Scheibenkleister II By Claus Brod - SCAN & Translation

DrCoolZic · Post by **DrCoolZic** » Thu Aug 30, 2007 7:56 pm

This seems to be the reference book on FDC and HDD

Claus Brod wrote:CBHD, SED, Hyperformat and some of the other tools described here once were part of my book "Scheibenkleister - Massenspeicher am Atari", published by Maxon Computer (originally called "Merlin"), which covered all the interesting details about floppy disks, hard disks, RAM disks, CD-ROMs and other mass storage devices for the Atari line. The book went through two major editions (the second edition was essentially a complete rewrite), but is now long out of print...

Does anybody have a scanned version of this book ?

I would be interested to read it ! As I do not speak German I was thinking of converting the content using an automatic translation program. I already have done that on several German doc files and if the results is far from beeing perfect it is usually readable...

This could be an interesting project.

PS This might not be the right place (HW forum) to publish?

jens · Post by **jens** » Fri Aug 31, 2007 10:18 am

Claus is thinking about the possibility of making Scheibenkleister available on the net.
It seems there have been issues with contacting one of them, so they can't discuss this atm.

DrCoolZic · Post by **DrCoolZic** » Sat Sep 01, 2007 9:01 am

I found a place where they still have the book and eventually I could do the work on my own. But problems are:
1) need to OCR and I do not think my sw has German dict.
2) read proofing would be difficult as I do not speaks German

Doing this as a "public" project is probably a problem too: legal & copyright ?

Did not know Claus Brod was still interested by Ataris? When you say

"Claus is thinking about the possibility of making Scheibenkleister available on the net. "

How far is it ??? "thinking about the possibility" sounds very far ...
Are you in contact with him ???

Related question CBHD is suppose to be public domain. But I could not find sources?

keili · Post by **keili** » Sat Sep 01, 2007 11:10 am

He is and you can have a look at his (english!) homepage:
http://www.clausbrod.de/cgi-bin/view.pl/Atari/WebHome

DrCoolZic · Post by **DrCoolZic** » Sat Sep 01, 2007 1:41 pm

Thanks. I have already visited his Web site many times.
Finally I just bought the book few hours ago from Nederland. Should receive it a few days ... and see what I can do from there.

If I am courageous I might need some help in translating German!!!

jens · Post by **jens** » Mon Sep 03, 2007 9:49 pm

Well - on his page Claus says he'll need conversion tools for the work to do.
Don't know how far he got up to now.

D-Bug are talking to him as well regarding Cbhd, and from some talk with ggn I know about the contact issue.

DrCoolZic · Post by **DrCoolZic** » Tue Sep 18, 2007 5:32 pm

As I already mentionned I have bought and received the book and started the work !!! Unfortunately I do not have the time I would like so progress is slow ...

The book is 872 pages ... So I decided not to do eveything at once!

As a test run I have scanned Chapter 13 (one of highest interest for me now) and .... (drum) .... translated it to English with a translation program. The result is for most part readable but nevertheless I had to do a lot of editing. For information the different listings in assembly have been translated also (do not worry only the comments where changed)

I have now reached the point where I need help as I do not speak German (even if I learned it at school for many years).
The English version has text highlighted in Yellow for words not translated (because not found in dictionnaries) and text highlighted in green for sentences that I could not reformat to something meaningfull ... and therefore I need somebody that speaks German and English to look at the text.

As an incentive and also because the text is still copyrighted I will publish the text in MS Word but encrypted.
So if you are ready to help me you can pm me a message and in return you will get the passwords. In return I expect that you provide me with a corrected English text (and why not a corrected German text if you find error in the scan).

Later this turn to be a viable project we could contact Claus Brod to see if he is interested and willing to make it public domain. Once the English version in validated I can also translate to French if any interest?

Forgot to mention:
Did not found any translation for SCHEIBENKLEISTER ??? What would be the best translation ?

Also the book came with a disk but unfortunately most files are unreadable. Do you know if the "disk" available from Claus site contains same info that in the original disk? Or does someone have a copy of the disk?

