Sometimes you have to do what you hate to do

Being engineer/programmer is generally a blessing, as most of the time one does what one likes (loves) most. I can perform even some tedious tasks if they’re related to a field I like, or a technology I appreciate. But sometimes I have to work with things which evoke a sense of almost disgust. Member of my team has to work with PowerPoint presentations. These presentations have charts which in turn take their data from embedded (or externally linked) Excel files.

CsvHelper vs Sep in the land of bad CSVs

Periodically I see following tweet where author of Sep praises it for being the fastest .NET CSV parser. And rightly so, it’s super fast, and works great. If your CSVs are well formed. I’ve allowed myself to retweet the above with a comment: It’s fast alright. And nice to use, although not so easy as CSVHelper. So, if you have these perfect CSVs (author claims Sep is relaxed on standard, but in reality not so much) I can fully recommend it.

AoC 2022

From edition to edition I’m less ashamed to show my code, even if I’ve failed to solve a challenge. Or if my solution was pretty stupid. And I believe it’s good, as it helps me to learn and there’s nothing shameful in trying your best. I’ve also improved my Vim skills as I was mainly coding on my iPad connected to my server via SSH. It was a challenge at first, but now I kind of like it.

To the best of my knowledge...

If only people would use this phrase more often instead of “it’s impossible”. Recently I’ve heard that it’s impossible to export LQA settings from memoQ server via API. And I’ll use this post to explain it’s not true. Plus, I believe it would be interesting to get familiar with a bit broken format of mqres file. Which is an XML, like most things in memoQ’s world. We’ll start by downloading the settings.

Host your own git

I have a personal git server for several years now, but I’ve used GitHub for “brag” code. It was easier, GH is well known and I could even collaborate with others from time to time. However, recently GH has, not blocked me as I could still manage my repos and commit code, but flagged my account. Which means it was not visible to the public. There was no email notification about it.

Basic Computer Games

My first computer was Atari 65 XE. We’ve bought it from some friend of my uncle. I’ve received it with lots of games and quite a collection of computer magazines and literature. These were the days when your magazine printed full code listings which you could then type into your computer and have a working program, or a game. It was usually in Basic. I’ve never did it. I was about 10 then.

Analyze JSON library

JSON files shouldn’t contain a lot of data, but sometimes they do. Recently I’ve received huge JSON file. It consisted of more than 100k lines and had more than 300 unique keys (attributes if you will). In memoQ you can create a filter for JSON files and then you can define which keys should be translated. You need to add your JSON to the filter and then populate the list of keys, then you can edit this list either in flat or structural view.

If you really don't want duplicates in you TMs

As per memoQ’s help page this is what causes your Translation Memory to store duplicated translations: Translation memory may have duplicate entries after the import: This happens if the translation memory allows multiple translation for each source segment, or when the translation memory uses double context. In the latter case, you may want to remove the duplicates because the context is not relevant. To get rid of duplicate entries, open the translation memory for editing.

Advent of Code 2021

Another year and another adventure. AoC doesn’t disappoint. It somehow was better for me this year, even though I’ve got lower score. It’ll sound as an excuse, and maybe it is, but I’ve started new job in December. So, I couldn’t spent whole day dealing with the problems, as I had to focus on my new role. And this was actually a good thing. Yes, I’ve gained less stars. But, I wasn’t spending a lot of time poking around, and basically running circles.

Of course souls games are casual!

Somebody has shared this image with me as supposedly funny. But I completely agree. I have very little time to play video games. And I practically only play Souls games. Why? Because you can do a lot in 15 minutes. You can approach a boss at least three times, and even defeat him. You can complete entire stage and get all the loot. You can farm. I’ve bought Red Dead Redemption 2 recently and oh boy.