XBench is alive and kicking!

After some time of silence, XBench development has become visibly active. On October 14, 2009 they released new version 2.8, and it took ApSIC less than a month to release its new build with hot fixes.

The tool, which was powerful enough for a tool available for free, is now even more helpful and useful. The most important things, to my mind, are regular expressions support and faster search engine, but this is not the whole list. XBench has always been the tool that supported the widest variety of file formats, but it expanded here as well having added a few more formats with the new release. Additionally, its checklists were enhanced and allow for better organization.

Last but not least, as of October 7, 2009, XBench allows you to develop plug-ins to it. Now you can implement your own types of checks as a DLL and make XBench run those checks together with ones that are built into it. All you need to do that, is to be familiar with software development and read this document carefully.

Well done, I believe. The market of QA tools has been quite live recently, and the fact that we have a powerful and evolving free tool is really pleasing.

And if ApSIC takes the next step and provide support for a community of plug-in developers, I really believe we may expect XBench to be the most comprehensive QA tool on the market in a very short time.

Nanotechnologies in action!

This post in fact is going to deal neither with nanotechnologies nor even with translation directly. However, I'm sooo surprised that I just feel I have to tell the entire world about it immediately.

I need to apply for a new foreign passport as my current one "ran out of space". I traveled so much that there are no free pages for visas any longer though it is valid for two more years. I felt very reluctant about collecting all the necessary papers, calling the officials to make sure what and when and how... and I naturally pushed myself to at least search for the necessary phone number in online yellow pages. And there was a web link under all the phone numbers, and I decided to check it.

What a surprise! They have all necessary information there! It's quite nicely categorized, to my mind, and includes everything you need to deal with passports, migration etc. Open hours, lists of necessary documents, rates, document templates - everything is there. And what really killed me - you can make an appointment with the head of Federal Migration Service in Tomsk via the site, and the appointment will be using Skype!

I can bet almost 100% of Russian citizens (at least outside Moscow) could not even think a provincial government agency may be so "electronically advanced". What they still miss is accepting the documents via e-mail or FTP, sending the passports back via DHL and... site translation into at least English :)