Recent content on Peter's Blog
Excel isn’t maybe great, but it’s useful for many things. That being said, I don’t use it at all in private life. But am using it a lot, not to say too much, at work:( It wouldn’t be so bad if Excel files produced by humans were also used/edited only by humans and Excel files produced by machines were also used/edited only by machines. Usually, it’s a mix. And it’s the basis of most problems I’ve…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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.
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
Recently we’ve had some huge Translation Memory to cleanup. It was built by copying segments from two other TMs, so it was a mess. It had over million segments and we needed to shrink it. So the obvious thing to do was to get rid of duplicates. Unfortunately our CAT tool isn’t very good at it, or rather very fast. But we can export/import TM in TMX format which is basically an XML.
When I want to contribute to some repository on GitHub I always check Issues section first. And this is how I’ve started with the repo I’ll discuss in this post. I’ve found an improvement request and wanted to implement it. First I’ve learnt how to do that, as I’ve not done it before. And then I’ve started to analyse the code in order to add this new feature, as…
After Advent of Code has ended I’ve started looking for another challenge and found weirdtext. It’s a recruitment test, but as I’ve found it quite interesting I’ve decided to do it and have coded it in Go. To make initial version of encoder and decoder was quite easy, but then I’ve started to add other cases to my tests and made some improvements, and also fixed some…
As I’m lone, self-taught “programmer” I miss challenges and cooperation in my life. That’s why I’ve welcomed Advent of Code. It allowed me to check my skills, learn new things and talk about code with other people. I’ve scored 43 out of 49 possible stars, so not a big success. But as I’ve played against myself I consider it a win as I’ve thought I…
Some time ago I’ve tried my skills in coding golf competition, and had a second place, at least for a while. I’ve originally written it in JavaScript as this language is fresher in my mind than Python. But then I’ve rewritten it in Python because I’ve got stucked. Even though it’s been a while, I’ve coded more lines in Python and read more about it, so I was able to find the bug and proceed.
I keep saying that you never know when some knowledge would be useful. So there’s no such thing as useless knowledge. You’ve just not found usage for it yet. Some time ago I was praising The Imposter’s Handbook. I’ve liked it so much that I’ve bought and started reading A Curious Moon of the same author. I was doing some SQL at the time, but it wasn’t my major task. And I knew nothing about…
I’m working with memoQ (CAT tool) for more than four years now. It’s quite good comparing to other localisation tools. Which isn’t maybe such a great achievement as there aren’t too many. But anyway, it’s decent. But memoQ team has made some weird design decisions early on. The most annoying one is the choice of encoding. Entire world uses UTF-8 which is great and everything works fine with…
We have this publicist in Poland, Daniel Passent, who’s one of the greatest to me. He once said that the Economist is the greatest newspaper in the world. And I agree with him. I’ve tried many, but there’s no single one which I would enjoy as much. There’s at least one which is close, but let me tell you something else first. I’ve been subscriber to Economist many times, usually it was digital…
When you’ve created some solution which is essential to the company you work for, it’s tempting to make it as proprietary and as little documented as possible for obvious reason of job security. But it’s short sighted. If your value lays only in maintaining this single piece of technology you still can be replaced at some point as this technology becomes obsolete or company would buy some other…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Overselling happens when you have a server which can handle 10 users, but you’re selling it to 15, because you assume they’ll not utilize all resources assigned to them. Or that you’ll manage to add more resources before users would start using them fully. It’s the most broken assumption in tech industry which almost never works, drives customers mad and ruins your brand.…
I’m currently using JekyllRB for my blog which maybe isn’t bad, but I don’t like it much just because I don’t like Ruby. I’m running site generation form Docker container, because I’m not allowing Ruby anywhere on my box. So I wanted to try Hugo. It’s written in Go which I know and kind of like, and it’s much faster. Speed isn’t maybe main…
That’s the title of great essay written by Neal Stephenson, so I’m lending it for my post. I was always the kind of guy who wanted the newest hardware, the latest software, the shinier GUI the better. Then I’ve started to do some proper engineering, and it’s changed my mind. I like the Chrome’s download manager, but whenever I need to download something heavy from…
I work a lot with memoQ Server, great translation tool. It has awesome Web Service API which covers almost all aspects of the server. It lacks CAL license management which is annoying. But on the other hand, it extends some functionality (for instance pre-translation), so you can do more than with memoQ Client. And it’s API, so you can automate a lot with it. To make life easier for myself…
