Last night I met briefly with a friend who happened to have a copy of the latest release of Linux Mint on a USB drive, so I borrowed the drive for a few minutes to see if I could boot from it and run Linux on my Eee PC. I wasn’t really expecting much, but to my surprise it booted up flawlessly, thereby confirming my earlier ideas about using Linux on this machine. Mint, as I saw last night, works well. I’ve also noticed that the recent release of Fedora (the distribution I have used most over the years) comes with support for persistent Live USB key installations, which would be ideal. And, of course, there is also the ever-popular Ubuntu to try out as well. Choices, choices!

(Incidentally, the fact that this entry is being written while I am standing on a  relatively crowded commuter train on my way to work is yet another reason why I think this PC was a really good fit for my needs.)

I recently noticed this survey on cell phone spam (via What Japan Thinks), and can vouch for the fact that it is a constant problem with no particularly good solution (at least, none that I am aware of).

Although the volume of spam that comes to my cell phone (probably between five and ten messages a day) is far less than the volume that gets directed at my primary e-mail address (lots!), the difference is that there are far more robust filtering options available for traditional e-mail than are typically offered by the companies providing such services for cell phones.

On my cell phone there are only a few options for filtering spam, all of which basically boil down to specifying categories of messages that should just be ignored, but the problem is that the settings are overly broad and cannot be fine-tuned in any meaningful way. You either reject all mail not sent from other cell phones or you accept everything, for example. (That might be a bit of an overstatement, but not by much.) This is not a very viable set of alternatives for what I would consider "normal" e-mail use, so I end up accepting everything to make sure that I don’t miss something that might be important, like a message from a potential new client.

With my regular mail, however, spam filtering options abound, so even though a lot of spam is sent to my address, almost none of it ever makes it into my inbox (thanks to MailFoundry, which I would really like to see phone companies introduce to stem spam), and even if it does, it will typically get zapped almost immediately by the spam-filtering functions of whichever mail application I am using, which is not a function I’ve seen in most phones.

Why is it that phone companies do not takea much harder line on spam? The survey results indicate that it is pretty clearly a common problem. My pet theory is that the reason is two-fold: (A) They don’t get enough complaints about it to justify taking additional actions and (B) they charge you for the spam you receive anyway, so their motivation to eliminate that particular stream of revenue is too low for them to act on. Those are my ideas, anyway; I welcome anyone who is better informed about these things to set me straight.

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.