Occasionally I do some translation from English to German for some of our products at DevExpress, and also for marketing content. Over the years, I have completed many such little projects and I find it hard to remember previous decisions — did I decide to translate certain terms at all, and if so, how?
Translation memory tools exist for such purposes, sometimes as part of larger CAT (Computer Aided Translation) suites, and there are quite a few of them out there. Many are the kind of softwar …
Liam twittered about VirtualBox a little while ago — not the first time I’d had a look at their page, but it’s been a while, so I went back. I’ve been a VMWare user for more than a decade myself. Always found it brilliant how I could take over a VM from one machine to another, and I have some VMs archived from 1998 or so, created on a Linux host at the time, that I can now still use on my Mac. I admit the need is rare, but the possibilities are great :-)
Anyway, so I thought let’s have a look …
Yet another “note to self” type post. I was just fumbling around with Mailman, and for some reason the web frontend was always redirecting me to http://foo.com, while I had been working on the options at http://www.foo.com. For some other reason that I didn’t really look into, even though my server redirects foo.com to www.foo.com anyway, no changes were persisted that way. I was additionally confused because my mm_cfg.py configures the default url host to www.foo.com explicitly. I …
I was just trying to record a Camtasia video in my Windows VM running in VMWare on the Mac. Couldn’t record any audio. Impossible. Of course the whole configuration isn’t exactly clear — VMWare doesn’t tell you exactly which “channels” (is that the word? I’m talking about mic, line in, …) it is connecting into the VM, and Windows doesn’t have any tools that are in the least helpful trying to find out if any channels deliver a signal. So I tried everything and it didn’t work. I had audio out …
I’m using SoundTrack Pro to do editing on recordings for Sod This [LINK REMOVED], have done so since the first episode. Cool software, usually. But sometimes shit happens in it, and it’s just unbelievable. When recording, I always try to remember to switch the track to mono, but about half the time I forget. By default it records in 24 bit, 44100 Hz, and saves as an AIFF file. So a typical one track recording ends up being a cool 600MB or so, in stereo. Anyway, so I have to bring the thing down …
Recently I was configuring some slide templates and I found it impossible to resize several font sizes at once. In Keynote, there are placeholders that have multiple levels, most notably the one for the body, which has multiple levels of bullet points by default. These levels each have their own format settings of course, including their font sizes. Now what if you want the whole thing a bit smaller? Maybe the first three are sized 42/36/30 and you want them to be 36/30/24. What do you do? Well …
I was just setting up Office in my Windows 7 VM, and something happened that I’ve never seen before: the activation process found that I had installed the license too many times and I should therefore call Microsoft on the phone and explain myself. Or something like that. Oddly, this time I had been using a license number that was in fact listed as an Office Professional key in my list of keys from my MSDN subscription. In the VMs, I rarely use anything but Access (to look at mdb files that I …
I’ve been using Subversion for many years, probably since 2002 or so, and when I started using it, I imported my existing CVS repository, which contains stuff dating back to 1995 or so. It’s a big and (to me) very valuable archive, especially since I started early on to put all sorts of stuff in there — not just source code, I mean, but rather everything that may be versioned, and that just benefits from being backed up in that repository. All my business paperwork, things like that.
_(As an …