AlexPGP's Corner

My attempt the other day to install Ubuntu 9.04 ("Jaunty Jackalope") on an old Dell ultimately failed because it partially succeeded on the first try, as far as I can tell.

That likely sounds paradoxical, but I've seen this problem before - years ago, in fact, during an attempt to install a version of Mandrake Linux - and it's associated with the installer's steadfast refusal to delete or format an existing partition that has the software to be installed (or a part of it) already on it, so if you screw up the initial install, the installer will simply go around in circles until the old software is removed by some agency other than that of the installer.

I solved the problem by booting with an old Knoppix CD and deleting the offending partition, after which the Ubuntu installation went smoothly, if slowly. The Dell is clunky, what can I say?

It also doesn't have wireless capability, so today, I hooked the Dell up to the router I used some time ago in Houston that acted as a bridge to the router I use as my gateway (i.e., the one connected to my broadband provider). But in attempting to link the two, I inadvertently (read: carelessly) caused my gateway router to link to what turned out to be a neighbor's DSL connection (which is quite some distance away, BTW), and nothing I tried would unlink the two.

So, seeing as it's been a couple of years since I refreshed the firmware on my gateway router anyway (I replaced the factory firmware with a package called DD-WRT back when I bought the thing), I went ahead and updated the firmware to the latest stable version, blissfully ignorant of how I might reestablish a connection to my broadband hardware.

Yeah, one of those small details that, left unattended, leave you dead in the water.

I vaguely recall the installers giving me a piece of paper that might have the appropriate instructions on it (including, say, a password). But unsurprisingly, I can't put my hands on that scrap of paper, so recovering my "main" connectivity will have to wait until tomorrow morning.

In the meantime, it's nice to know I have a data plan in place via my BlackBerry! :^)

Cheers...

Clicking on my Traveldrive icon after inserting it in a USB port would get me an "Application not found" error message, though I could get at the contents of the device in other ways.

Logic dictated that something was trying run, but the operating system couldn't find it. A virus scan gave the device a clean bill of health, which was a good start. Then, after doing some Googling, I scanned the device for an autorun.inf file, but there wasn't any such file in evidence, nor was there after I enabled viewing hidden files.

In the end, it turned out that I had neglected to uncheck "Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)." When I did that, an autorun.inf file suddenly appeared, wanting to run something that's not on my system (I hope). The file is deleted, and the device now works the way it used to.

I wonder, to whom did I lend my Traveldrive on August 15?

Cheers...

I got up at 4 am because I woke up and couldn't fall asleep again. I fired up my computer and decided to download the Trinity Rescue Kit, to see if it can be of any help in diagnosing a problem with one of the two "guest kiosk" computers downstairs in the lobby. While I was at it, I checked my email to see if there was any response from A2 (which hosts my work domain). There was. The message read:

Because you have extra MX entries could you please make sure that the primary domain in the mx record is supposed to be galexi.com?

Maybe it was the early hour, I don't know, but this message didn't make much sense to me.

See, soon after switching hosting companies, I added my webmail provider's mail exchanger servers to the MX records for my work domain at A2. In any event, as I didn't really grok the message, I responded with:

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. The MX entries for galexi.com are:

	0	galexi.com
->	5	in1.smtp.messagingengine.com
	10	in2.smtp.messagingengine.com

Where the second line has a graphic at its start that says "to" with an arrow pointing at the contents of the second line.

Can you provide more detail in your instruction? Thank you.

While I was waiting, I played around with some of the other features of the A2 control panel having to do with email and tried to understand what was going on. For some reason, between language on the configuration page that said

Changing your MX to something besides galexi.com will prevent us from managing your mail. Your email will no longer be sent to this server.

and messages that read, for example,

The MX entry for galexi.com has been changed to in1.smtp.messagingengine.com (priority 5) This server will NOT serve as a mail exchanger for your domain's mail.

