From the silicon front...

I tried running the Adaptec software for the Iomega CD-RW again last night, except this time, instead of a 4x write speed, I selected the 2x speed. I figured maybe 4x was just too fast for my machine to keep up, suspecting maybe the USB port - which is card-mounted and not integral to the motherboard - might be not as perky as it should be.

It worked. I cleaned off about a half-gig of miscellaneous files last night, and before I left for the store this morning, I lined up another 600 MB of photos for archiving.

I also decided that I had had about enough of FreeBSD on what I persist in calling my "Linux" box. I got out the Linux Mandrake 7.2 disks and got to the point in the install where files start to get copied onto the hard disk, when.... blam! I get an error message.

Something is not right with some file somewhere. I retry the install, this time in text mode. Same problem.

Okay. Let's go to plan B. I put away the 7.2 disks and retrieve the 7.1 disks. All goes well with the install, up to the point where it asks me to put in the "Extensions" CD. I don't have one, but the screen says that I don't really need one. I hit "Cancel" and the machine begins to churn, probably unpacking the archives copied to the disk so far.

I get a divide by zero error.

Suspecting that perhaps the default partitioning of the disk left too little room in the root directory, I restart the install and repartition the disk so that about 60% belongs to "/" and the rest (except for a 250 MB swap partition) belongs to "/home".

Everything goes as before, except after the files are unpacked, I am asked to install the "Applications" CD.

I have one of those, but the CD won't open to let me put it in.

Against my better judgment, I use a paper clip to force the CD drive open. I put in the Applications CD and close the door.

The machine freezes.

Feh.

The install documentation, as is seemingly traditional with Linux, is useless. It describes a process that only generally resembles what the computer screen is asking me to do.

Moreover, this is time-consuming. What starts out as an initial estimate of 40 minutes or so to install the system rapidly climbs to over 80 minutes and stays there. At least FreeBSD installed quickly. (On the plus side, it gave me an opportunity to read the first 50 pages or so of Cryptonomicon, and it looks like it's going to be a good read.)

Drew will come at around 11 with the mail today, and I'll probably go home at noon and work on a translation until closing time. We'll then go to Durango, where we will gather provisions for the upcoming week (or at least a few days). Tomorrow will be devoted to cleanup and translation (that should make for an interesting day).

Cheers...

About that Izvestia article...

The more I think back on that article by Maria Treshchanskaya, I think the author misses the whole point of online journaling, or else has an axe of her own to grind.

From what I can see from my perhaps-too-narrow vantage point (I journal only here on LJ), I think the vast majority of people who post their thoughts online are not trying to impersonate anyone, at least not in the sense of creating persons out of whole cloth or making believe they are someone famous.

This segues neatly into the oft-explored question of whether and to what extent any public, online journal reflects the writer's "true" self, but that is a question for another time.

Cheers...

A well-spent afternoon...

I went home at noon, leaving Drew in charge of the store. After a quick lunch, I sat down and attacked the first translation.

The document was a letter addressed to a member of my client's staff. What was unusual about the file was that a translation was prepended to the Russian text. The recipient had sent the document out for translation because the English translation was, um, difficult to read.

And no wonder. It's a machine translation.

The translated letter opens:

I write you about one problem irrelevant with subjects of our current correspondence. Above this problem, I have though some time ago. My opinions I has impart to Mr. A and Mr. B. It would be desirable also to discuss this questions with you.

After I read the original Russian, this is what I produced:

I am writing to you about an issue that is not related to the themes of our ongoing correspondence. I got to thinking about this issue some time ago, have shared my views with Mr. A and Mr. B, and would like to discuss them with you as well.

What I find noteworthy about the machine translation is that, although it is pretty bad, it is not as bad as what one could expect of software from, say, five years ago.

In other words, the state of the art is progressing.

Many of my colleagues dismiss machine translation with derision, maintaining that a computer program will never be able to do as good a job as a human. Maybe so. Maybe that ought to be slightly modified, to read: "as an experienced human translator."

But will it be good enough?

By analogy, let me zip across the epistemological firmament and talk a bit about chess.

The late Claude Shannon described the overall design of a chess-playing computer back before 1950. Practical implementation of the idea was, of course, a ludicrous notion at the time.

"A machine would never be able to play chess," said the skeptics, "or at least, not a creditable game of chess. Certainly never a good game of chess." All sorts of reasons were given, the most convincing being one that borrowed a bit of chess lore about the number of possible ways the first dozen or so moves could be played. That number has a lot of zeros in it and can only begin to be comprehended by noting that if each atom in the known universe made one move every second, then all of them together, working in parallel, would require several billion years to exhaust all the possibilities... just for the first dozen moves or so.

Then, around 1970, a bunch of students at MIT (if memory serves) were allowed to enter a computer program they'd written - named MacHack IV - as a contestant in a USCF-sponsored chess tournament. Out of six games, it lost five and drew one; its first provisional rating was 1100 or so, which put it at the rank beginner level.

But it drew a game against a human who was not particularly interested in making academic points, but caissic ones.

The skeptics drew back. "An 1100 player is a patzer. Chess programs will never beat a master...certainly a program will never beat a grandmaster."

I remember sometime in the 80s, the English International Master David Levy bet something like 20,000 pounds that, five years hence, no program would exist that could beat him. Five years later, he won the bet, but declined to renew it.

A couple of years ago, a massively parallel computer - "Big Blue" - put away Garry Kasparov, the then-reigning World Champion.

Machine translation has come a long was since "out of sight, out of mind" was rendered as "blind lunatic" back in the early days. The text I saw today was unintelligible to the average user, but as I examined it, I saw the spark of something.

Is my job safe for the foreseeable future? I think so, and probably for the next 20 years as well. I just have to stay... one... step... ahead.

By the way, I got the job done in plenty of time to go with Drew and Shannon to Durango to stock up on staples. Among other goodies, I got the 7.1 version of Red Hat's "Deluxe Workstation" software, which is installing right now as I lay these lines down on phosphor. I decided to play it safe and have the installer reformat the disk and do a disk scan. Unlike the Mandrake product, the overall install time (excluding the format) has not risen above 34 minutes for the whole shebang, and there's only about 5 minutes left in the process, according to the screen.

Tomorrow will be devoted to clean-up and the other assignment I have to do. I've already asked Drew to be prepared to handle the store single-handedly on Monday and Tuesday, while I attend to translations. He responded by reserving Wednesday morning for a trip to Durango with Shannon and her mom.

The install is almost complete... gotta go.

Cheers...