Dennis Ritchie has died.

"I feared that the committee would decide to go with their previous decision unless I credibly pulled a full tantrum."
    -- dmr@alice.UUCP

Or, in this case, “Pool! Out of the loop!”, which explained how someone’s straightforward Python-based service had managed to open 350 simultaneous connections to the MySQL server in a matter of minutes, under very light load. Another one of those “glad we caught it in QA” moments.

Between the product page that focuses almost exclusively on vague descriptions of bundled apps, the extremely weak coverage of yesterday’s press conference, and the distinct lack of detailed product reviews based on actual shipping hardware, one might wonder if you’re not terribly excited about releasing the ThinkPad Tablet, even with the real digitizer hardware that makes it possible to use a stylus for more than fingerpainting.

I managed to find confirmation that it supports the regular Android Market as well as the Lenovo App Store, but does it work with Amazon’s App Store? Can you cleanly delete unwanted bundled apps, such as McAfee for Android? Does the note-taking app include all of the optional handwriting recognition languages, such as Japanese? If not, are they available as add-ons?

The product doesn’t seem to be really getting launched, y’see. Most of the press coverage is still from over a month ago, and is a mix of direct quotes from press releases and handwaved comments about how good it will be when it’s finished.

Which suggests that until this week, it was still so rough that it couldn’t be sent out for real reviews. This might have been okay if you’d been the first company to launch an Android tablet, or perhaps even if you hadn’t already shipped a similar one (without the pen) in the IdeaPad line.

[Update: the ship date keeps slipping on lenovo.com, and I don’t think it’s due to a huge number of orders…]

Quoting ArsTechnica:

Here is the data that Sony is sure has been compromised if you have a PlayStation Network Account:

Your name
Your address (city, state, and zip)
Country
E-mail address
Birthday
PSN password and login name

“​…although Sony is still unsure about whether your credit card data is safe.”

If they got the credit cards as well, Sony is in for a world of hurt.

A while back, I upgraded my laptop by replacing the DVD with a 240GB SSD. This has been very, very nice, and gave me just shy of 750GB of disk space, a third of it silly-fast.

So naturally I couldn’t resist replacing the 500GB Seagate hybrid with a Western Digital 750 GB 7200rpm drive, giving me just shy of a Terabyte. And I carry another Terabyte around in the form of a WD hardware-encrypted USB drive.

If this future we live in had flying cars and catgirls, it would be perfect.

Amusingly, despite the fact that this laptop (and its daily backups…) is the center of my electronic universe, I will likely not be taking it to Japan with me at the end of March. My sister and I are only going to be in Kyoto for a week, and time spent in the hotel is time wasted. I’ll take my little Win7 netbook (can VPN to work in an emergency) and my Kindle (v3 has kanji support, and 3G Whispernet works all over Japan), but the bulk of the weight in my carry-on will consist of cameras and lenses.

The Kindle is the reason for several of my seemingly-unrelated recent entries and sidebar links, by the way, including an upcoming discussion of my grand kit-bashing project that mixes Aozora Bunko, MeCab, JMdict, MongoDB, pLaTeX, dviasm, and pdftk, welded together with a few hundred lines of Perl to produce ebooks with personalized levels of furigana and matching per-page vocabulary lists. More on that soon.

In addition to Aozora’s out-of-copyright literature, it’s easy to find much more contemporary work marked up in their format. One should of course only download such things if one is already in legitimate possession of the printed book, but once that hurdle is cleared, my version will be much easier to work through. The scripts can take a complete light novel from raw text to completed PDFs in about 10 seconds, and it only takes a few passes to find all of the unusual vocabulary and definitions, so my reading speed will be improving quite a bit soon.

Which is good, because, as I said, I’m finally going back to Japan!

Since a new version of the free-as-in-fork LibreOffice package was just released, I thought I’d take a look and see if it’s gotten any easier to import formatted text.

The answer: “kinda”.

Good: It imports simple HTML and CSS.

Bad: …into a special “HTML” document type that must be exported to disk in ODT format, and then reopened. Otherwise, all formatting not available for web use will either disappear from all menus and dialog boxes, silently fail, or be deleted when you save (generally the result of pasting from another document).

[note that the Mac version crashed half a dozen times as I was exploring these behaviors, but it usually managed to open the documents on the second try]

Sadly, furigana are not considered compatible with HTML, so they’re stripped on import, making it rather a moot point that you can’t edit them in HTML mode. The only way to import text marked up with furigana is to generate a real XML-formatted, Zip-archived ODT file.

Just spent a merry, no wait, hellish few hours fighting to get a LaTeX distribution up and running for the sole purpose of running a single script that uses it to convert marked-up Japanese text to PDF in convenient ebook sizes.

I failed. Or, more precisely, I got all the way to a DVI file that could be displayed quite nicely on screen, with all the kanji and furigana intact, but then the PDF converter that was part of the same TeX package that had generated it started barfing all over my screen, and I refused to spend more time on the project. I simply have no desire to navigate the layers and layers and layers of crap that TeX has acquired in its hacked-together support for modern fonts and encodings.

