NavTechGloss French-English Glossary of Naval Technology, new link

As reported on 15 September, this blog has been hacked. The posts remain in place, but many of the links are corrupted almost as soon as they are posted. Today I will attempt to remedy the situation by posting a new link to download my glossary in the form of an image. To use it, type the link directly into a new window or tab in your browser.

This version to v18 of my French-English Glossary of Naval Technology was first published several months ago. If this attempt to post a new link works, the next update, v19, will be published towards the end of the year.

This glossary is intended for French-to-English translators and writers specialising in technical journalism. The document attempts to deal with a terminological challenge specific to journalism, namely access to and equivalents for the many synonyms, multiple technical designations and other devices that journalists use in both English and French -- though perhaps even more in the latter than in the former -- to avoid repetitions.

The glossary began as a simple Word document over 20 years ago and has simply grown and grown. To accommodate the amount of information it contains, I have adopted a custom page format (50cm by 50cm) for the main table. The idea is not to print it, but to use it on your computer. Better still, index it using an indexing and search engine like dtSearch. 

This edition is offered free of charge to one and all.

File size: > 13.7 Mb. Here is the link:

Image of link below. Type this into your browser.

If you need to contact me, please leave a comment.

Blog hacked, links corrupted

This blog has been hacked by persons unknown. The main damage is that every link on every page has been corrupted. All clicks result in 404 messages. I'll post here when I find a solution.

A new point of access to my

French-English Glossary of Naval Technology

will be set up in mid-October (2020).

If you need to contact me, please leave a comment.

NavTechGloss: client satisfait

La publi-info postée par Mer et Marine le 15 mai donne une indication du niveau de satisfaction du client.
Voir 18ème édition du Lexique français-anglais de technologie navale.

NavTechGloss: Over 600 hits

My post (below) on NavTechGloss has now logged over 600 hits and almost as many downloads. Most satisfactory given the level of specialisation.

Online portfolio

Further to My public portfolio posted on 25 May 2018, additional articles can be viewed here.
The originals of these articles are also available on the Mer et Marine site.
Some are accessible free of charge while others are behind the Mer et Marine paywall.

Switching to Mac, take #2

I've now worked on my MacBook Pro for at least a couple of hours a day for over three months. I'm happy with the hardware and amazed how good the Time Machine is when you need it. I have not yet had to rebuild the machine (i.e. software, apps and files) but am confident that should the need arise it will go very smoothly. This is a huge advantage over the major hassles associated with rebuilding a Win10 machine, something I have had to do far too often over the last three or four years following a number of Win10 crashes and failures and various hardware failures. It took me three or four days each time and I never seemed to get things back to exactly the way they were before.

More generally the transition is going less well. I tested the LibreOffice word processing package throughly, but found it had too many shortcomings to suit my needs. Next I moved on to Microsoft Office 365 and more particularly Word 365 for Mac, but was astounded to find that it is very different from Word for Windows OSs. The shortcuts are all different, the autotext hardly works at all and many, many other tricks of the trade had to be relearned, sometimes painfully. And, after two months on Word 365 there are still some things that I used to be able to do under Win10 but still can't under MacOS.

Other disappointments abound.

• When searching for files by their name, I find Spotlight cumbersome compared to Everything.
• When manipulating files, I find the MacOS Finder and ForkLift cumbersome compared to Zabkat's xplorer² File Manager.
• When searching for text in a file, I find both Spotlight and HoudahSpot utterly hopeless compared to dtSearch.
• Though loudly proclaimed, I find HoudahSpot clunky and incredibly slow when searching for anything more than a single word. Unlike dtSearch it appears to be completely incapable of searches like searchwordroot*, let alone searchwordA within N words of searchwordB (searchwordA w/N searchwordB) and fuzzy searches. dtSearch does any of these in an instant and displays the relevant portion of any file I select in the list of hits.

Conclusion

For me and my workflow, Mac offers a couple of big benefits (reliable hardware + Time Machine) and a host of shortcomings.

If I could find a PC manufacturer offering the sort of hardware reliability that was still common ten to twelve years ago and an app to faithfully backup then reinstall a Win10 OS complete with all the settings for all my apps, I think I would return to PC in a wink.

So for the moment I have decided to persist with my Mac conversion process. I will soon install 

Parallels® Desktop 15 for Mac

 and Win10 so that I can use Office 365, IWS, dtSearch and Everywhere under Win10.

I will report back here in due course.

Switching to Mac, take #1

The Macintosh computer first came out, with a memory capacity of 128K, in 1984. I purchased my first Mac, with 512K of memory and a pinwheel-drive matrix printer, in 1985 or 86. It was powered by a large and heavy uninterruptible powersupply, or UPS, containing an iron-core transformer. In 1989 I purchased a more powerful SE30 with a 10M external hard disk and a portrait-style A4 screen. Each item represented a significant investment. Indeed the first two were made with the aid of bank loans. To protect my investment, the hardware was covered by insurance policies for theft, breakage and lightning damage, my house and office being in a rural area.

Earlier this month, after my new Asus laptop died just six months after the guarantee had expired and some serious frustration with Microsoft Windows 10 and Office 365, I decided to switch back to Mac, specifically a MacBook Pro. Fearing that it would take some time to bring my keyboard reflexes up to speed and more still to become familiar with all the new software, I would not have given the switch a moment's thought had I been working full time. But, being mostly retired, I saw the transition as a challenge.

I have now been playing around with my MacBook Pro and LibreOffice Writer for two weeks. I'm making reasonable progress but my keyboard reflexes and software skills still leave a lot to be desired. Amazingly, I have yet to work out how to select text then extend the selection one word at a time using the keyboard rather than the mouse or touchpad in Writer, Mail, or any of the other apps I use.

I suspected before making the switch that dtSearch does not work on Mac, nor anything like it and that the same is true of IWS. For further details, see dtSearch + IntelliWebSearch, take #2. In a private emails, David Thede, the author of dtSearch (hence the 'dt' in the name), and Michael Farrell, the author of IWS, confirmed that their products are not compatible with Mac, that no Mac versions and planned, and, worst news of all, that they knew of no comparable products that run under the MacOS.

Has my use of dtSearch and IWS won more admirers, others might have joined me in the quest for the best alternatives on Mac.

So far, I have found only HoudahSpot for harddisk-wide searches, but so far it appears to be a very poor second to dtSearch. To make better use of the keyboard and shortcuts, I am exploring  PhraseExpress and Keyboard maestro.

* Finally found out how to select or deselect the next word. Amazed that this was so difficult to find.
** The command I'm now looking for is how to get the cursor to return to where it was before moving it to somewhere else to, say, select some text.