(where I interpreted "this server" in both messages to mean A2's server), as well as that little graphic pointing at the second of three MX record entries (which I thought meant mail would be sent there, instead of to the first item in the list), I was convinced that, having adding the MX records per my webmail provider's instructions, the job was done.

So what was the message from A2's tech support trying to say, I wondered? Why would I want galexi.com to be the primary domain?

While waiting for a response from the tech, I decided to rearrange the priorities of the records, and in doing so, ended up (temporarily) with four entries for my domain and guess what? The little graphic moved to between the second and third entries! It wasn't pointing to the second entry at all! Here's my next message to tech support:

It would appear that the "to" graphic with the right-pointing arrow merely is centered vertically in the table cell, so it only appears to point to the second line when there are three lines in the cell. That would mean that the primary domain in the MX record is already galexi.com (with a priority of 0), no?

I checked how much of the 250 MB "quota" I had used for my account. It had risen from 2.37 MB yesterday to 2.44 MB today. I added that information to my email, suggested that it indicated receipt and storage of my mail on the A2 server (the A2 webmail didn't work, for some reason, when I tried it yesterday, which I ascribed to the general problem of mail not working), and sent the message off, letting the tech know that I would be experimenting with rearranging priorities, in case he started working on my ticket and found the configuration to be different from what I had stated in the earlier email.

A few minutes later, I sent the following email:

Changing the priority of galexi.com away from 0 appears to do the trick.

Upon rereading your instruction, I believe you are trying to say something along those lines (i.e., if you want mail to go to the messagingengine MX entries, galexi.com should not be your primary MX record).

Pardon my curiosity, but are you based in the United States?

In retrospect, I probably could have asked about the guy's native language in a more direct and more tactful way (his name suggests he is German), but hey! what's done is done and I think I've asked politely.

Mail works now. I think. YAAY!

Back to sleep. I'm the "on call" interpreter today, so my job is to hang out at the hotel and field hot issues. Here's keeping my fingers crossed.

Cheers...

Today has been one of those dippy stay-away-from-your-computer days, which you realize is ongoing only after having been at your computer most of the day.

My first attempt to download the final version of the latest Ubuntu CD (v. 8.04) stopped for no reason after downloading just over 500MB. A second attempt gave up the ghost after downloading 520 MB when my browser suddenly died when I unplugged my MP3 player.

Said MP3 player - a Sansa e260 - used to connect to my VAIO with no problem, but now that I have an RMA number to send the player back and have the manufacturer address a flaky earphone jack, I'd like to wipe the content before I send for what will undoubtedly be a replacement. Today, when I plugged the unit in, suddenly XP decides I need something called an MTP driver, without which the only thing that happens while the e260 is connected via its USB cable is charging of the player's battery.

That, and maybe some kind of computer-y Rube Goldberg chain of events that crashes Firefox after having downloaded 90% of a CD image.

I've restarted my Ubuntu download, at the breath-stopping rate of about 16 kB per second, which means someone could tie a CD to the back of a chipmunk in Seattle and have it run to New York and I'd probably be greeting the little rodent before the download was complete. (I think I'm going to go try a torrent next time rather than attempt to link directly to a mirror. Life is too short.)

Cheers...

(UPDATE: Things may be turning around. I found a setting on the e260 to change USB mode, which I did, whereupon things now work the way I remember them working... though I am currently running from the VAIO's Linux partition, in the previous version of Ubuntu, which I fired up because BitComet froze when I started it up under Windows, which prompted me to shut XP down. Oh, bother...)

(UPDATE: Downloading directly from a site in Denmark is proceeding at about 400 kB per second.)

In my opinion, the use of translation memory programs makes sense if done so by the translator in the privacy of his or her office. Once you get an agency involved, the concept pretty much goes into the toilet.

