Snared...

One of the nasty parts about Wordfast is that from time to time, graphics go missing from translation documents. I noticed this at literally the last minute before I was set to send off my latest opus. Fortunately, there wasn't really much to do as far as translating the figures (a collection of individually drawn elements - lines, boxes, text boxes) was concerned, so I made a screen shot, cleaned it up a bit with Photoshop Elements, and pasted the missing items into the translation.

Displaying graphics in MS Word is not always a sure thing. I remember a case a while back where I translated a sizeable document (as in: multimegabyte) that referred to figures in the text but did not show any. (This was in Word 2003, and I even checked to make sure no figures were displayed in the original file I received for translation.) Sure enough, soon after submitting the file, I got a call asking why I hadn't translated the figures, which taught me to always ask/clarify/complain about things that don't appear to be right, especially when there is time to do so.

This latest document was loaded with surprises, including a bunch of text boxes that were almost impossible to find unless you were looking for them, as I was, and a bunch of double-bulleted bullet points that I hadn't noticed while actually translating. In the end, I could not devote my time to checking the quality of the translation (which ought to be pretty high to start with), because of all the mickeymouse crap I kept running into.

The wind howled loudly last night and the sky over the mountains looked dark and threatening when I finally heaved toward the kitchen to make some coffee. I can still hear the wind, although not as loudly. Galina has gone off to the store. I have a load of things to do as well.

Cheers...

Catching one's breath...

I have been fairly fortunate in avoiding worms and viruses furnished courtesy of various miscreants on the Internet, and have largely avoided any involvement aside from keeping virus and firewall software up to date, but when this latest brouhaha exploded regarding the Microsoft Windows Metafile exploit published over the weekend, I decided to take a closer look.

It turns out that WMFs were built to execute code, way back when Windows was just a youngster, meaning that the buzz right now is not about a Windows bug, but a Windows feature. It apparently doesn't take much to put together a metafile that looks like it should be a graphics file, but which will cause an error during the rendering process, in turn causing whatever someone else might want to execute on your computer.

Antivirus programs won't catch it; spyware blockers won't see it; firewalls can't stop it. One stopgap I saw published involved unregistering the DLL (dynamic link library) that renders such files (the command line is: regsvr32 /u shimgvw.dll), and the Internet Storm Center has taken the unprecedented step of endorsing an unofficial patch in advance of the currently scheduled official patch from Microsoft on or around January 10. I managed to unregister the DLL and run a patch installer on both my desktop and laptop. The ISC has published a pretty thorough FAQ on this issue.

Speaking of computers, the U3 USB device I bought a while back is beginning to bug me. It's supposed to work on Windows 2000 systems that have been patched to SR-4, which is what my desktop is up to, but whereas before, I would get a message from the U3 software to the effect that my system was not up to date, now the sofware simply does not work. (The drive installs and everything, but I can't take advantage of the U3 software on the device.) Too, installing the drive on my XP laptop tends to make Windows Explorer slow to a crawl (a couple of minutes to wait for a directory listing to be displayed in an appropriate window, unless I install the device before logging in).

I also took a look at the CSS style sheet of my work site and managed to ameliorate, somewhat, the ugliness that occurs when you load the site in Internet Explorer. There are still some spacing issues to address and the "bottom footer" looks like it's lost, but at least I don't have titles running into text, or fields looking raggedy on the page.

In any event, I got caught up in all of that after delivering the translation this morning and before going to the store to help with processing packages. I have yet to try a method I thought of at the store for invoicing this morning's job: do a comparison of the original and translated file so that revisions - i.e., my translations - are highlighted, and then do a search and replace to delete any text marked as deleted in revision mode and any text that I never touched (the stuff that started out in English). In theory, all I should be left with after such a S&R is text that I translated. We'll see.

It's been a long day.

Cheers...