Klapauzius · Post by **Klapauzius** » Wed Sep 19, 2007 8:54 am

DrCoolZic wrote: Forgot to mention:
Did not found any translation for SCHEIBENKLEISTER ??? What would be the best translation ?

This will be difficult to translate to English.

Actually, the literal translation would be:
"Sh*t" - or, more mildly put: "What a mess"

But in this context, "Scheibenkleister" is a play on words:
Scheibe = disk, floppy
Kleister = glue

So perhaps just take the original title?

Klaz

DrCoolZic · Post by **DrCoolZic** » Thu Sep 20, 2007 2:39 pm

OK it looks like so far the translation does not generate much interest !!!
Only one request so far !!!!
I still think that this is very interesting information.

I have finished to scan and translate Chapter 12 and you will find this chapter in German and English. This time it is not encrypted

so that everyone can get a feeling of the work done/todo.

This time I only spent a couple of days

on the translation and therefore there is a little bit more work to do ...

This time the words not translated are highlighted in Yellow and the sentence that needs to be reworked have their font in blue.

Have a look and if you can provide feedback this would be great.

Actually a list of words that do not translate ("yellow" word) would help a lot as I can enter them into a personal dictionary that I can use for the upcomming translations ...

DrCoolZic · Post by **DrCoolZic** » Fri Sep 21, 2007 9:11 am

About German dictionary:
I am using the following online German-English dictionary for words that do not translate correctly in Systran:

http://dict.leo.org/
http://www.ego4u.com/en/dictionary

Any pointer to better online dictionary?

Now a question: There are many terms in the book that I can't find in any dictionary. How is that possible? Is it because the book uses unusual terms? Of course I am not talking about proper name (e.g. adaptec, sh205, ...)!

For Info: One thing I rebember from school is that the order of the word is quite specific in German (things pushed to end of sentence) and apprently Systran is not very good at putting things back to "English order" ... This is were I spend most of the time postprocessing the text and I have sometimes difficulties in putting everything back. I am probably making mistake during this postprocessing and this is why I need help.
To give you I idea you will find attached a direct output from the translator (yellow highlight = not translated, green highlight = comes from perso dictionary - still plenty to enter). Keep in mind that I have build a dictionary of specific terms for which I have either found reasonable translation or for terms not to translate (Proper name, English Term, etc). Of course the assembly code generates a lot of problems (Systran does not really understand 68000 asembly language!) and requires lots of postprocessing but it is nice to get translated comments.

Post by **Dal** » Fri Sep 21, 2007 10:00 am

I'd be inclined to put the text you have into a simple html page, post it up somewhere (or host it on your own web server. Then use babel fish to translate the text using the url

DrCoolZic · Post by **DrCoolZic** » Fri Sep 21, 2007 4:27 pm

Dal_1978 wrote:I'd be inclined to put the text you have into a simple html page, post it up somewhere (or host it on your own web server. Then use babel fish to translate the text using the url

dont know about babel fish but Systran pro V6 is supposed to be the best tool for translation ...
Nevertheless I will give a try to Babel ...

Post by **Dal** » Fri Sep 21, 2007 4:35 pm

http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com/babelfish/tr

I use it now and again to make sense of some of the Atari sites that are in French/German.

clausb · Post by **clausb** » Tue Sep 25, 2007 12:00 pm

Dal_1978 wrote:I'd be inclined to put the text you have into a simple html page, post it up somewhere (or host it on your own web server. Then use babel fish to translate the text using the url

Hi all,

wow! I feel flattered that after all these years, somebody would actually invest all that effort to scan and translate the text!

A word of warning, however: The text is still copyrighted, and the copyright owner is Maxon. The good news is that I'm now in the process of obtaining the rights for web publication from Maxon, and if this works out as planned, I will publish the book online. If you still want to translate the text, then at least you don't have to scan it first.

Cheers,

Claus

DrCoolZic · Post by **DrCoolZic** » Tue Sep 25, 2007 12:27 pm

clausb wrote:wow! I feel flattered that after all these years, somebody would actually invest all that effort to scan and translate the text!

I am very interested about FD and HD on Atari (specially on FD protection) and your book is apparently still THE reference. I have heard about it so many times that I have decided to buy it. Unfortunately I do not speak German and my only solution is to rely on automatic translation. While automatic translation is not perfect it is readable and of course much better than nothing!

