Hello fellow list members.
My name is Jean-Christophe Helary, I am French and I've lived in Japan for close to 25 years where I work as a translator, and on the side as a free software "promoteur".
I started a tech blog called "Mac for Translators" in 2007, before Apple moved to Intel and when (still mostly the case now) most of the professional solutions for translators involved Windows. I had been involved with OmegaT, a Java GPLed "translation memory" application since its timid release in the winter of 2002 where there were about as many users as you could count on a (human) hand. I think I was "public" user number 3, or maybe 4. Two years later I created the user group, on Yahoo, because most of OmegaT issues were discussed on non specific lists (one now with very little activity "linux for translators" and the other dead "MacLingua"), and the rest is documented somewhere.
The writing pace has varied a lot over the years. Currently the last article is about 1 year old. There isn't much news in the mac tech world for translators and I'm mostly writing about my processes, that involve AppleScript a lot, and some other automation solutions, etc. I try to stick to free software (and the whole blog is free-licenced) but sometimes I talk about non-free solutions. I have a few AppelScript "tutorials" that I want to write, but they are tutorials for people who want to start doing real things. The ones I already posted are basically huge comments on my code. They are interesting to write because they force me to document everything I code, and they also force me to understand the copy-pasted code that I used. There are 2 issues here. I don't code AppleScript every day so I'm far from being a "native" and have to relearn every time I write new code, and AppleScript is very close to being a dead-end solution on Macs and everybody is waiting for its successor, so the community is not exactly thriving (but the good side is that you have very easy access to world-class experts that really enjoy supporting newcomers)...
http://mac4translators.blogspot.com
Last year, I decided to start a new side project that I envisioned could become a new job. In 96, I was hired by a local bookstore in Paris, right in front of the university. It was a scholarly bookstore specialized in the Arab World, and not the "Arab World" that' on TV since 911, but the other one, the one with the Palestinian poets, the one with Lenin translations in Arabic, etc. At the time, the public web was just being born. I had had a 9600 bauds modem for about 2 years and I proposed the owner that I create a web site with the catalogue for orders. The result was the second bookstore web site in France, the first being the one of the bookstore where I spent my hours between classes and whose owner had introduced me to the web ("Buy a modem! It's fun!") I came to Japan with the HTML 4.0 draft printed on paper in my suitcase and I went on creating web sites in HTML+CSS for about a decade. Back to today. CMSs have invaded the web and I happen to have found a Wordpress community on a small island where I have a garden and a spare house that I fix, 30 minutes by ferry from the mainland. I thought it would be fun to propose my old but still useful skills to small and medium businesses who have a web site but have no idea hot to fix/improve/maintain/update it and don't want to depend on the big money suckers that created the site in the first place.
So, in the winter of 2018 I started brushing up my skills. That ended up evolving into a "why don't I build my own CMS with the tool I want most to learn: emacs". So I started with a github page, and decided to publish something every day, even on weekends. At first it was all had written from scratch, then I wrote some elisp code (the beginning of my "cms"), then because of family issues, I stopped.
Family issues having mostly been solved, I'm ready to start again. I want to write because it's fun, and useful, but mostly fun.
https://brandelune.github.io/
I've been a paid supported of sr.ht since the day after the alpha phase started. What Drew (and fellow coders) is really important. I don't even use 0.1% of the provided services, but I'll be upgrading my plan to $100/year (I wanted to do it today after I received the 1-year anniversary announcement but there seems to be a glitch in the web UI). Thank you for your amazing work.