Honestly, if I want to generate cleanly-formatted Japanese text as a PDF, with furigana and vertical layout and custom page sizes, it takes 10,000 times less effort to spit out bog-standard HTML+CSS and feed it to Microsoft Word.

[Note to the MS-allergic: performing the equivalent import into OpenOffice is possible, but not reasonable. Getting basic unstyled plaintext+furigana wasn’t too bad, but anything more complicated would be an exercise in tedious XML debugging.]

[Update: gave it another go, and eventually discovered that running dvipdfmx with KPATHSEA_DEBUG=-1 in the environment returned a completely different search path than the kpsewhich tool used. Copying share/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf.ptex to etc/texmf/texmf.cnf made all the problems go away. At least until the next time I upgrade something in MacPorts that recursively depends on something that obsoletes a recursive dependency of pTeX and hoses half my tools.

And, no, I can’t use the self-contained and centrally-managed TeX Live distribution (or the matching GUI-enabled MacTeX). That was the first hour I wasted. Its version of pTeX is apparently incompatible with one of the style files I needed.]

For a slightly-early birthday present to myself, as part of a post-Thanksgiving sale I bought myself an OWC Data Doubler w/ 240GB SSD. After making three full backups of my laptop, I installed it, and have been enjoying it quite a bit. This kit installs the SSD as a second drive, replacing the optical, allowing you to use it in addition to the standard drive, which in my case is a 500GB Seagate hybrid. I’ve set up the SSD as the boot drive, with the 500GB as /Users/Shared, and moved my iTunes, iPhoto, and Aperture libraries there, as well as my big VMware images and an 80GB Windows partition.

[side note: the Seagate hybrid drives do provide a small-but-visible improvement in boot/launch performance, but the bulk of your data doesn’t gain any benefit from it, and software updates erase the speed boost until the drive adjusts to the new usage pattern. Dual-boot doesn’t help, either. An easy upgrade, but not a big one, IMHO.]

Good:

• Straightforward installation. There was only one finicky bit where OWC's detailed instructions didn't quite match reality, which just required a little gentle fiddling to get the cable out of the way.
• Boots faster. Much.
• All applications launch faster, especially the ones that do annoying things like maintain their own font caches. Resource-intensive apps (pronounced "Photoshop") also get a nice speed boost for many operations, especially when I'm working with 24 megapixel raw images.
• Apple's gratuitous uncached preview icons render acceptably fast now. Honestly, I got so sick of delays caused by scanning large files to generate custom icons that I turned it off a long time ago (except the magic Dock view of the Downloads folder, which you can't disable it for).
• SuperDuper incremental backups are ~4x faster. 10-15% of this comes from not having to scan the 160GB of stuff that's now on a separate drive, but most of it is due to not seeking around on the disk to see what's changed. I've actually switched my backups from a fast FireWire800 enclosure to a portable USB2 drive, and I still save a lot of time.
• A little better battery life, a little less heat. The hard drive stays spun down most of the time unless I have iTunes running.
• External USB DVD drives work fine for ripping, burning, and OS installation.

Bad:

• Apple's DVD Player app refuses to launch at all unless an internal DVD drive is present; external drives aren't acceptable (unless there's also an internal, in which case you can cheerfully use both, and even have them set to different regions). VLC is a poor substitute. You can get it to work with external drives... by editing the binary. Seriously, you replace all instances of "Internal" with "External" in this file:
  /System/Library/Frameworks/DVDPlayback.framework/Versions/A/DVDPlayback
• Time Machine backups don't pick up the second drive. Neither does SuperDuper, so I added a one-line script to my SuperDuper config that does:
  rsync -v -‍-delete -‍-exclude .Spotlight-V100
      -‍-exclude .Trashes -‍-exclude .fseventsd
      /Users/Shared/ /Volumes/Back2/
• Snow Leopard seems to have lost the ability to reliably specify the mount location of a second drive. In previous releases, you could put the UUID or label into /etc/fstab and it worked. Now that file only accepts device names, which are generated dynamically on boot. This works if only two drives are present at boot time, since the boot drive will always get disk0, but having an external drive connected could result in a surprise.
• (obvious) Can't watch actual DVDs without carrying around an external drive.

So, file this little experiment under “expensive but worth it”. I do watch DVDs on my laptop, but only at home or in hotels, so the external drive isn’t a daily-carry accessory. The SSD has a Sandforce chipset and 7% over-provisioning, and is less than half full, so there’s no sign of performance degradation, and I don’t expect any. Aperture supports multiple libraries, so I can edit fresh material on the SSD, then move it to the hard drive when I’m done with it. Honestly, unless Apple releases MacBook Pro models that wil take more than 8GB of RAM, I really see no need to buy a new one for quite a while.