One long night...

...and it ain't over yet.

Everything has proceeded smoothly, with little noise and fuss. For some reason, yesterday's report from the Moscow MCC never got translated, so I ended up translating two reports today.

This is no big deal, especially now, because first of all, activity helps keep the dreaded sandman at bay, and second, the report has become significantly shorter (and hence, clearer) since I was here last.

Things got off to a rocky start, though, as none of my passwords would get me into where I needed to be. Fortunately, I was able to get the password reset in short order (and also found out my account needs to be renewed by this coming Friday).

The room in which I work hasn't changed much. There are a few more pictures on the wall, including one of the current crew of Bill McArthur and Valery Tokarev (both of whom I have worked with in the past). And it appears to me that someone has moved the photographic poster of Yuri Gagarin out of the corner so that it's a bit more visible and almost dead centered on the interpreter's desk. Fortunately, it's not one of those shots where the subject was looking at the lens when the exposure was taken, so it's not as if Yuri follows you around the room or anything. Still...

There's about 20 minutes left until the morning handover, so I better go get ready. I'll need to prepare a few minutes more than usual, to make up for not having been around for a few months.

Cheers...

Beds and rates...

When I got back from the MCC this morning, there were piles of mattresses in the parking lot, and I was too slow to realize that the hotel was replacing all of the mattresses in all rooms, including mine. Fortunately - or not - I had to go visit one of our tenants whose heater had quit, so I was able to give the hotel some time to replace the mattress before I headed back to go to sleep.

Silly me, of course they hadn't finished by the time I got back!

Anyway, my old mattress is now back on the box spring, and I am seriously contemplating hitting the sack here shortly.

* * *One phrase that makes my blood run cold is a request by a translation company for me to come up with my "best price," typically based on some humongous volume of promised work. I've come to associate requests for that elusive "best price" as requests for laughably low rates that represent huge discounts from what one might normally charge.

I'll say it again: translation does not benefit from "economy of scale." Generally speaking, translating twice the words takes twice the time and it takes as much effort to compose a sentence when you are being paid n cents per word as if does to compose that sentence when you are being paid 2n cents each for those same words. Therefore, in my opinion, discounted rates are to be measured in percentages maxing out in the vicinity of 10%, and then only for truly remarkable amounts of work.

Happily, though, one company that had asked for my "best rate" called me this morning, and responded quite reasonably when I quoted my standard rate. Another company that had inquired about that same rate is, I am told, in something of a bind where they are probably going to have to engage any and all Russian-to-English translators to make an insane deadline on an insane volume of text. I sent them an email quoting my standard rate, but have not heard anything back yet.

Then there is the client I mentioned the other day, who today sent me a lengthy job and well and truly had les couilles to ask me if I'd be willing to accept payment on the basis of the source word count instead of the customary target count. I suggested that I'd be happy to do so if they raised the per-word charge by 20% to account for expansion, which would give them the ability to know in advance how much a document would cost to translate (ostensibly the reason for this change in policy), though frankly it would still leave me a bit on the short end of the stick in cases where the expansion actually exceeded 20% (most of the time, I suspect).

Call it experience, but I didn't think I was risking anything by going more than halfway to meet the client in this instance, because the answer was predictably uncompromising: sorry, we're offering the same work at the same rate per word, only we intend to pay you significantly less because we are basing payment on a significantly smaller word count. Are any concessions being offered to the poor translator, such as longer deadlines? Nope.

As you might expect, I am not doing this assignment at a 20% discount, either now or in the future.

As I'm typing this, the Outpost firewall is logging port scans at a rate of about one per minute, so I better post this and get offline, so that whoever is screwing around can go bother someone else.

Cheers..

Five hours plus...

...of sleep, I think. Maybe even six. I can function at that level.

My inbox contains no responses to any of the emails I sent before hitting the hay, which signifies... nothing much at all. No news, as they say, is good news.

* * *TrueCrypt is an interesting open source application that claims to deliver a high-quality solution to the issue of data encryption. I say "claims" because nobody in their right mind ever offers a program to explicitly provide crappy encryption, and yet the history - particularly the early history - of microcomputing is littered with the corpses of encryption programs that came with impressive marketing materials but truly awful, mickeymouse algorithms.

Basically, TrueCrypt operates by creating a data file - call it a metafile - that is then "mounted" as a disk on your computer (shows up with its own letter 'n everything in MyComputer). This metafile contains data that - to all intents and purposes - appears random whether or not you've got any data in it to encrypt. When you save files to the mounted TrueCrypt disk (i.e., to the drive that is the metafile), the data in the metafile still looks like a bunch of random data. According to the documentation, there is no information saved with the metafile that gives any clue as to what kind of data is in the file or what kind of encryption algorithm was used to create the encrypted data.

What I find appealing about this approach is the ability to have multiple such metafiles that can be stored off-site (indeed, there's a beta service out there called Mozy that will store up to 2 GB of data for you for free, but even though they say they encrypt the data to keep it from the eyes of prying third parties, the True Paranoid™ will want to encrypt any such data before the Mozy software gets its grubby little subroutines on it, but I digress...).

As I mentioned, lots of encryption programs that have been touted as having "unbreakable" encryption have been subsequently shown to be not so unbreakable, to one extent or another. (Even the venerable Pretty Good Privacy program has come in for its share of criticism.) So, on a whim, a few minutes ago I searched Google to see what kinds of critical assessments of TrueCrypt had been published recently. I've saved the page offline, to be pursued at a time when I have little else to do.

One incidental that did amuse me was a comment by one Nitesh Dahnjani regarding the application's capability for creating a so-called "hidden volume."

The "hidden volume" feature takes advantage of the fact that the entire metafile looks like a collection of random data. (In other words, the result of storing a 1K file inside a 100 MB metafile looks pretty much the same storing 99.9 MB of files inside the same file.) Given this fact, the application has the capability of creating a second random-looking file within the metafile that can also be used to store data. (Is your head dizzy yet? Hang on, we're almost there!)

The idea here is that you could encrypt the Really Important Stuff™ in the hidden volume, along with some files that merely Look Important™ in the "standard" volume. Theoretically, faced with a choice of giving up the password to your encrypted file or, say, one or two fingers, you can reluctantly blurt out the password that gives the Bad Guys™ only the innocuous files, and who's to know that there may actually be additional encrypted files in the volume?

Answers Nitesh: Anyone who has read the documentation!

This means, BTW, that if you have not created a hidden volume within the standard file, your Honorable Adversary™ will probably feel obligated to break out (and use) the battery cables, tin snips, and other assorted doodads in an honest, due-diligence effort to get that other - and, sadly, nonexistent - password from you.

Quoting Hannibal Lector, "Goody, goody."

How did I get off on that tangent? I need to get ready to go to work.

Cheers...