A nice, quiet day...

And productive, too, although it's more due to the nature of the document I'm working on, as opposed to anything else.

The "heavy" part of the assignment I'm working on now is an 80-page user manual for an application developed at the All-Russian Scientific-Research Institute of Experimental Physics. As manuals go, I can almost translate this one at near-light speed (I've done 20 pages today, and I started late :^), but I'm being held back by the figures.

There are 120 figures in this document (it says so in the introduction), and each of them is a screen shot of a dialog box or something similar, and each such figure needs to be translated. Although I need not actually edit the graphics, the work is enough of a pain to slow me down considerably. In fact, I've started to simply leave space for the figure "key" tables that will show the correspondence of Russian and English text.

* * *I'm reinstalling RedHat 7.1 on my Linux box because during my last install, I apparently set the security level too high, which tells the installation software, apparently, not only to not enable, say, the ftp daemon on the machine, but to not install it at all! I'm sure, given enough free time (something I am not too awash in right now), I could shoehorn stuff like ftp in by hand (been there, done that, got the tee shirt, and the worn-out shirt is collecting oil under the car, ok?). There wasn't anything worth keeping on the machine to begin with, anyway (nothing that hadn't been backed up).

Which reminds me: the next time I do a backup of a directory from a Linux box, make sure you set things up to copy the files that start with a dot (and this family includes most configuration files). I took a look at my old CD of files saved from my old masquerading server and noticed that all of the dot-files are absent. Ye gods.

Anyway, I think I'll put in another hour or so on the translation and then kick back and relax... if I can remember how to.

Cheers...

A chortling we'll go...

In obeisance to one's initial contact with frustration, I conform as well as the next well-bred citizen to the real scouting motto:

When in trouble, when in doubt...
Run in circles, scream and shout!

After a moment's fun, though, it's time to turn to, and see what can be done to salvage the situation.

A bothersome nit kept bobbing just under the surface of my consciousness, like a bone in a stew. Finally, it hit me... the Linux backup CDs I looked at earlier in the day were not the most recent ones. I had, in fact, been looking at (probably) the most recent one just the other day to get at a Perl script.

After having put up my translation for the day, I went through my CDs, and in the process realized that their organization (or lack thereof) was worse than I remembered it.

Add that as a to-do for the new year.

In any event, I finally found what I was looking for, in the place I had left it (in the CD drive on the eSlate). And... my old configuration files are frozen happily on the disk.

* * *After reinstalling RH 7.1, I really don't see much of a difference, except that there is now an ftp daemon where one is supposed to be. I had to go in and enable the poor thing, though, and then stop and restart xinitd so I could actually ftp into the machine.

Now, if only I could solve important problems as easily!

Cheers...