In my opinion, the 1920s silo was worthy of listing as a building of architectural or historic interest for its Art Deco style. What a pity it wasn’t. 🙁
Fedora, the community spin-off of Red Hat Linux, has announced the release of Pidora – a special remix of Fedora for the Raspberry Pi, as follows:
Pidora 18 (Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix) Release
We’re excited to announce the release of Pidora 18 – an optimized Fedora Remix for the Raspberry Pi. It is based on a brand new build of Fedora for the ARMv6 architecture with greater speed and includes packages from the Fedora 18 package set.
* * *
There are some interesting new features we’d like to highlight:
Almost all of the Fedora 18 package set available via yum (thousands of packages were built from the official Fedora repository and made available online)
Compiled specifically to take advantage of the hardware already built into the Raspberry Pi
Graphical firstboot configuration (with additional modules specifically made for the Raspberry Pi)
Compact initial image size (for fast downloads) and auto-resize (for maximum storage afterwards)
Auto swap creation available to allow for larger memory usage
C, Python, & Perl programming languages available & included in the SD card image
Initial release of headless mode can be used with setups lacking a monitor or display
IP address information can be read over the speakers and flashed with the LED light
For graphical operation, Gedit text editor can be used with plugins (python console, file manager, syntax highlighting) to serve as a mini-graphical IDE
For console operation, easy-to-use text editors are included (nled, nano, vi) plus Midnight Commander for file management
Includes libraries capable of supporting external hardware such as motors and robotics (via GPIO, I2C, SPI)
Unfortunately for Fedora, Pidora has a rather embarrassing meaning to some: in Russian, “pidora” is a derogatory word for a male homosexual. As a consequence, the following announcement has been posted on the Pidora website:
It has come to our attention that the Pidora name bears an unfortunate similarity to another word in Russian, and this has offended some community members and amused others.
Please accept our apologies for any offence caused. Our goal was to simply associate “Pi” (from Raspberry Pi) and “Fedora” (from the Fedora Project).
We are actively seeking a broadly-acceptable alternative Russian name in consultation with some community members, and will post more information shortly.
Politicians are not renowned for their use of either modern technology or social media. As regards the latter, this was previously noted by tech humour site xkcd with the “Clueless Politician Coast” on the island of Twitter on its Updated Online Communities map in 2010.
If proof were needed of this cluelessness, this was happily provided today by Maria Miller MP, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport.
Case proven, m’lud?
Those with memories capable of coping with more than 140 characters – 138 more than used by Ms Miller – may recall she was the MP who thought it was perfectly in order for taxpayers to provide her parents with somewhere to live.
I was in London yesterday for an Extraordinary General Meeting of Wikimedia UK, the Wikimedia chapter covering the United Kingdom, held at the British Library.
It was during my visit that I became aware of the existence of the Crown Estate Paving Commission or CEPC as I walked from Paddington to the library along Marylebone Road. The CEPC is a statutory body first set up by act of Parliament in 1813 to manage and maintain parts Crown land around Regent’s Park and Regent’s Street.
One the CEPC’s railings fronting Marylebone Road, I came across the sign below.
A greengrocer’s apostrophe that will last generations
An interesting fact emerged today in an article in Inside Time (masthead: the National Newspaper for Prisoners. Ed.) about the mess that Capita Translation & Interpreting’s making of the interpreting contract it has with the Ministry of Justice (posts passim).
The final paragraph of the Inside Time article mentions last year’s Civil Service People Survey, according to which just 28% of MoJ staff had confidence in their senior management and only 32% said the department was well managed. Moreover, a mere 18% of staff felt changes to services were for the better and only 23% said that change was well managed.
What was even more surprising to me – and I hope to any other reasonable person – was the response of the MoJ’s spokesperson to these damning verdicts of the Ministry, as follows:
These results show that staff are growing in confidence in the leadership and management of change in the department.
What are they putting in the senior management’s and ministers’ tea at 102 Petty France, London SW1? I think we should be told.
The council has installed ANPR cameras at its 3 recycling centres at Pixash in Keynsham Midland Road in Bath and Old Welton in Radstock to prevent callers from outside the district from using the facilities.
From 2 April 2013 you will need a FREE electronic Recycling Centre Resident’s Permit. You will not be able to use any of three our Recycling Centres with out [sic] this.
According to the council, the move is necessary as it could not afford to subsidise the cost of disposing of waste belonging to people who live elsewhere. The council also states somewhat disingenuously that residents’ council tax pays for them to dispose of their recycling, but somehow omits to state that the council earns income from selling stuff that can be recycled.
