Translator Plugin Gold (for WordPress blogs) provides automatic machine translation of blogs in 32 languages (more will be added soon) - German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Arabic, Dutch, Greek, Russian, Norwegian, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Latin American Spanish, Filipino, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Slovenian, Swedish, Welsh, Turkish and Latin. We provide unlimited free updates and upgrades and 6 months of free support.
Translator Plugin Gold has a lucrative affiliate program too. You can make a cool 30% from each sale!

The new features and fixes in version 1.2 (free upgrade for existing customers) are:

New Features

1. Directory browsing of translator plugin directory has been disabled for better security.
2. The ability to switch off translation statistics (from translator option page under Basic->Statistics->Disable Statistics section). You may gain some performance by switching off the statistics simply because it uses a database query to store the data. You can still use the Statistics widget to display your existing statistics. However it will not be updated if you decide to switch off stats. You can again switch it on any time.
3. In Translator Plugin Gold 1.2 we added a new hook / callback facility to enable you to view and process the translated page before it is served to the end user. Please refer to developer guide to know how to use it. The importance of this hook cannot be understated.
   You can use the tgTranslatorPostFilterHook to edit / modify the content of the translated pages before it is served to the user. You can also take action based on the content or engine used to translate the page.
   This hook can be used to handle errors in translation or even catch and process new types of errors. The actions include 1. ability to send custom error pages, 2. re-direct to original pages (for example in case of error), 3. displaying custom error messages and more. Few use cases for this hook are:
   • Provide customized title, meta tags & descriptions for translated pages to eliminate concerns about duplicate content. Check out the translated pages in simple thoughts for some usage examples (hint: look at the meta tags and title).
   • Provide custom error pages or re-direct to original page when translator is unable to translate a page (due to overload or temporary unavailability of engines).
   • Filter translated pages
   • Add your own content to translated pages like advertisements etc. You can also do it using existing translator API. However this provides full control over processing translated pages before it is served to the end-user.

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Translator Plugin Pro (for WordPress blogs) provides automatic machine translation of blogs in 13+1 languages (many more will be added soon) - German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Dutch, Greek, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional and optionally Norwegian (note: we provide 32 languages with Translator Plugin Gold). We provide unlimited free updates and upgrades and 6 months of free support. The new features and fixes in version 5.2 (free upgrade for existing customers) are:

New Features

1. Directory browsing of translator plugin directory has been disabled for better security.
2. The ability to switch off translation statistics (from translator option page under Basic->Statistics->Disable Statistics section). You may gain some performance by switching off the statistics simply because it uses a database query to store the data. You can still use the Statistics widget to display your existing statistics. However it will not be updated if you decide to switch off stats. You can again switch it on any time.
3. In Translator Plugin Pro 5.2 we added a new hook / callback facility to enable you to view and process the translated page before it is served to the end user. Please refer to developer guide to know how to use it. The importance of this hook cannot be understated.
   You can use the tgTranslatorPostFilterHook to edit / modify the content of the translated pages before it is served to the user. You can also take action based on the content or engine used to translate the page.
   This hook can be used to handle errors in translation or even catch and process new types of errors. The actions include 1. ability to send custom error pages, 2. re-direct to original pages (for example in case of error), 3. displaying custom error messages and more. Few use cases for this hook are:
   • Provide customized title, meta tags & descriptions for translated pages. Check out the translated pages in simple thoughts for some usage examples (hint: look at the meta tags).
   • Provide custom error pages or re-direct to original page when translator is unable to translate a page (due to overload or temporary unavailability of engines).
   • Filter translated pages
   • Add your own content to translated pages like advertisements etc. You can also do it using existing translator API. However this provides full control over processing translated pages before it is served to the end-user.

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I am a long time LayeredTech dedicated server customer. Today out of the blue LayeredTech increased the price by 26%! None of the "service improvements" directly benefits average customers like us:
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Check out our career page and open positions. We prefer candidates from Kolkata, India. Exceptional candidates out of state will also be considered. In short we are looking for:

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I was looking for a simple free & open source trouble ticket system. I checked several of them, all the popular ones and more. I scanned through all the lists, which unfortunately haven't been updated for years. Anyway after slogging for several hours, I present you with the simplest, easy to use and well featured trouble ticket system I could find.

Note: Don't forget to read the disclaimer section (not your standard stuff) with interesting tidbits on other trouble ticket systems.

Trouble Ticket System / Customer Support System Requirements

First let's look at the requirements:
Most people make the mistake of thinking that a trouble ticket system is nothing but a defect tracking system and so they recommend systems like trac. Trouble ticket system, while similar in concept to defect tracking system, is significantly different in nature and purpose. A trouble ticket system is primarily concerned with accepting issues from end-users and routing them through the workflow system to get it resolved. It should also allow for escalation, if required, and prioritization.

A trouble ticket system, may (mostly for open source projects) or not allow viewing defects reported by other users. A trouble ticket system is more concerned with providing a service to get the troubles / issues resolved. It may or may not want users to view issues reported by other users. However when it doesn't allow viewing issues by other users, it should be complemented with a FAQ system to reduce load on customer support.
A valid use case for not allowing viewing issues for other users is when you are reporting an issue to your web hosting provider. Your report may contain details of login, password or other sensitive information which you do not want other users, or worse search bots, to browse through.
Many defect tracking systems, including the one I currently use - Mantis, doesn't allow this simple functionality out of the box!

A defect tracking system on the other hand is focussed on getting defects resolved for a product or project. It isn't focussed as much on providing timely resolution of customer defects as it is on timely fixing of bugs. So while they are similar, they intent and purpose is different.
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Automattic hosts WordPress.com using dedicated servers from LayeredTech. According to Todd Abrams, President & COO of Layered Technologies:
"The Layered Technologies support database was a target of malicious activity on the evening of 9/17/2007 that may have involved the illegal downloading of information such as names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and server login details for 5 to 6,000 of our clients."
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As you all probably know by now Sun decided to sell Windows 2003 servers (gasp, sputter… Scott McNealy would surely turn in his grave on hearing this news; wait a minute, he is still the Chairman of Sun) on its hardware. The key question on everyone's mind is has Sun finally found a direction as Microsoft's partner or has Sun joined the dark side as some would like to say or has Sun finally lost its marbles or whether it is really a strategically brilliant move? Significantly Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, is eerily silent on his blog about this initiative and continues to promote OpenOffice as an alternative to Microsoft Office.
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Vista Service Pack 1 is likely to be released to manufacturing in the first quarter of 2008, will not be as significant a feature release as Windows XP Service Pack 2. It will roll up many of the incremental performance and security updates Microsoft has been making since last November.

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1. They, for all purposes, do not have customer support:

1. There is a number (1800-424-1600) but when there are problems in the line, nobody picks it up.
2. In the rare cases when somebody does pickup and answer, they can never solve any problem. They will just take the complaint and give you a number.
3. The complaints are never attended; they are silently closed.

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Chuq Von Rospach is an Adobe Photoshop veteran. Recently he had series of bad experiences with Adobe Photoshop customer support. In essence what was promised on Adobe's site wasn't honored by Customer reps, what customer reps said wasn't honored by another group, resulting him paying much more for the software than he should have. I was reading through the rather rambulatory article, the pain I can sympathize with (as it is common to many other customer support divisions including but not limited to BSNL, AOL etc.) but not his decision to still end up purchasing the software. Adobe Photoshop has a very nice and capable alternative which allowed us, and we haven't regretted it since, fully migrate from Windows to Linux.

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