Case in point: the use of Déjà Vu, which encodes various "events" occurring in the source text by embedding codes {239}like this{240} as place markers for italics, boldface, or whatnot. The only problem with that is that sometimes you end up with absolutely horrid segmentation, where words are not only have markers i{26}nse{28}{29}rted willy{30}-{31}nilly{32} inside of them, but

senten{1074}ces {356}are o{357}

ften {1075}d{358}ivided {359}arbi

trarily{360} amo{853}ng

sev{361}eral s{362}e{363}gments, {666}too

Aaargh!

My proposed solution is going to be to consolidate such sentences into one table cell, do the best I can with the embedded codes, and put "see above' in every emptied cell, so as to at least get paid something for all the extra work. (I've just emailed the client with this proposal.)

In the meantime, seeing as how 36,000 of the 40,000 words in the assignment are in such a file, I'm going to have to spend some serious time writing macros to make the work possible.

Just my luck.

Cheers...

UPDATE: Client approves!

UPDATE: I had forgotten how much fun it is to work with 237-page long tables in Word!

Permit me to vent.

If I previously thought that Excel was the world's worst choice for creating a document for translation, then now I am so convinced of this as to make the convictions of the truest of true believers pale by comparison.

I do believe this is the first time I've blown a deadline because of... let me be brutally frank... my collossal and inexcusable ignorance of just how limited a product Excel actually is.

It turns out, you see, that if you paste the contents of a Word table cell into an Excel worksheet, the contents may or may not end up one worksheet cell. I found this out when I tried pasting a table column from Word into Excel, with very disappointing results: every hard and soft carriage return caused a cell partition in Excel, and there is no convenient way of merging the contents of cells in Excel (of course, that's understandable, as spreadsheet tables are not text tables).

Getting rid of the hard/soft carriage returns in Word helps, but Excel still insists on splitting cell contents at unpredictable points.

Paste options do not help (for a minute, I thought my problems had been solved, but that was an illusion).

And lo, when I tried to record an Excel macro, it turns out that instead of using what I would call the Word model ("Move into a cell, enter edit mode, select the text, copy the text, exit edit mode, move up one cell, enter edit mode, go to the end of the text in the cell, type Alt-Enter, paste the previously copied text, exit edit mode"), Excel is much more literal ("Select cell A108, paste the string 'xxxxxxxx', where 'xxxxxxxx' is the string resulting from all that cutting and pasting), resulting in what would appear to be a use-once macro.

I'm probably just not "literate" enough in Excel to do what needs to be done, but it just seems to me that so little of Excel is intuitive at all.

In short, at worst, I'm looking at completely retranslating about 6000 words and doing it by hand, because the client wants the English to appear under the original Russian text. I can (and did) get the job done in Word, after a whole lot of heaving and grunting. However, now, it turns out I can't move the result back into Excel, short of actually retyping the entire farblegargling thing.

I am so angry, it's not funny.

Cheers...

The client for the current translation sent me a file and some kind of program to help with "suggested translations."

The setup doesn't work with Wordfast (I'm not too sure it'll work with Trados, either, but I'm not wasting time finding out), but deleting just the auxiliary program didn't help much.

(At least I think I deleted the auxiliary program, what droppings of it I could find.)

The idea of the add-on program is to allow you to double-click on pre-highlighted terms in the source text, which brings up a popup window with suggested translations. This is a nice idea in principle, but the execution, um, is somewhat lacking.

It turns out that the auxiliary program merely enables information previously embedded in the source file to be displayed in the popup. As mentioned before, this plays merry hell with Wordfast, but to add blunt trauma to injury, the suggested translations aren't exactly confidence-inspiring (e.g., "treaty provisions" is suggested for "положения договора" instead of the expected "contract provisions").

The information was embedded within MACROBUTTON fields in the text, which can be searched for (thank goodness) and deleted, and they have. Now I can get down to the gruesome work of translating roughly 20,000 words (and "editing" some 4,000 more embedded in TM segments) words by next Monday.