A word of warning, however: The text is still copyrighted, and the copyright owner is Maxon.

Thats what I figured out and this is why I did not want to release the scan publicly. Only chapter 12 is public and can be considered as a sample, an incentive to buy(?)...

The good news is that I'm now in the process of obtaining the rights for web publication from Maxon, and if this works out as planned, I will publish the book online. If you still want to translate the text, then at least you don't have to scan it first.

This is great news. Any idea about the timeframe ?

ppera · Post by **ppera** » Tue Sep 25, 2007 12:31 pm

clausb wrote: ...The good news is that I'm now in the process of obtaining the rights for web publication from Maxon, and if this works out as planned, I will publish the book online...

Very nice. Hope that we will see more such 'releases' .

clausb · Post by **clausb** » Tue Sep 25, 2007 5:58 pm

DrCoolZic wrote:This is great news. Any idea about the timeframe ?

Well, the legal stuff should be settled soon (a few weeks at most), and once that is done, I will start to post chapter per chapter. I hope to get the whole thing done by the end of the year.

Cheers,

Claus

DrCoolZic · Post by **DrCoolZic** » Tue Sep 25, 2007 6:06 pm

clausb wrote:Well, the legal stuff should be settled soon (a few weeks at most), and once that is done, I will start to post chapter per chapter. I hope to get the whole thing done by the end of the year.

And if you agree I can post English version

Post by **Greenious** » Tue Sep 25, 2007 6:16 pm

I'm very interested, but since I am very bad at german, I don't think I can contribute much.

But as for translating the text, maybe we can find a spot on the atari-forum wiki for it, I think the wiki format will prove to be an excellent way of translating this, especially if there is a couple of people working on it.

clausb · Post by **clausb** » Tue Sep 25, 2007 8:35 pm

Greenious wrote:But as for translating the text, maybe we can find a spot on the atari-forum wiki for it, I think the wiki format will prove to be an excellent way of translating this, especially if there is a couple of people working on it.

Actually, I run TWiki on my own site, so....

Claus

Post by **thothy** » Wed Sep 26, 2007 6:51 pm

Hi Claus! Great to hear that you are still working on getting the Scheibenkleister online! Thumbs up! It's really a great book! But I guess a good english translation will be quite hard to do because you play a lot with the words in the book

DrCoolZic · Post by **DrCoolZic** » Wed Sep 26, 2007 8:22 pm

thothy wrote:Hi Claus! Great to hear that you are still working on getting the Scheibenkleister online! Thumbs up! It's really a great book! But I guess a good english translation will be quite hard to do because you play a lot with the words in the book

This may explain why translation software have difficulties. They usually do not like "play on word"

and as I mentioned I found a lot of "unknown" words ?!

(at least with the dictionaries I tried)

By the way related to this:
Seems like the site hosting CBHD is dead

I have tried to access it for the last couple of weeks from Claus link without success? On the diskette are the source for an old version of CBHD sources ??? Any new version of the sources online ?

clausb · Post by **clausb** » Thu Sep 27, 2007 7:59 am

DrCoolZic wrote:
thothy wrote:Seems like the site hosting CBHD is dead I have tried to access it for the last couple of weeks from Claus link without success? On the diskette are the source for an old version of CBHD sources ??? Any new version of the sources online ?

Thanks for the note, I had not noticed this yet. I have contacted Steffen Engel (who's still the CBHD maintainer and used to run the website which hosted the latest version of CBHD) to find out more.

And although I hardly remember anything about the book, I guess an automatic translation should prove difficult. Back then, I didn't exactly try hard to stick to technical terms only

Claus

Post by **Mug UK** » Fri Sep 28, 2007 6:54 pm

If you point us at the German-glish, there's more than a few of us on here who'll gladly dive in and help English-ify the text.

clausb · Post by **clausb** » Sat Sep 29, 2007 9:06 am

muguk wrote:If you point us at the German-glish, there's more than a few of us on here who'll gladly dive in and help English-ify the text.

Cool! So let me clarify the legal stuff and post the text to my site, and then we can start translating it!

Claus