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This evening on the way home from work I purchased up an ASUS Eee PC. As much as I really like the MacBook I purchased about a year and a half ago (has it already been that long?), it is a little bit too heavy to carry around all the time and I’m always worried about using it on crowded trains, because I’m afraid some careless salaryman will whack it with his briefcase or something. With the Eee PC, however, both of these things are much less of a concern. First of all, this little thing weighs less than a kilogram, so carrying it around is no trouble at all. Also, because it uses a solid-state disk instead of a hard drive, even if it does get knocked around a bit, it probably won’t break. 

The downside is that the screen is tiny 800x480 and the disk is only 4 GB, which means that with Windows XP SP3 installed, there’s only a few hundred megabytes of extra space left. Still, as long as I save most of my files to the SD card (also 4 GB) in the built-in card reader, I shouldn’t need too much extra space for what I have in mind, which is mostly lightweight document editing and maybe a bit of blogging here and there. 

This post is being written in Windows Live Writer, which doesn’t seem too bad so far, but I get the feeling that it won’t be too long before I start itching to get rid of Windows and install Linux on this new toy of mine. In other markets, this model is actually sold with Linux installed by default, but here in Japan, it seems to be available only with Windows XP Home. 

Ordinarily, I try to refrain from purchasing electronics that have been on the market for less than six months or so (this model debuted earlier this month), but the attraction to the Eee PC was just too great to resist. I’ve been waiting for PC manufacturers to catch onto the idea that compact, inexpensive machines with just the basics would be a great thing for busy people like me, but for the longest time the market for laptops seems to have been focused on cramming as much high-end, cutting-edge technology as possible into a machine that just barely fits the definition of “portable”. In this case, however, I’ve got a machine that does what I want, in a size that suits my needs, for less than 45,000 yen (about $435 at current exchange rates). I’m sure I will run into its limitations at some point, but for the time being I’m pretty pleased with it. 

In my day-to-day translation work, I get a lot of mileage out of a number of different computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools, one of which is the very impressive OmegaT, an open source translation memory tool that has an innovative approach to the way translation tasks are handled. One of the most impressive things about OmegaT, however, is that although it has many robust features, it is developed by a team of volunteers who make it available to anyone who would like to use it absolutely free of charge.

Because the developers do not ask for any sort of compensation for their efforts, I am always pleased when I see someone write a nice review of OmegaT, like the one Corinne McKay recently wrote in her blog, Thoughts On Translation. I hope other translators who have tried OmegaT and found it useful will do the same, because the word-of-mouth marketing helps call well deserved attention to this useful application.

I remember a conversation I had once many years ago, when I was a young journalism student, with a friend of mine who worked part-time for a local ISP. I was telling him about all the amazing things I was learning in one of my information-gathering courses, a lot of which focused on how to make profitable use of library resources. He remarked casually that libraries would one day cease to exist, because any and all valuable information would eventually find its way onto the Internet. Although I didn’t doubt even then that such a thing might happen one day, I was taken aback by the confident assertion that followed: “Heck, almost everything worthwhile already is.”

I was reminded of that conversation when I came across this article at CNN:

Use with caution: The perils of Wikipedia

In particular, this part caught my attention:

[Former American Library Association president Michael Gorman] added that Google and Wikipedia were creating a generation of “intellectual sluggards incapable of moving beyond the Internet,” with no interest in exploring non-digital resources.

I know this is true simply by the attitudes of many of the people I know and work with. If they can’t find something with a few Google searches or a quick swing by Wikipedia, it might as well not exist. It’s a shame, really, because even as remarkable as Google and Wikipedia are, they both barely amount to a drop in the bucket of human knowledge. To consider either of them anything more than the starting point for any significant information need would be foolish.

But what can be done about it? If everyone assumes that all the world’s knowledge is available in one place, how will they ever find out otherwise?

Over the past several weeks, I have encountered a strange pop-up ad that hijacks Firefox and will not relinquish control unless Firefox is forcibly shut down. Has anyone seen this before? (Click on the image to see a larger version.)

It’s the same ad every time. I’m wondering if this represents a Firefox vulnerability or something more sinister, like malware on my PC.

Update:
Well, it turns out to be malware after all. It seems that ErrorSafe is a reasonably well known piece of scareware. Symantec has generously published instructions on how to remove it. Seems like a pretty tedious process, though. I’m now wondering if it wouldn’t be a better idea to simply back up all of the data my wife and I need and then completely reinstall Windows—or better yet, go back to being a no-Windows household again.

Around this time last year, we bought a new Windows PC, which naturally means that we bought an anti-virus/security package to go along with it; in this case, we decided to go with McAfee. The software itself works well enough, so there is really no reason to complain about it, except for when it periodically requires you to “check in” to make sure that your software is still current. The problem is that, upon logging in, you get presented with a screen that looks exactly like this:

Just this morning, McAfee notified me that our coverage has now expired, so I will have to either log into the Web site and pay for an extension, or buy a new version of the product from my local software vendor. After logging in and being greeted by the cheerful but mostly blank screen above, I’m considering buying new software—but probably not McAfee’s. They just don’t seem to want my business enough to go that extra mile and actually, you know, offer me something to buy.