Jean-Christophe Helary
-----------------------------------------------
http://mac4translators.blogspot.com @brandelune
What an interesting niche, thanks for sharing. It's rare to see a
blog that's over ten years old. Nice work keeping it going :)
On Fri, Nov 15, 2019 at 7:25 PM Jean-Christophe Helary
<jean.christophe.helary@traduction-libre.org> wrote:
>> Hello fellow list members.>> My name is Jean-Christophe Helary, I am French and I've lived in Japan for close to 25 years where I work as a translator, and on the side as a free software "promoteur".>> I started a tech blog called "Mac for Translators" in 2007, before Apple moved to Intel and when (still mostly the case now) most of the professional solutions for translators involved Windows. I had been involved with OmegaT, a Java GPLed "translation memory" application since its timid release in the winter of 2002 where there were about as many users as you could count on a (human) hand. I think I was "public" user number 3, or maybe 4. Two years later I created the user group, on Yahoo, because most of OmegaT issues were discussed on non specific lists (one now with very little activity "linux for translators" and the other dead "MacLingua"), and the rest is documented somewhere.>> The writing pace has varied a lot over the years. Currently the last article is about 1 year old. There isn't much news in the mac tech world for translators and I'm mostly writing about my processes, that involve AppleScript a lot, and some other automation solutions, etc. I try to stick to free software (and the whole blog is free-licenced) but sometimes I talk about non-free solutions. I have a few AppelScript "tutorials" that I want to write, but they are tutorials for people who want to start doing real things. The ones I already posted are basically huge comments on my code. They are interesting to write because they force me to document everything I code, and they also force me to understand the copy-pasted code that I used. There are 2 issues here. I don't code AppleScript every day so I'm far from being a "native" and have to relearn every time I write new code, and AppleScript is very close to being a dead-end solution on Macs and everybody is waiting for its successor, so the community is not exactly thriving (but the good side is that you have very easy access to world-class experts that really enjoy supporting newcomers)...>> http://mac4translators.blogspot.com>> Last year, I decided to start a new side project that I envisioned could become a new job. In 96, I was hired by a local bookstore in Paris, right in front of the university. It was a scholarly bookstore specialized in the Arab World, and not the "Arab World" that' on TV since 911, but the other one, the one with the Palestinian poets, the one with Lenin translations in Arabic, etc. At the time, the public web was just being born. I had had a 9600 bauds modem for about 2 years and I proposed the owner that I create a web site with the catalogue for orders. The result was the second bookstore web site in France, the first being the one of the bookstore where I spent my hours between classes and whose owner had introduced me to the web ("Buy a modem! It's fun!") I came to Japan with the HTML 4.0 draft printed on paper in my suitcase and I went on creating web sites in HTML+CSS for about a decade. Back to today. CMSs have invaded the web and I happen to have found a Wordpress community on a small island where I have a garden and a spare house that I fix, 30 minutes by ferry from the mainland. I thought it would be fun to propose my old but still useful skills to small and medium businesses who have a web site but have no idea hot to fix/improve/maintain/update it and don't want to depend on the big money suckers that created the site in the first place.>> So, in the winter of 2018 I started brushing up my skills. That ended up evolving into a "why don't I build my own CMS with the tool I want most to learn: emacs". So I started with a github page, and decided to publish something every day, even on weekends. At first it was all had written from scratch, then I wrote some elisp code (the beginning of my "cms"), then because of family issues, I stopped.>> Family issues having mostly been solved, I'm ready to start again. I want to write because it's fun, and useful, but mostly fun.>> https://brandelune.github.io/>> I've been a paid supported of sr.ht since the day after the alpha phase started. What Drew (and fellow coders) is really important. I don't even use 0.1% of the provided services, but I'll be upgrading my plan to $100/year (I wanted to do it today after I received the 1-year anniversary announcement but there seems to be a glitch in the web UI). Thank you for your amazing work.>>> Jean-Christophe Helary> -----------------------------------------------> http://mac4translators.blogspot.com @brandelune>
Thank you Jeremy.
Writing the RSS feed by hand on the second one was fun too :)
> On Nov 16, 2019, at 13:58, Jeremy Jung <dev@jeremyjung.com> wrote:> > What an interesting niche, thanks for sharing. It's rare to see a> blog that's over ten years old. Nice work keeping it going :)> > On Fri, Nov 15, 2019 at 7:25 PM Jean-Christophe Helary> <jean.christophe.helary@traduction-libre.org> wrote:>> >> Hello fellow list members.
Jean-Christophe Helary
-----------------------------------------------
http://mac4translators.blogspot.com @brandelune
On Saturday 16. November 2019 4:20:03 CET Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
> Hello fellow list members.> > So, in the winter of 2018 I started brushing up my skills. That ended> up evolving into a "why don't I build my own CMS with the tool I want> most to learn: emacs". So I started with a github page, and decided> to publish something every day, even on weekends. At first it was all> had written from scratch, then I wrote some elisp code (the beginning> of my "cms").> > https://brandelune.github.io/
Hello,
I have small advice for the health of this web.
Please specify charset / character encoding of the website.
See:
https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_meta_charset.asphttps://www.w3schools.com/html/html_charset.asp
Have fun writing.
Best regards.
> On Nov 16, 2019, at 18:11, Juraj Oravec <jurajoravec@netc.it> wrote:> >> https://brandelune.github.io/> > Hello,> I have small advice for the health of this web.> Please specify charset / character encoding of the website.
OMG, how come I have missed that !!! Thank you for pointing that out.
Jean-Christophe Helary
-----------------------------------------------
http://mac4translators.blogspot.com @brandelune
> On Nov 16, 2019, at 18:11, Juraj Oravec <jurajoravec@netc.it> wrote:> > On Saturday 16. November 2019 4:20:03 CET Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:>> Hello fellow list members.>> >> So, in the winter of 2018 I started brushing up my skills. That ended>> up evolving into a "why don't I build my own CMS with the tool I want>> most to learn: emacs". So I started with a github page, and decided>> to publish something every day, even on weekends. At first it was all>> had written from scratch, then I wrote some elisp code (the beginning>> of my "cms").>> >> https://brandelune.github.io/> > Hello,> I have small advice for the health of this web.> Please specify charset / character encoding of the website.
Thank you. It should be fixed now.
Jean-Christophe Helary
-----------------------------------------------
http://mac4translators.blogspot.com @brandelune