Bored Trados users ?

For bored Trados users who want to work in a free software environment, here are the latest news:

1) OmegaT is able to translate TTX files that have source=target (output option if I am not mistaken), that requires a small utility called Toxic, to be found here:
http://www.omegat.org/resources/toxic.zip

2) It is possible to deliver "cleaned/uncleaned" file sets by translating the file in OmegaT and processing the resulting TMX in OpenOffice.org with the Anaphraseus macro (a Wordfast equivalent for OOo). The discussion about the process is here:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/OmegaT/message/14705

And Anaphraseus is here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/anaphraseus/

自由に翻訳！

That is the title of an article I wrote in Japanese about OmegaT.

The article was published in the 45th issue of the AAMT Journal. I've put a copy of the article online, here: 自由に翻訳！

The article is not an introduction to using OmegaT, if you want the introduction, download OmegaT and start it. You'll have a tutorial in the language of your OS.

Download link: OmegaT_2.0.3_Beta.dmg

OmegaT in Kyoto on July 11th

I'll be making a presentation about OmegaT at the "Open Source Conference 2009 Kansai" on the 11th of July, from 11.15 to 12.00.

http://www.ospn.jp/osc2009-kansai/

People who can't make it for the seminar are welcome to the OmegaT "booth" where I'll be from Friday morning.

Bash (command line) shortcuts

Until today, I only used the following shortcuts on the command line:

ctrl+a → go to beginning of line
ctrl+e → go to end of line
ctrl+k → delete to end of line

And even though I was very frustrated by the fact that I had to use
the mouse to select/copy/paste etc, it never really occured to me to
google for "bash command line shortcuts"...

To make it short: bash uses the readline library.

The user documentation for readline is at:
http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/php/chet/readline/rluserman.html

All the shortcuts that exist on your machine can be found by using the
'bind' command:
$ bind -P | more
You'll have more shortcuts with:
$ bind -p | more
If you want to know how to use 'bind' to add shortcuts, check its help
file:
$ help bind

Select/cut/paste require to first bind a shortcut to "kill-region":
$ bind "\C-xx": kill-region
(ctrl+x followed by x)

Now we need to select the string (create a "region").

A region is automatically created between a "mark" and the cursor. So, we only need to put the mark at one end of the region and to move the cursor
to the other end.

To create a mark use: ctrl+@ or ctrl+space,
then move the cursor, then hit ctrl+xx to "kill" the
region.

Pasting requires ctrl+y.

But, the ctrl-y (Yank/paste) command works only within
the application from where the string was "killed". The "kill-ring" is
not shared by other applications (even though they may accept
ctrl-y as a Yank command).

So, if you want to get a string from terminal and paste it outside
(like select a command and paste it into a mail for ex), here is
something that may not be the most efficient way to go, but it works:

echo string | pbcopy
or
echo "complex string" | pbcopy

For ex, to put the above line in the pastebpard, I'd do:
echo "echo \"complex string\" | pbcopy" | pbcopy

Static electricity and your fan...

My fan started to blow like crazy yesterday. But it was not really blowing in fact. It was just making a lot of noise. A little bit like when those little model planes take off... Since my MacBook is not equipped for flying I understood something was very wrong. I was doing CPU intensive things when all this started... Like (re)install the trial version of iWork' 09 and simultaneously move 3 gb of data to my external disk...

I did not sleep well last night. The prospect of having to complete 3 translations on my backup machine (an old Titanium) while the MacBook was sent to repairs -for the 4th time- was not making me very cheerful.

I called Apple support this morning and they told me this fan problem could be triggered by static electricity.

The procedure to solve that is as follows:

1. turn the machine off
   
2. unplug it
   
3. remove the battery
   
4. press the start button for more than 10 seconds
   
5. plug the machine and put the battery back
   
6. press Command+Option+P+R simultaneously right after pressing the start button
   

The machine is supposed to emit 2 long beeps after booting and then starts normally.

I did not have 2 beeps, instead of that the MacBook entered a just as scary cycle of reboots. So I eventually stopped pressing the keys, and the machine decided to stop pedaling with my nerves and properly boot.

Now, the fan seems to behave properly. I'll hopefully be able to complete the jobs without having to send the machine to repairs... Only 5 months left on my AppleCare !!!

iWork 09, no backward compatibility...

I just downloaded the iWork '09 trial package. Reports on the net mention its enhanced Applescript support, its new looks and new functions.

Pages '09 opens Pages '08 files without difficulties and can save into that format (see the new Share menu), but the new format cannot be opened in Pages '08.

A Pages '08 was basically a folder with a .pages extention. You could go to Terminal and do a:

$ cd file_name.app


to find the following list of files:

$ ls
Contents QuickLook index.xml.gz


where both Contents and Quicklook were folders with files in them, while the file itself was a gz-compressed XML file (index.xml.gz)


Now, the same file created by Pages '09 would have a totally different structure.

Where file_name.pages was a folder containing compressed data in Pages '08, the file is a compressed folder containing normal files.

To see what it looks like, change the .pages extension to .gz and double-click that file. The result is a folder with the following files:


$ ls
QuickLook buildVersionHistory.plist index.xml


Quicklook is still a folder with a PDF (Quicklook) and a JPEG (thumbnail) preview of the file but the old Contents folder is not there and the index.xml contains XML code that significantly differs from the one in Pages 08.


Keynote '09 and Numbers '09 show a similar internal structure for their files.

Copy - Paste (not Cut) files

After last week's post I tried using the Finder's copy & paste functions to move files around.

One thing the struck me is that there is not cut function. Well, there is the delete function but you can't copy files and simultaneously delete them from their location.

I discovered the reason this morning...

When you copy a file in Finder, OSX does not seem to burden itself to load all the data in memory. It only seems to register the file location.

So, if you copy the files, delete them now because you could as well do it now instead of having to come back here later, and then try to paste them somewhere, OSX will complain that the files are missing. Indeed, there are in the Trash...

The correct order is thus to copy the files, paste them in their new location, go back to the original location and delete them...

It would seem to me that the smarter way to implement that would be to not remember their actual path, but to put a flag on the files, similar to an alias, so as to track the files if they move or are removed, before being pasted to their new location...

Update

I just found this hint on MaoOSX Hints: Use Quicksilver for Finder cut and paste .