Problems upgrading from IE8 to IE9 on a Sony Vaio on Windows 7

Posted on by Roger Pearse

For some months I have been using Internet Explorer 8, when I really wanted to upgrade to IE 9.  But I just couldn’t!  When I tried, the installation seemed to work; then my PC would reboot; and then it would come up in black and white, attempting to set “personal settings”, and would just hang.

Nothing I could do would fix this.  Even if I went to the Advanced Options in IE, and tried to Reset to factory settings, this would hang too.

This evening I finally managed it.  Since I never actually found a page which explained the problem, here are my thoughts.

Firstly, I usually used the 32-bit version of IE8, rather than the 64 bit version.  This was on Windows 7 64-bit.  The reason for this was that IE8 64-bit did not support flash, so a lot of sites did not display their content.  The Flash driver for 64 bit IE8 never did arrive, as far as I can tell.  But I don’t think doing the Reset on the 32-bit does any good.  You need to do whatever you do on the “main” version.

Secondly … you can’t reset IE8 while it is running.  This was the breakthrough.  Instead, close down all your IE instances, and then do Start … Run … inetcpl.cpl.  This is the Control Panel options for IE, and you can access it without IE running.  I was able to do a reset to factory settings OK!  Then, when I started IE8 — using  the 64-bit one, you may be sure — it started normally.

Then, from the 64-bit IE8, I clicked on the IE9 icon and did the install.  I closed IE8 as it ran — no reason to have it open.  I also paused Kaspersky Internet Security — which notoriously interferes with a lot of things.

And … bliss!  IE9 installed just fine.

At least Google should now stop nagging me about using an old version.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m still chopping away at Ibn Abi Usaibia, and I’m on p.463 now.  <sfx:groan>  I’m almost sure this was less hard work ten years ago.  Of course the OCR software wasn’t as good back then.  Maybe it’s just my imagination.  I shall have some time over the next couple of weeks to make real progress with this, tho — a training course that I had booked for the week after next is not going to run.  This leaves me at a loose end, suddenly and unexpectedly. 

The first two pages of the translation of Methodius, De lepra have come through and I think that they are basically sound.  The translator actually translated the entirety of the page and laid it out in Word, notes and apparatus and all, which was rather impressive.  At the moment we’re discussing what to do with all of Bonwetsch’s notes: first a set of biblical and other references, and then an apparatus.  It looks as if we’ll just translate a few of the major notes where these would affect the meaning.

But I haven’t managed to pay for any of it yet.  Indeed I’m still learning how www.peopleperhour.com’s website works.  But the system requires a large deposit, which I have paid.  Thankfully this can be done from Paypal, so your purchases of CDROM’s etc can be used to fund the new work directly.   I have no strong feelings either way, so far, about whether www.peopleperhour.com is a good place to get work done.  I suppose that means that it is basically going well.

One interesting problem is that, while the translator knows his German, he isn’t familiar with the bible, or the ecclesiastical-speak that we find in so many patristic works.  One sentence confused him rather seriously, because he didn’t recognise the reference to the parable of the mustard seed.

Nor could this be expected, necessarily — a general translator probably specialises in contemporary documents where everyone is thinking in the same culture-pattern, whatever language they are writing those common thoughts in.  We, on the other hand, are accustomed to work which is honeycombed with biblical language and ideas. 

But it’s a warning to us all, in a way.  Material that we think is clear and obvious does in fact involve a jargon, and some unusual ways of assembling sentences and referring out to the biblical text.

I wish Bonwetsch had written in French.  I could probably have done the whole text myself in a day or two.  But German always hurts, when I have to translate it.  I suppose it just means that I need to read much more stuff in German, and get used to it, in the way I did for French.  But when would I get the time?

UPDATE: 9pm, I’ve just completed p.500, and it’s now time to back up my PC for the weekend!

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Problems with Abbyy Finereader 11

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Tonight I realised that I was getting close to the end of one section of Ibn Abi Usaibia, and that the next 350 pages was in sight.  I thought that it might be a good idea to create a Finereader project for those pages, and run the optical character recognition on them, and do a few global search-and-replaces.

So far I have been working with Finereader 10, although I did a small experiment with Finereader 11 when I got it.  But this new chunk is an obvious break-point to move up.

