Bristol Wireless News

On Wednesday 13th January, Bristol Wireless’ Sam Rossiter attended and participated in the first public run of the Digital Challenge Game developed by Drew Mackie and David Wilcox as part of the Government’s £7 mn. Digital Challenge.

The venue was Community at Heart in the ‘deprived’ Barton Hill area, which local residents had been invited to attend to put forward their ideas. Drew, David and Sam all addressed the assembly before the game started: Drew and David explained how the game was to be played, whilst Sam outlined Bristol Wireless’ involvement in the city’s developing final bid, emphasising our interest in such projects as online mapping and community history (both of the area and the local people), as well as making network connectivity more common. Kevin O’Malley of one the main co-ordinators of Connecting Bristol, also sang for his supper.

The premise of the game was very simple. With members of the local community working in groups, design a project that may be implemented under the Digital Challenge. After this, the groups are again divided; in smaller groups a character from a set of half a dozen or so typical characters designed by Drew and David is put through the project for 4 years. At least once over the 4 year storyboard, Drew will confront your character with a real-life event (pregnancy, illness, crime, etc.).

For a more complete report of the event, there are three readily accessible sources:

1. David Wilcox’s blog piece;
2. Kevin O’Malley’s report on Connecting Bristol;
3. A local resident’s view on Straight Outta Easton.

For those who don’t subscribe to the Bristol Wireless mailing list but like to drop into the chat channel for a lurk or a laugh, you might like to read the following email from Mike Harris of psand.net:

Hello All,

Yesterday I migrated the IRC service from the old server (soon to go offline) to the new (just put on-line) and found out that some, including I think a CGI script running on-line still use the old server name darksun.psand.net to connect to IRC. This was deprecated a long time ago in favour of irc.psand.net and today I’ve switched off the old IRC service.

So please everyone use irc.psand.net from now on. All the channels are the same. Thanks.

Cheers,

Mike

If you’re having difficulty logging into the chat channel, you’ll need to tweak your chat client accordingly; then you’ll be able to see all your old mates, including getting eggzy, our resident bot, to start Google fights!

La Marseillaise, the French national anthem, starts with the lines ‘Arise, you children of the fatherland, the day of glory has arrived’. For the deputies (MPs) elected to the French parliament, the Assemblée Nationale, the ‘jour de gloire‘ will be one in next July when 1,154 French parliamentary workstations will start running a Linux OS with the OpenOffice.org suite, Firefox and an open source email client. It is reported that the choice of Linux distribution and email client have still to be decided.

The project formed the basis of a study by Atos Origin, whose conclusions convinced the French parliament to make the switch.

A parliamentary spokesman said: “The study showed that open source software will from now on offer functionality adapted to the needs of MPs and will allow us to make substantial savings despite the associated migration and training costs”.

This will be the first case of a French public institution switching its PCs onto a Linux operating system. Previous open source initiatives concerned servers – as happened with the Ministry of Agriculture – or OpenOffice and Firefox, which are now in use by France’s gendarmerie.

The decision has been welcomed by French open source supporters. Benoït Sibaud, president of the Association for the research into and promotion of open source computing, said that the decision to migrate to open source will allow the Assemblée Nationale to have greater control over its IT, without depending on any one vendor and to make better use of public money.

The original French report is available on ZDnet France.

In the last week both Bristol and Manchester, both finalists in the government’s £7 mn. Digital Challenge, have announced wireless network plans.

Firstly, in Bristol Cityspace, one of the country’s leading providers of urban digital networks, and the operator of the city centre StreetNet network, announced its selection as Bristol City Council’s preferred partner for a major expansion of the existing 3 km long StreetNet wireless network originally deployed as a pilot by Cityspace in 2004. The Connecting Bristol blog also reports that Cityspace is keen to work with Bristol Wireless on the network expansion.

Full details are available in the press release.

Meanwhile up in Manchester on 1st December, the City Council issued a Request for Information & Comment as the first step in plans to launch a broadband wireless network over Manchester that the Council hopes will eventually cover an area of up to 400 square miles and 2.2 million people. If fully implemented, the network would cover 90% of the Greater Manchester area and be the largest single city broadband wireless area in Europe. In addition, it would be as large as all other city-based wireless networks in the UK put together and encompass not only central Manchester, but also include surrounding boroughs such as Salford and Tameside.

More details of Manchester’s plans can be found on the ONE-Manchester blog.

It’s been a few months since your correspondent last visited Princess Royal Gardens in Redfield. Since that time the LTSP suite has been refurbished and upgraded.

The suite now comprises a new server – now running Debian – and 7 thin clients. In addition, the rat’s nest of wires and cables has now disappeared from the floor at the foot of the common room wall; it’s all been hidden in trunking screwed to the wall and the whole setup is looking very tidy and proper.

New tables have also appeared, kindly donated by Unity Information Systems of Clifton and the whole suite is now ready to act as a proper training facility, not just for the residents themselves (and their visitors), but also for the wider community, as outlined in Ronnie’s letter recently posted on Connecting Bristol.

Ronnie also says that Princess Royal Gardens will be giving the new setup an official launch in the near future, which will be featured here, luckily with some pictorial accompaniment.