Working in localization industry involves a lot of searches in the TM (Translation Memory), or TMs even. I was saying many times that memoQ is great tool, both client and server products. But what I find limiting is ability to search through TMs. You have an app for that, but it’s not very pleasant to use. Fortunately memoQ provides Resources API. Unfortunately its basic functions allow you…
I’m a big fan of learning. Can’t stand a day without learning new thing, and can’t stand people who are not learning either. Recently I was reading Black Hat Python, it’s a great book, I truly recommend it. Even such noob like myself could figure out the stuff described there, it’s just brilliant. Anyways. I was reading it for fun, and maybe to use it for my private…
Recently I was posed with the task of backing up Translation Memories (TMs) from memoQ server into TMX format. You can of course do it from memoQ desktop client, however taking into account number of TMs we have it would mean at least 400 clicks every time backup is needed. It would be quite a dull task and as a human being you can always miss one or two TMs in the process, and you don’t…
I know that guys who say that book was better than the movie are annoying, but today I’ll be such guy. I’ve seen Godfather some time ago, and I didn’t like it. Because of that I had no interest in the book. But recently one of my favorite actors recorded audiobook where he’s reading this novel, so I’ve decided to give it a try. And I was amazed. This book is…
From time to time on various groups/forums which I follow appears the post like “Learn how to convert format x to y”. Usually it’s coming from some guy (or company) who’s trying to sell his converter, or at least training around it, to you. There’s nothing wrong with it, people need to earn money. Plus there’s definitely market for it. If you’re freelance…
I’ve bought OnePlus One over a year ago. I must admit that I was aiming for Nexus 6 at the time, but as I’m cheap the price prevailed. I was lucky as by then they’ve introduced invitation less Tuesdays or something like that. Enough to say that I was able to buy the phone without the need of invitation which was nice. I haven’t expected much as it was almost half the price…
I’ve had enough of waiting for CyanogenMod 12 to arrive for my OnePlus One, so I’ve installed OxygenOS instead. Or rather flashed as they don’t offer OTA yet. First note, don’t follow their instructions in order to install TWRP, but rather this video. Otherwise you’ll still have Cyanogen recovery which won’t allow you to install OxygenOS. Other than that process…
Recently I’ve finished Python course on codecademy and I’m hooked. The last language I’ve liked so much was PHP, but I lacked real incentive to start doing more advanced stuff. Python is different as I can create apps for my desktop (or even phone), not only for my server. It is quite logically organized, although there are few things I don’t like. And it’s the first…
I was using Evernote few years back and then switched to OneNote. It was better in graphical organisation of the notes and its screenshooting tool is still the best. Plus I was already paying for Office so it was “free”. Then Windows 8 happened and ruined screenshooting functionality. Now by pressing Windows+S you’re getting search instead. But I was still using it as I’ve…
If you’re using VPN which is based on OpenVPN, or anything other than Microsoft’s native VPN client where you have this magical “Use default gateway on remote network” option. And happen to use “Use following DNS server addresses” on your default network device where your VPN provider is using it’s own DNS server. Then you can encounter following message…
I’ve seen the first movie and it was great. Then I’ve read the book and it was even better. But the newest picture is just bad. On so many levels that it was barely watchable, even though I really like both actresses. Not to mention Stephen King. It’s bad from the start. First scene, we see lady giving birth which reminds rather summoning of a daemon. After baby arrives mother…
It was Sunday afternoon, I’ve had my son on my lap watching excavators on his part of the screen (and people ask me why I need big monitor). On the other half I was checking twitter which I’ve rediscovered recently. Snooping on suggested people I’ve found colleague’s website. It was so simple that I’ve started to wonder if this person is paying also for hosting as it…
There are few actors and directors about whom I’m able to say, “Well, this guy (sorry, no girls here) has never released a film which was bad, I’m watching new one without any review, it must be good”. One of these actors was Denzel Washington. Was, because I’ve recently seen 2 Guns. Don’t take me wrong. It’s not so bad, I’ve actually quite enjoyed…
I prefer not to know much about the book before I read it. I like to be surprised. And that’s exactly what happened with The Myths of Innovation. I’ve thought that I would just read some interesting stuff about innovations. As I’m already familiar with Myths Series I’ve expected good stuff, and wasn’t disappointed. But I wasn’t expecting motivational book at…
Once Upon a Timethere was a man and his wife. And they’ve had a child, which was lovely, but at the same time very demanding. So they were tired most of the time and needed entertainment which would allow them to spend a nice evening once in a while. As there was wast kingdom of Netflixnearby they’ve used it’s library to search for the good show. And they’ve found one, so…
I’ve switched to Android 4.2 recently and noticed one quite annoying problem. I’m using Taskerto switch mobile data on only periodically in order to allow phone to download emails, weather info and other stuff. For majority of time when phone is in my pocket data services are off. It saves a lot of juice from my battery. And it’s working quite fine actually, or was working on…