A thirty-some group of really attentive people sat through my ATA presentation “From Blogs to Wikis” that I gave last Saturday, November 4th. Looking back at all that we covered in the 75-minute barrage of chattering I gave, I salute your steadiness.
All that is regarding Web 2.0 and all the new services available to us on the Internet is very exciting to me. I hope I carried some of that passion to you who attended. Moreover, I hope you will subscribe to this feed and start adding others to your Google Reader page, or some reader of your choice.
You can download the presentation by clicking the format of your choice: Flash—reads in your browser, you must click the slide to go forward; QuickTime movie—requires QuickTime to play, includes all animations and you also need to click to progress; and PDF, where each completed slide is one page. Continue reading »
Written by Yves
\\ tags: web 2.0
The recent inroads made by the Mac platform could be easily measured by the strong attendance that welcomed TransMUG’s Mac panel on November 1st at the ATA Conference. Although its number could seem confidential in that gigantic room, it’s in fact 50-some translators who were present to listen to (from left to right) Yves, Catherine, Christine, Emmanuel, and Michael, sharing personal experiences, information and tips regarding working on a Mac as a translator in a PC-centric world.
Between the strong interest shown by the professionals attending for a secure and pleasant platform, and the many shortcomings regarding Vista perceived by people on the market for a new machine, this produced a strong choir for a discussion about Macs among translators. And considering the many Macs one could already spot in the hallways of the Conference, it almost looks like most of our work has already been done, even before the panel!
The whole panel joins me to warmly thanks all who attended, stayed overtime for the questions and answers section, and came to discuss with us after-while. As promised, we are posting the PDF of the presentation that you can download here. Wishing you all good computing.
Written by Yves
\\ tags: fusion, mac, office, parallels, purist, remote desktop connection, translation tools, virtual machine, wordfast
This year, once more, TransMUG is at the ATA Conference to help translators on the fence make the decision to switch, and to support Mac users in a PC-centric professional world. We are renewing our “Trados on the Mac” card campaign at a time when it has never been easier to run the PC-based Translation Environment Tools on the Mac.
Moreover, a panel moderated by Language Technology Division Administrator Michael Metzger, TransMUG members Catherine Theilen-Burke, co-founder Christine Lemor-Drake, and myself, as well as consultant and recent switcher, and now evangelizer Emmanuel Lemor, will review the many advantages of using the Mac platform. Catherine is introducing our November 1st session:
We are gearing up for our presentation at the ATA conference “The Merits of a Mac in a PC Centric Translation World.” Some of you probably believe the product speaks for itself and will naturally attract converts. There is something to be said for that. Certainly the timing is good for this type of discussion. Your support at our session is welcome, come to the ATA session Thursday November 1st at 3:30. We are not looking to preach to the choir, but to lay out options, resources and to create a forum. The information from the session will appear on this blog, and the conference DVD. Many translators have invested their intellectual and financial capital in PC tools and that must be respected. Others will be tempted to explore the Mac given the momentum created by new products.
The contents of the session will set the context for this exploration into Macs. Many of us have had drummed into us that PC’s were the only option and you couldn’t get translation work unless you abandoned the Mac. Even three years ago, if you weren’t a savvy Mac user, to a certain extent this was true. Everything depends on what kind of translation work you do. As translators we are always looking to our next computer and for the most part constantly fine tuning and problem solving to keep the systems we have running smoothly. Now that you can buy a Mac and run a total PC environment, if that is what it takes for people to discover the Mac, so be it. Sooner or later, they will venture into the Mac platform and discover it’s potential.
Articles accompanying the release of Leopard have been very positive.
In Thursday’s New York Times (10/25/07) business in David Pogue’s State of the Art Column titled “A MacLeap Courtesy Of Leopard” continued on page 9 by “A Leap in Cleverness Sure as Leopard’s Feet” goes over the set up of the big feature Time Machine, “one click – that’s got to be the shortest setup of any backup system in history”, one click set up has always been a feature on Macs and continues to be so. Time machine is visually attractive and innovative according to Pogue. Spaces, virtual screen software, improvements to Boot Camp receive good marks; the see-through menus have mixed reviews. The article ends with “Leopard is powerful, polished and carefully conceived. Happy surprises and very few disappointments, lie around every corner”. An altogether encouraging review given the context of Apple’s market share and the dominance of the PC.
An article appearing in Monday’s New York Times business section (10/22/07) gives us some details of Apple’s growing market share. Apple will continue with its pace of frequent upgrades and it’s expected growth for the next quarter is higher than expected by industry analysts, “(the research firm) Gartner forecast that Apple would grow more than 37 percent based on shipments of 1.3 million computers, for an 8.1% share of the domestic market.”. Visitors to the Apple stores numbered 100 million last year. How many of these visitors are potential switchers? Mr. Wolf (Industry newsletter Wolf’s Bytes) “estimated that 60-70 million of them were Windows users drawn by the iPod or the iPhone, who could potentially shift to the Macs.” So we are in an interesting period of time, many avenues to explore, tools to look at. This period of transition and new products is a perfect setting for an examination of using Mac’s in a translation world.
Don’t hesitate to stop by the NCTA table, at the entrance of the Grand Foyer if you are attending the Conference. Welcome to San Francisco!
Written by Yves
Having followed the genesis of Leopard closely, I was wondering if I should be once again (like for Tiger) an early adopter of that cat. I was reassured by a source close to the team in charge at Apple, that the long awaited fruit of their workings was possibly their more achieved yet. So I made the leap and got the new OS installed on my two machines on the day of the release.
Now, how is Leopard relevant to the translator’s experience, what does this upgrade translate into, to paraphrase NCTA’s newest slogan? First, surprisingly enough, I must say that even on my 4.5 year old PowerBook G4 at 867MHz (slowest configuration permissible), this cat is still faster than the previous one. I had read that a particular effort had been made on the optimization of the system and it is notable!
