Full of win.

SF writer Elizabeth Moon has been removed as Guest of Honor at Wiscon, for the crime of stating an opinion that disagrees with the proper view on the subject.

[Update: The Brickmuppet weighs in, with thoughtful and linky goodness, including a Wiscon review. Honestly, after reading the review, I have to think that the only reason they originally invited her was for a chance to hate.]

Recommendation FAIL: because I own an Ove’ Glove…

Again? Seriously? Dogu-chan herself wasn’t wacky enough, now she needs to be backed up by the Doguun 5 bikini combat team?

I suppose the bright side is that this keeps you visible enough for your agency to justify making more DVDs…

More, please. Preferably without the bizarro zombie/mutant/drag-king who mars two of these shots.

No, seriously, Kemeko, you’ve found people who know how to do your hair, makeup, and clothing, and who recognize that your talent is accompanied by severe hotness. The only thing missing is a long-overdue solo album.

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Sometimes, funny-looking English in a sign isn’t. This is a perfectly reasonable translation of the Japanese text on the sign, and I’m sure it makes perfect sense to everyone who sees it.

杖等をご使用の方はここでお拭き下さい

There are no circles in PDF. Thought you saw a circle in a PDF file? Nope, you saw a series of Beziér cubic splines approximating a circle. This has never been a problem for me before, and I’ve cheerfully instructed the PDF::API2::Lite module to render dozens, nay hundreds of these “circles” on a single page, and it has always worked.

Then I tried rendering a few tens of thousands of them, and heard the fans on my laptop spin up. PDF::API2 is a pure-perl module, you see, and Perl is not, shall we say, optimized for trig. PDF::Haru, on the other hand, is a thin wrapper around Haru, which is written in C. Conversion took only a few minutes, which is about a tenth of the time the script would have needed to finish rendering, and the new version took 15 seconds to render a 1:50,000,000 scale Natural Earth basemap and all the data points.

I ended up abandoning “circles” for squares anyway, though, because PDF viewers aren’t happy with them in those quantities, either. Still faster to do it with PDF::Haru, so the time wasn’t wasted.

As a bonus, Haru has support for rendering vertical text in Japanese. I can think of a few uses for that in my other projects.

(I should note that it’s not useful for every project, and in most respects PDF::API2 is a more complete implementation of the spec, but for straightforward image rendering, it’s a lot faster. Development seems to have mostly stopped as well, so if it doesn’t do what you want today, it likely never will)

Why is Windows 7 willing to install updates and reboot a machine during a backup? Now, if this were a server, and I were running some third-party backup software, maybe you’d be able to convincingly mumble something about it being my responsibility to override the standard auto-update settings and schedule them for outside the backup window, but this is your own supplied automatic backup software on a consumer laptop. You know, the one that tries to run whenever it sees the backup drive connected and thinks now would be a good time to protect your data?

Left hand, meet right hand; you two should talk occasionally.