I started up Finereader 11, and attempted to import my settings — primarily my custom English-Arabic language setting — from FR10.  This promptly crashed.

I restarted FR11, and after a bit of fiddling recreated the language and saved it.  I then opened the PDF with the 350 files, which was fine.

Then I OCR’d the lot.  This seemed to go OK; and then started popping up horrible-looking internal error messages.  In fact it just would not allow me to view the “read” pages.

I ended up going back to FR10, which is running at the moment.  Doubtless I have done something wrong, but it is troublingly easy to crash FR11.

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Ibn Abi Usaibia update

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I may be on holiday this week, but the sky is leaden grey, and has been so for a week, apart from a few hours yesterday.  So I’m working on OCR’ing Ibn Abi Usaibia’s History of Physicians.

I’ve reached page 353, where begins the entry on Hunayn ibn Ishaq, the great translator of Greek medical works into Arabic.  I hope this will be interesting.

In truth I am relieved to reach this point.  The last 50 pages have been all about the physicians of the early Abbasid period; venal, money-grubbing, treacherous, self-important and — one and all — evidently incompetent.  Reading about the palace intrigues in which all took part has been tedious enough. 

The interesting thing is that, because most of them had no medical skill, they placed their patient in danger.  They all had the same patient too — the Caliph — who alone had the money to hire them.  So the Abbassid ruler who hired them was at more danger than any of his subjects!

UPDATE: I have just reached p.400 of Ibn Abi Usaibia. 

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Methodius update

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have now agreed terms to translate the Bonwetsch text of Methodius De Lepra.  The work survives in Old Slavonic, plus Greek fragments.  Bonwetsch did not print the Old Slavonic, but a German translation of it, interspersed with untranslated passages of the original Greek. 

I would have much preferred to translate the Old Slavonic, but I have no clear idea of how to obtain this, since it has never been published.

I’ve not used this translator before, so we will see what sort of job he does.  The price is quite a bit more than I really like; but I’ll do it as an experiment.  The result will go online as public domain, of course.  I shall add in whatever footnotes are useful from Bonwetsch — biblical references and the like.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve spent part of this afternoon working on proofing a fresh chunk of the translation of Ibn Abi Usaibia, History of Physicians.  I’m beginning to find that I need to make global find and replaces in each chunk for the same sorts of things: Abu needs to become Abū, Air to become Alī, Ibrāhfm change to Ibrāhīm, and so on.  Unfortunately Finereader does not give me any macro facility; I have to hit Ctrl-H and go through as much of the list as I can remember.

What is needed, obviously, is a script.  Or else a macro facility, or some kind of automation.  It needs to operate by recording what I do, and then be editable.

Anyone got any suggestions?  I have tried AutoIt and AutoHotKey, and neither has the recorder facility.  AutoHotKey claims to have it, but it is not in fact installed.

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The date of the Mithraeum of San Clemente in Rome

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Someone online told me today that the Mithraeum underneath the church of San Clemente in Rome was first century.  Of course I knew that Mithraic archaeology starts ca. 100, so I wondered what date the Mithraeum really was.

The Mithraeum was discovered by an Irish father, Fr. Joseph Mullooly, whose publication Saint Clement (1873) is online[ref]Fr. Joseph Mullooly, Saint Clement, Pope and martyr, and his basilica in Rome, Rome, 1873.  http://www.archive.org/details/saintclement00mulluoft[/ref].  A recent topographical dictionary[ref]Lawrence Richardson, A new topographical dictionary of ancient Rome, p.257: preview here.[/ref] says that the Mithraeum was discovered in 1869, but because of ground water excavation only became possible in 1914, that it is “of the early third century” and gives references of E. Junyent, Il titolo di San Clemente in Roma (1932), p.66-81; Vermaseren Corpus 1.156-59; and Nash (?) 2.75-78.  It is  unfortunate that none of this material is accessible online.  It would be useful to know more.