Then, there’s the look: Every time your familiar environment changes, you may be ruffled at the edges. And ruffles there were, notably with the side dock, modified at the last minute to calm the storm. Overall, it’s darker, and funnily, because most of the unified look draws from iTunes, though more serious, it remains very much playful. The icons are even more detailed and the three dots in the top left corner of your window, even shinier! What impressed me the most after only a few hours on the system was how crisp everything had become. There has obviously been a serious effort applied also to the resolution of the characters on the screen. It is a very welcome improvement since Mac users had to pay for more accurate rendition of the fonts with a tad blurriness… until now.
If you don’t feel like those enhancements are enough to pull your wallet out and spend $129 of your hard earned money, Apple has over 300 more reasons on their site to convince you. One of my favorites in the list is screen sharing, to take over mom’s machine in France and fix remotely the shenanigans that scare her, without any prior voodoo settings, and allow you to grab your home machine from your laptop on the move to get a file you had forgotten or even work on that remote machine! And don’t start me with the Finder: You can now see the front page of most of your documents (Office, PDF, images, and more) in Cover Flow view like you do in iTunes. No need to open anything to see what you are looking for and get rid of unnecessary files.
And the best for last: the application I will not be using yet because I’m a good boy backing up my machine every single day with Super Duper! but I haven’t figured out yet how to combine this with the new feature, Time Machine. That is pure high tech magic made simple. Don’t ask me too much about the hard links that keep your files on the drive after you have trashed the files they link to, but this is what allows you to virtually go back in time and retrieve long lost documents where they were at the time you are rolling back to in the past. And you can then restore just any piece to your present! All you need is an external drive, configure the app for the type of files you want Time Machine to protect. Besides, it also keeps hourly snapshots of your system. In case of major crash, you can restore your whole setup from a happier time. Welcome to the advent of the “no configuation, no excuse” backup, all in the background.
So visit Apple.com/macosx, and if you don’t find a good reason to upgrade, or switch to that superb platform that has become the Mac, email me. You may also want to join TransMUG and debate with us the merits or issues you have with your computing environment. Please visit our Yahoo! Groups page for more info.
Finally, if you will attend the ATA Annual Conference in San Francisco, come see TransMUGians Catherine, Christine, and I in the panel discussion “The Merits of Using a Mac in a PC-centric Translation World,” Thursday November 1st at 3:30. More on this panel discussion here soon.
Written by Yves
On the road, at a client’s office, I often use two methods to access my mail: Horde on my web host servers for my personal and professional mail, and GMail for all the mailing lists and other services I subscribe to. After having tried Yahoo! Mail (too limited when it comes to using other accounts in combination), and .Mac Mail–a thing of beauty with, yet again, some frustrating limitations–I came to the conclusion that GMail was the best bet for me. (You won’t catch me using Hotmail…) But first, let’s look at Horde.
Rough but Powerful
Horde is a full-fledge organizer you may only meet when you have a web host. It is generally part of their suite of goodies included in CPanelX, the control panel for the complete management of your site. Having your own private place on the Web is not a luxury anymore. With Hostgator, I enjoy 200GB of storage space, unlimited email address, unlimited domains, on and on… for a measly $9.95 a month. After the terrible experience I endured with Lunarpages, that switch, a year ago, was a great move. And when web domain are under $9 per year at GoDaddy, there shouldn’t be any reason to depend on your ever changing ISP for your email address and basic web page…
Back to Horde: The workhorse is inelegant, but quite powerful, and with tons of messages to sort through and IMAP synchronization of my mail with Apple Mail, it’s nice to have the possibility to run some searches you can save as “Virtual Folders,” Horde’s name for Apple Mail’s Smart ones. Spam filtering there is not tops, though. So I keep that solution for the personal email I only share with friends and clients.
Searches you can save in Virtual Folders with Horde
Catch All… and All
For all my mailing lists and other registrations that can turn bad, I have another domain name I create addresses with that can be disposed of when they are abused. Until this year I had a “catch all” account and it worked great. XYZ Industries wanted my email for their survey and I would write XYZIndustries@mydomain.com, and their correspondence would come to my catch all account. Unfortunately, any spammer creating a random address with my domain name, i.e. random@mydomain.com, would also reach my account. As long as spam filters had to deal with “simple” worms and viruses, all was fine, and my web host spam filter worked fine. Pestmongers have become more refined with time and this solution doesn’t cut it anymore.
GWorld
Enters GMail: I redirect all my catch all accounts to my GMail account and let their spam filter, the best free filter in the business, and let them sift out the crap. I keep my spam on the server for a month, in case I have to search for a message that would have been picked erroneously for the trash. At the end of the first month, GMail had stopped 10,000 messages… Now, 3-months later, the average monthly load has risen to 18,000! You have to wonder how long email services will endure that constant assault. In the meantime, I will soon abandon the “catch all” solution, but the transition is not that simple.
I wasn’t joking…
The only reason why I don’t redirect my own personal email to GMail, is the possibly only shortcoming of the service: it’s not IMAP. In other words, it does not synchronize with my mail client, i.e. if I delete a message in my mail client, it won’t delete it on GMail. Being a POP mail system, GMail offers you to either leave your messages in the Inbox, or remove them.
I find the IMAP alternative very convenient and am keeping that system for my main email account. This way, when I am away from home, when I log into my mail server, the Inbox is the same that the one I have at home, lest the large message archive I keep on my home machine.
Depending on your setup, on your needs, a GMail account may offer a solution to some of your email woes. The private beta phase has ended so you don’t need anybody’s sponsoring you to create your own account anymore. Try it if you haven’t already, you may like it.
Written by Yves
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