Bristol Wireless News

Earlier today Bristol Wireless volunteer Sam alerted the co-op to the launch of Whitehall’s action plan for open source, including support for ODF.

The action plan has a foreword by Digital Engagement Minister Tom Watson MP, which starts:

Open Source has been one of the most significant cultural developments in IT and beyond over the last two decades: it has shown that individuals, working together over the Internet, can create products that rival and sometimes beat those of giant corporations; it has shown how giant corporations themselves, and Governments, can become more innovative, more agile and more cost-effective by building on the fruits of community work; and from its IT base the Open Source movement has given leadership to new thinking about intellectual property rights and the availability of information for re–use by others.

That’s a glowing testimonial for starters. The collaborative working methods inherent in open source have produced all the software currently being used to write this piece and its licensing conditions. Indeed, Minister, the internet (even with your upper case. Ed.) couldn’t function without open source/free software and neither could Bristol Wireless: our entire infrastructure is based upon it. In return for being able to use free and open source software we can help to improve it by fixing bugs and have many years experience of operating it in a production environment.

The commitment to open standards, including ODF comes in as action point 8 out of 10 and states:

Open Standards: The Government will specify requirements by reference to open standards and require compliance with open standards in solutions where feasible. It will support the use of Open Document Format (ISO/IEC 26300:2006) as well as emerging open versions of previously proprietary standards (eg [sic] ISO 19005-1:2005 (“PDF”) and ISO/IEC 29500 (“Office Open XML formats”)*. It will work to ensure that government information is available in open formats, and it will make this a required standard for government websites.

* = Whether this standard is truly open is a matter of debate. Ed.

Government website compliance with open standards and open formats is a great change. It wasn’t always so and huge swathes of the Whitehall estate still run on proprietary.

It’s reckoned the UK Government spends some £600 mn./year on proprietary software licences. Will the new-found conversion to open source mean taxpayers money won’t be wasted paying any more Microsoft tax? We’ll have to see.

The action plan is available as a pdf or can be read online. There’s good BBC coverage too.

Finally, if the Minister is keen to show his commitment to open source, we’d be pleased to put Debian on his laptop for our usual consideration – even making him a coffee while he waits.

Regular readers will be aware of the activities or our DIY wifi enthusiast Tony whose adaptation of a humble USB wifi dongle have been documented here before (news passim).

Well, he’s been making further modifications… Bristol is not blessed with the most clement of climates, although its soggy grey skies prevent plenty of moisture for cultures of various kinds to flourish. Needless to say, some weather protection is required for both people and property. Here’s Tony’s low-cost answer for his DIY wifi rig.

That’s right, reader! It’s a baby’s feeding bottle.

However, let’s continue in Tony’s own words:

I have added a baby feed bottle to the home-made dongle enhance to allow it to be left out in the rain.

This addition reduces the incoming signal strength by about 2-3% !

Like a candidate running for political office over the pond, Honest Tone even gives it an endorsement…

I believe this to be acceptable and recommend this mod!

Tony, our DIY wifi devotee, has now sent me graphic evidence of the effectiveness his fan grille-enhanced USB dongle (news passim).

It’s fairly obvious from the image that there’s a clear signal boost to the dongle when attached to the grille (left-hand plot) than when used on its own (right-hand plot).

Ben, our server admin, has just announced the update of the Bristol Wireless Debian repositories.

As a preface, Ben wrote:

Debian 5.0 “Lenny” was released on Valentine’s Day, how sweet. I suspect that this has caused many break-ups as enthusiastic Debian Sys Admins rushed from candle-lit dinners to attend to their servers.*

Anyway, Ben informs us that our repositories have now been updated to cover the following releases:

• Etch (old stable)
• Lenny (stable)
• Squeeze (testing)
• Sid (unstable)

The naming of Squeeze continues the Debian tradition of calling releases after characters in the film Toy Story.

* Including you Ben? Ed.

The Wireless Community Weekend (WCW) hosted annually by Freifunk is taking place at the end of May (22.-24.05.2009) and will be staged once again at c-base in Berlin.

The event programme has not been firmed up yet and will be arranged by participants. Proposals for the programme can be submitted before the event.

Further details in English on WCW2009 can be found on the event wiki.

Hat tip: Global Freifunk. Read the original article (German).

Pete, the Chair of Bristol Wireless, has posted details to our daily mailing list of a petition on the 10 Downing Street website, requesting the British Prime Minister to promote greater use of open source software in UK schools. At present, use of free and open source software in schools is very much a minor pursuit, relying on the enthusiasm of individual schools’ teaching and IT staff.

The petition is worded as follows:

“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to make the primary operating system used in state schools free and open source.”

At Bristol Wireless we fully support the aims of the petition: using open source in education teaches the pupils about IT, not about how to use a certain widespread operating system (or how to be “button monkeys”, in the words of one of our more outspoken volunteers. Ed.). In addition, we’re no strangers to helping promote open source in education: in 2005 we took the mobile LTSP suite to HesFest – the home education festival (news passim) and this is documented in the HesFest video). In addition, we’ve also demonstrated the use of LTSP and free/open source software to schools in the Bristol area.

If you believe children would benefit from using free and open source in schools, the petition can be signed here.

After taking a well earned break in January, the first Dorkbot Bristol meeting of 2009 will be on the Tuesday, 17th February 2009 at the Pervasive Media Studio, Anchor Square (above the Firehouse Restaurant) from 7pm until 10pm. It’s a free event with donations accepted for refreshments.

It’ll be a ‘Show & Tell‘, an open invite to anyone to come along with something and enthuse about it for a few minutes: the ’something’ can be a piece of kit or an interesting project – it’s totally up to you. Organisers Mike and Rachel would also like someone from either Bristol Wireless or BBLUG to talk about a Linux topic for a short period (5 to 15 minutes). If you can help out, please contact them at dorkbotbristol at googlemail.com (replacing the at with the @ sign).

February’s Dorkbot will close with a musical extravaganza, this time in the form of a performance from Mark K (aka Red Rhythmic Dragon).

Download the February Dorkbot Bristol flyer if you fancy publicising the event.

See the Dorkbot Bristol site for full details.

I’ll see you there as I have a ‘Show & Tell‘ item to bring.