Thanks to the generosity of a friend, there is mention in JSTOR in an American journal of a 1915 article by Franz Cumont:

In C. R. Acad. Insc. [?] 1915, pp.203-211 (3 figs) F. Cumont reports on “recent archaeological work in the cellar of the church of Saint Clement in Rome.  This church rests upon the foundations of a temple of Mithra built at some unknown date in  a large house of the time of Augustus.  After much trouble water was diverted from the site which is now dry and open to inspection.  Part of a heavy wall belonging to the republican period can now be seen. Recent discoveries include a fountain which stood before the temple; numerous remains of animals, especially of wild boars; and part of the altar discovered in 1859.  It is inscribed CN. ARRIVS. CLAVDIANUS | PATER POSUIT. and dates from the end of the second century A.D.  The head of a solar deity found in 1869 is of the same date.

Don’t you just hate abbreviations?  Thanks to Google and some guessing, it seems to be ” Comptes Rendus de l’Academie des Inscriptions”.  Thankfully French journals are starting to come online, thanks to www.persee.fr, and the CRAI is here.  A  bit of poking around and the article proves to be Découvertes nouvelles au Mithréum de Saint-Clément à Rome.   But it doesn’t give us much.

The need for access to the Vermaseren’s CIMRM online remains acute.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Today has been dedicated to life’s little chores.  But there is a little news.

Last night I did some more OCR on Ibn Abi Usaibia.  We passed the page 320 mark.

I’m still negotiating to translate Methodius, De Lepra from the mixture of German and Greek that Bonwetsch printed in GCS 27.  The price is quite a bit higher than I wanted, but I’ll find the money for this one and treat it as an experiment.

I’ve also done a bit of work on the GCS page.  A correspondent has pointed out that there is a way to download the volumes from the Polish library as a single .djvu file, rather than a zip file of myriads of pages.  This works (not in IE8 tho — I got it working in Firefox 5), and I’m redownloading some of the files now.

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ALDL demanding copies they aren’t entitled to?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A letter arrives today, addressed to my company, Chieftain Publishing, from the “Agency for the Legal Deposit Libraries”. 

In the UK there is a duty on publishers to supply a free copy of each of 6 libraries: The British Library, Oxford, Cambridge, National Library of Scotland, ditto of Wales, and Trinity College Dublin.  It is a much resented provision among publishers, especially publishers of expensive limited-run books.  It’s not that useful a provision, when you consider that none of these libraries will make copies available by inter-library loan to people like you and I. 

The letter demands 5 copies of the Eusebius book paperback, under the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003. 

But they’ve already had 5 copies of the hardback, and indeed I have an acknowledgement of receipt.  So I’m rather baffled.  Can they really be entitled to yet more copies of a book which are basically the same?

But the web is a wonderful thing.  The Act itself is here, and laid out — thankfully — in a very readable form.  And what do I see at the top?

Duty to deposit
1.Deposit of publications
2.New and alternative editions
3.Enforcement

“New and alternative editions” sounds relevant, so I open it up.  And I find…

(1)This Act does not apply to a work which is substantially the same as one already published in the same medium in the United Kingdom.

So I have written back and queried their request.  After all, whatever would the libraries whom they represent do with TWO copies of the book?  I shall await a response with interest.

But I wonder how many publishers just sent copies regardless?  And what happens to them?

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m continuing to scan the History of physicians by Ibn Abi Usaibia.  I’ve done another 40 pages lately, which takes us up to 288.  But we’re still only about a third of the way through.

I’ve had a possible bid at PeoplePerHour.com to translate Methodius De lepra; the first bid was too high, but we’re much closer now.  It’s still more than I ever wanted to pay, but I’m willing to give it a go, so long as the quality is there.

The sales figures for November for Amazon for Eusebius: Gospel Problems and Solutions have arrived.  14 copies were sold through Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.  My company also sold a few copies directly.  It seems that sales are gradually increasing each month, which is good.  There’s quite a delay between the orders being placed and money reaching me — at least 3 months — but the money for June and July has now arrived.  Of course those months were early days and the sales were fairly small numbers, but at least some money is now coming in.  It’s fairly clear, though, that by 5th April the project will still be in debit, but perhaps not by as much as I had feared. 

So, if you need a Christmas present for the patristic scholar in your life, why not buy him a copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk?  (sorry to bang the drum a little: I’m not that good at this marketing stuff, but even I know that Christmas is coming).

A correspondent has been pointing out various errata and corrigenda in the GCS page that I’ve set up.  I must look some more at this.

If the sun ever comes out — it’s been dull here for five days now — I shall do a trip up to Cambridge University Library.

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