Chief scribe
Bristol is well known for its links with natural history and wildlife. The city is the home to the BBC’s Natural History Unit and Bristol Zoo is celebrating its 175th anniversary this year. To build further on this base, there’s a Wikipedia sprint coming up soon in Bristol in aid of ARKive, the organisation dedicated […]
Our friends in the UK Ubuntu community want to hold more regular events in the real world, but don’t want to concentrate everything in one location. Consequently, they are going to hold an Ubuntu Hour at a pub in some part of the country roughly once a month. This way every couple of months everyone […]
As of the start of the new school year, all secondary schools in the Languedoc-Rousillon region of France will be equipped with laptops, according to local site Tout Montpellier. What’s more, the machines will be running free software. The 32,000 pupils who’ll be going back to school in September 2011 will receive a laptop linked […]
The Department of Defence has stepped up its push for open source software to reduce its A$100 million annual software licensing bill, IT News reports. Last week, it joined five other Australian government agencies in forming the Open Technology Foundation, which is aimed at facilitating collaboration and interoperable technology in the public sector. In January […]
The chief scribe had just been examining our website statistics, as provided by the excellent open source AWstats package (a contraction of Advanced Web statistics. Ed.), and thought readers may be interested in their revelations. For the first time since switching to a new host and a new platform (running the whole site on WordPress, […]
Kerala IT News writes that, as part of the 10th anniversary celebrations of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in India, the Technopark, Trivandrum-based International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS) recently held a consultation on ‘Future Directions of FOSS in India’ at Technopark, to establish future directions for use and promotion of […]
What happened on 25th August 1991? Well, it wasn’t when Sgt Pepper taught the band to play! 😀 Nope. definitely not. However, something very significant in the world of computing occurred on this very day 20 years ago. A young student in Helsinki named Linus Torvalds sent the following email to the Minix newsgroup: Hello […]
The H-Online reports that The GIMP, (in longhand, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. Ed.) the most widely used open source, cross-platform graphics program, is to gain a fully-functional single window mode with effect from the latest update to version 2.7.3. The news emerges from a news item from the program’s development team. In the single-window […]
OSOR reports that Experts on procurement involving open source software doubt the validity of a tender published by the Romanian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MAI) in July, which excluded solutions based on open source licences (news passim). The ministry’s justification of the ban “seems to be odd and not convincing and that makes me wonder […]
I’m writing this at the instigation of fellow UK Wikimedia member Matt Jukes following on from last week’s successful Bristol Girl Geeks vs Wikimeet event (news passim) with a few thoughts on a couple of the barriers to contributing to Wikipedia and its sister projects and raising the project’s woeful gender imbalance (87% male in […]
Last night saw another first in collaborative events in Bristol when Bristol Girl Geeks got together with a bunch of local Wikipedians plus trailblazing female Wikipedian Fiona Apps, who helps Wikimedia UK with outreach work (news passim). After we’d all got a glass of wine and some nibbles, Fiona was introduced and gave a brief […]
After the recent spate of revelations about Bristol City Council’s IT problems (news passim), it’s good to be able report some positive IT news from the Counts Louse. The Council’s new website, built upon the open source Drupal content management system (CMS), went live today and first impressions are very favourable: the new site looks […]
Saturday 17th September 2011 is Software Freedom Day (SFD). SFD is an event with hundreds of teams from all around the world running local events to help their communities understand Software Freedom. SFD is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The aim of SFD is to educate the general public about […]
John Honniball has today written to the BBLUG list with a reminder about tonight’s Dorkbot, as follows: A reminder for those who’d like to find out more about the goings-on at Dorkbot Bristol, that we’re meeting on Tuesday evening, 16th August, from 7pm, at the Pervasive Media Studio. This is above the Firehouse Pizzaria on […]
According to the Romanian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MAI), domestic Romanian and European interoperability requirements are forcing it to ban the use of open source software in building a criminal records management system. The explicit ban of software available under an open source licence is one of the requirements made by the ministry in the […]
According to Computerworld Denmark, hospitals in Denmark’s Copenhagen region are switching from Microsoft Office to the open source LibreOffice suite. The switch will involve some 25,000 desktops. Savings costs in the first year are estimated at DK 40 mn., equivalent to 5.3 mn. EUR or some £5 mn. In addition to the costs savings, the […]
Yesterday, 12th August, marked the 30th anniversary of the birth of the personal computer (PC). On 12th August 1981, IBM announced the launch of its 5150, subsequently called the IBM PC. The 5150 was originally released with a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 CPU, 16 KB of RAM, 2 x 5¼ floppy drives and a 80 […]
Yesterday we reported on the troubled history of Bristol City Council’s troubled efforts to implement its open source strategy with the ‘assistance’ of Computacenter, one of the country’s largest suppliers of proprietary Microsoft products (news passim). Today Mark Ballard of Computer Weekly has published a new post on the affair, which highlights, inter alia, the […]
Some weeks ago we gave advance notice of the forthcoming Bristol Girl Geek Dinners and Wikipedia event on Thursday 18th August (news passim). Further details have now emerged. It’s being held at the Merchant Venturers Building, University of Bristol, Woodland Road, Bristol, BS8 1UB (map) and starts at 7.00 pm. The main aim of the […]
OSOR reports that the Brazilian Government signed a letter of intent last month to work with both The Document Foundation and the Apache OpenOffice.org community to develop the office suites maintained by both communities. The letter states that the Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) standard is already a guarantee of interoperability within the […]