Recently I’ve revived my subscription to Wired. I’ve bought yearly subscription for $5 which is a great price. I’ve used my Gmail address when ordering it and received confirmation to this address. However, after logging in I’ve found out my subscription wasn’t active and I couldn’t activate it. Let’s create a support ticket I’ve thought and off to the support page I went. I needed to log in again and it’s asked me to activate my subscription, again. Only then it’s served me with an information that my subscription is already assigned to a different account. WTF?! But OK, I’ve remembered that I have another account with them using my Outlook address. However, I didn’t use it during this purchase. Nevertheless I’ve switched to this account and voila, subscription was there, active.

Some time ago I’ve created a tool which was testing our Translation Memories (TMs). It was useful, because they’ve become corrupted quite often and sooner we knew about it the better. So I’ve set it to run every day. These days problems with TMs are sporadical, but I’m still running it just in case. Process is automated and all it requires from me is to read short report each day, so no biggie.

Agile is the hype these days and there’s probably no single startup which isn’t using this approach right now. In big corporations the adoption is slower, but they are also moving toward it as it simply works. Develop in small steps, measure how well product works so far, move forward or take a step back and fix. Data is really crucial here. Measure how well new improvement helped you with your problem, or measure how it’s made some things harder, as it can go both ways. Correlate the data with how it was before and make a judgment if it’s the right way.

I’m interested in computers since I’ve learnt that they exist. And I’ve always wanted to work with them. But life is strange and I’ve landed with MA in Marketing and Management. Thankfully these days education doesn’t chain you to one type of work and currently I work as a, sort of, software engineer. But I’ve been always feeling like an imposter, because I don’t have official CS education.

The Imposter’s Handbook to the rescue! This book is exactly for people like myself. It helps to fill in the blanks. The part about algorithms is simply brilliant. Finally someone has described Big O notation in the way which is easily comprehensible. All the other books I’ve read started with a deep math and simply bored me before I’ve got to the main idea. Here you get the essence of the thing.

BOM is a Unicode character, U+FEFF byte order mark (BOM). In context of UTF-8 the most import thing is that it confirms that the file is UTF-8 encoded (most probably). Because there’s no other way to be almost certain (you never get 100% confidence with encodings). Of course there are methods of heuristic analysis which can offer high accuracy. I myself am using Mozilla Universal Charset Detector, but it’s still guessing. Even though educated one.

This year alone I’ve written more than thousand lines of code for various libraries. And I’ve started to write libraries;) Each of my methods is unit tested. My classes are as well designed as it’s possible basing on my current knowledge. I can write new automation script for our servers in the matter of hours (sometimes minutes) comparing to days not so long ago. I’m able to test most of the things before they’ll get on the server, so I’ve almost eliminated vicious cycle of build-deploy-check-fix. I understand my systems better, so often I instantly know where the problem lays. And most importantly I can deploy the same code to test and production environments, so I avoid duplicated effort of testing.

I’m very interested in computer security. From the beginning I’ve had an idol, or idols even, who I’ve followed and learned from. I think it’s started with Kevin Mitnick after reading his book The Art Of Intrusion. Which was not exactly what I was hoping for. I’ve not known much about computers back then, so I’ve thought I would read more about scripts and such rather than how to trick a secretary. So it wasn’t a long relationship. But it’s opened my mind a little bit, so I’ve focused more on how things work rather than getting ready to use solutions.

Word document is still popular format in localization industry. Translators and reviewers are using tracked changes to discuss potential translation issues. Often times these people are from different companies and it’s required to preserve their anonymity. Word has functionality to make documents anonymous, but it’s blunt tool which will wipe all private information. And you want to know which comment comes from which person.

At some point in my career I was introduced to this solution. Which involves saving document as RTF, editing it via text editor (other than Word) and saving it as Word document again. I can understand how it can be useful to non-technical people. But don’t do it this way if you have an engineer, it’s wrong.

I’ve had a problem where I’ve needed to clean some stuff from files and then upload them to the server. Cleaning part was fast, for more than a hundred of files (2 GB in size) it took less than a minute. Problem was with upload. It took several hours.

So, I’ve thought, let’s try doing it in parallel. I’ll launch upload on so many threads as I have, and my workstation has a Xeon, it should help. It doesn’t use much bandwidth, so I don’t need to worry about clogging my network connection. It’ll be fine. It wasn’t. Luckily.

memoQ is great product, I’m saying it a lot. But some features need a bit polishing and one of them is support for Machine Translation (MT). It’s done through series of plugins. I’ve just used two so far. Pseudo-translation which is fine, but limited. Although they’ve enhanced it in Adriatic version. Second plugin is for Google Translate. There’s not much in terms of configuration, you set the API key, can specify regex which matches will be ignored in MT process, and enable option to put the tags from source at the end of the translation. And this is pain I’ve had to hack.