Nevertheless, it is asking its residents to sacrifice their privacy – and hence their liberty – to recycle or dispose of domestic waste.
This blog never ceases to be amazed at the mismanagement of the courts and tribunals interpreting service by Capita Translating & Interpreting/ALS (posts passim).
Under the title ‘Judge corrects a Capita Interpreter’, Linguist Lounge recently published the post by ‘Stranger’ quoted below, which is reposted here with the kind permission of the site administrators.
At court I fall into conversation with a Capita interpreter. She is North African and does Arabic. Prepared to do French too but only in simple cases. She tells Capita this but still gets sent to do a job at Bailey. The judge was French speaker and, she said, corrected her translation several times. She was greatly embarrassed and told Capita they shouldn’t have sent her. They told her that she should withdraw her name for French in that case. But they knew she wasn’t qualified for French, yet sent her to the court that deals with the most serious criminal matters.
If you are sending someone to the Bailey you know it is not to interpret for a defendant who has been caught speeding. She says that the admin staff at Capita didn’t have a clue what they were doing. She seemed very unhappy with her “employers”.
As pointed out by the original author, the Old Bailey doesn’t handle speeding offences. It is better known under its official title of the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales and deals with major criminal cases from Greater London and, in exceptional cases, from other parts of England and Wales. Were I the judge in that case, I would have had Capita Translating & Interpreting charged with contempt of court for not respecting the court’s authority.
Reading through the notes on the submission of written evidence, I was struck by the following:
2. Evidence should be submitted by e-mail to transev@parliament.uk in Word or Rich Text format, with as little use of colour and images as possible. If you wish to submit written evidence to the Committee in another format you must contact a member of staff to discuss this.
Parliament: we’re a Microsoft-only shop.Both Word and Rich Text format are Microsoft proprietary file formats. How long they remain readable is totally in the hands of a private American corporation whose first concern is making a return for its shareholders, not preserving the proceedings of Parliament and its committees for the benefit of future generations.
For those future generations, I’d recommend that parliamentary select committees start accepting submissions in other, non-proprietary formats, such as plain text or open standards such as Open Document Format. The latter is an internationally accepted standard (ISO/IEC 26300:2006/Amd 1:2012) and is being widely adopted by other governments and official bodies (such as NATO, where ODF use is mandatory. Ed.) around the world for official document exchanges.
Finally, the notes give no details any member of staff for the public to contact for submissions in other formats.
Update: Since alerting the Transport Select Committee to this post via Twitter, I’ve received the following reply from them:
Interesting post. We’re happy to accept other formats- and do – as long as we can process them using the software we have. We will certainly pass your points up the Committee Office chain to see if more can be done to accommodate this.
Thanks, very much folks. I’ll await developments with interest.
Today was a momentous day for George Gideon Oliver Osborne (aged 41 and three-quarters), a man who does Chancellor of the Exchequer impressions. Firstly, he joined Twitter. Needless to say, there was the usual warm Twitter welcome for politicians, as evidenced by the use of the hashtag #gidiot. Those using the hashtag were slightly more polite than other reactions to George’s embracing of Twitter.
Secondly, it was also the day of the Budget. In summary there was very little to cheer about, except the abolition of the beer duty escalator.
However, what made me cringe while listening to the Chancellor’s speech live on radio (apart from his whining, grating tone. Ed.) was his language: at one point near the end, I distinctly heard him refer to the amount of “one pence“.
Now, George isn’t exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, but one would at least expect the Chancellor of the Exchequer to know the difference between penny and pence.
Since the end of the budget speech itself, BBC Radio 4 news readers have also reiterated Osborne’s ‘one pence’ blunder – repeatedly. 🙁
To paraphrase the Duke of Edinburgh’s famous retort from 1962, the Bristol Post is a bloody awful newspaper. Every day it manages to show its ignorance of the districts of Bristol, greengrocer’s apostrophes are not unknown and the command of terminology shown by its journalists is abysmal.
For the benefit of passing Post journalists, I shall once again quote from that article about the difference between the two:
…here’s a brief explanation of the difference between interpreting and translation: interpreting deals with the spoken word, translation with the written word.
Simple isn’t it? So simple on would think even a Bristol Post hack would be able to understand the difference. 🙂
Today was a momentous day for George Gideon Oliver Osborne (aged 41 and three-quarters), a man who does Chancellor of the Exchequer impressions. Firstly,