In other news, I've set up proust, my old VAIO, next to my work machine, to display the information in the marked up file (in case deleting the fields was a bad idea somewhere along the way), as well as that in a couple of huge reference files that were supplied by the client. Along the way, I tried to get proust connected to my local wireless network, but that required me to change the type of encryption used by my routers, because proust didn't support WPA-PSK using AES encryption (only TKIP).

Once that was accomplished, I was flummoxed by the fact that, despite having assigned addresses 192.168.55.xxx to my local network, proust was being assigned the IP address 192.168.1.102 by the router's DHCP server, which didn't help matters at all. In the end, it turned out that long ago, I had permanently assigned proust the 102 address in the router; once I deleted that specification, proust acquired a proper address.

* * *Forget Iraq, avian flu, or getting hit by a rock from outer space. The big news currently 'round these parts is the $370 million jackpot in the Mega Millions game. Wikipedia has an educational article on the subject, among which information is the chance of winning The Big One (1 in 175,711,536). With that probability, you actually have a positive mathematical expectation of winning money when you buy a ticket.

Of course, you're competing with players in eleven other states, too.

The Texas Lottery people have been running an ad recently, thanking the good citizens of the state for having dropped $9 billion into the coffers for education (supposedly) over some period of recent time. Whether that's what actually went into education or whether its the sum prior to what a certain Signor Ferrari called "handling charges" is not clear to me. The sum is, however, pretty impressive, though I wonder what it bought?

* * *I am currently 2500 words into my daily self-imposed quota of 4000 source words. I've been struggling with the text, but managed almost 700 words over a recent 50 minute stretch. At that rate, I could nail today's bag in two hours.

We'll see.

Cheers...

Microsoft Word just informed me that my disk is full. This is the first time I've seen that message in years.

Unfortunately, strange as it is to say, I have about 10 GB of free space on the disk, according to Explorer. I also have nearly a gig of free space on my thumb drive, which Word also says is full. (The file I'm working with, BTW, weighs in at about a half-megabyte.)

I had no choice but to exit the file "without saving it."

I think I will reboot the machine.

Cheers...

UPDATE: Whatever was the problem is no longer around. Upon reopening the file, I note that I apparently made quite a bit of progress since my previous save, based on where my work stops in the "most previously recent" version of the file! I cannot describe how thrilled I am to have lost that effort (well, not all of it... just the formatting part, which is what took most of the time in the first place). Ye gods. It is important to keep in mind that I wouldn't be so sensitive to such incidents if Word wasn't, in the end, so confoundedly useful!

I woke up around an hour ago, after about 4 hours of sleep. I plan to go for a bike ride shortly, then try to sleep for a couple of hours before going back into work.

It's "official": I called Verizon Wireless tech support to find if they could give me some pointers regarding the use of my BlackBerry's data capability via Linux, and the short answer is: no. Could they tell me what modem initialization string is used to activate the phone's modem feature? Same answer. Ah, well...

I have found some information regarding an initialization string that must be sent to the phone before dialing, and I understand the mechanism of embedding said string in a script file that is executed prior to dialing, but I just don't have the patience to go through all that now.

I'm off to go for a walk.

Cheers...

I've suffered through three BSOD so far today, and along with "old faithful" (IRQL_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL), I've started to notice errors such as PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA. Grrr.

I am too busy to stop and figure out what's causing it, and too cheap to hire anyone to fix it (not to mention the preliminary step of vetting any such person's abilities... there are stories out there involving people who are supposed to be professionals that'd curl your hair! But I digress...).

This last go-around, I removed one of the memory boards and set the lowest possible CPU speed in the BIOS, although I can't say I've noticed any reduction in temperature as a result. Knowing it is a direct invitation for Murphy to lend a hand in the proceedings, I will confidently - heh! - state that so far (20 minutes), I have not experienced any more problems.

However, I have almost 2500 words to go before hitting today's self-imposed deadline, and to that end, I've declined an additional over-the-transom assignment, sight unseen. (I would have declined it even without the computer problems.) Once I finish today's quota, I will start packing for the move.

Cheers...