The trailers for Hellboy 2 may or may not be advertising a good action flick. One thing they’re definitely advertising is the creeping doom that is political correctness.

Take a good look at this frame:

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…some guy. Somewhere.

Doctor Horrible’s Sing-along Blog is briefly being streamed again, and I noticed that Hulu offers softsubs as closed captions. These were not provided by the producers of the show. Just a hunch.

I’m doing some load-testing for our service, focusing first on the all-important Christmas Morning test: what happens when 50,000 people unwrap their presents, find your product, and try to hook it up. This was a fun one at WebTV, where every year we rented CPUs and memory for our Oracle server, and did a complicated load-balancing dance to support new subscribers while still giving decent response to current ones. [Note: it is remarkably useful to be able to throw your service into database-read-only mode and point groups of hosts at different databases.]

My first problem was deciphering the interface. I’ve never worked with WSDL before, and it turns out that the Perl SOAP::WSDL package has a few quirks related to namespaces in XSD schemas. Specifically, all of the namespaces in the XSD must be declared in the definition section of the WSDL to avoid “unbound prefix” errors, and then you have to write a custom serializer to reinsert the namespaces after wsdl2perl.pl gleefully strips them all out for you.

Once I could register one phony subscriber on the test service, it was time to create thousands of plausible names, addresses, and (most importantly) phone numbers scattered around the US. Census data gave me a thousand popular first and last names, as well as a comprehensive collection of city/state/zip values. Our CCMI database gave me a full set of valid area codes and prefixes for those zips. The only thing I couldn’t find a decent source for was street names; I’m just using a thousand random last names for now.

I’m seeding the random number generator with the product serial number, so that 16728628 will always be Elisa Wallace on W. Westrick Shore in Crenshaw, MS 38621, with a number in the 662 area code.

Over the next few days, I’m going to find out how many new subscribers I can add at a time without killing the servers, as well as how many total they can support without exploding. It should be fun.

Meanwhile, I can report that Preview.app in Mac OS X 10.5.4 cheerfully handles converting a 92,600-page PostScript file into PDF. It took about fifteen minutes, plus a few more to write it back out to disk. I know this because I just generated half a million phony subscribers, and I wanted to download the list to my Sony Reader so I could scan through the output. I know that all have unique phone numbers, but I wanted to see how plausible they look. So far, not bad.

The (updated! yeah!) Sony Reader also handles the 92,600-page PDF file very nicely.

[Update: I should note that the “hook it up” part I’m referring to here is the web-based activation process. The actual “50,000 boxes connect to our servers and start making phone calls” part is something we can predict quite nicely based on the data from the thousands of boxes already in the field.]

It’s times like this that I’m glad I don’t follow local politics. Also that I have three cops living on my street.

Dennis Donohue, mayor of Salinas, an agricultural community dubbed America's salad bowl and the birthplace of the Nobel Laureate, John Steinbeck, appealed to the community to participate in a week-long Fasting for Peace campaign.

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"Make no mistake, a single fast or city flower or group of grandmas alone won't reduce violence in the streets," the paper stated. "But combined, they inject positive thinking into a city so desperate for some, and represent another chance for Salinas to come together over a community problem."

And why is this news in the UK? Because the Great Nanny has made this sort of wishful thinking their last remaining hope for crime control.

Nice to see not all of my neighbors are as deluded as the mayor, though:

"Fasting will accomplish NOTHING with regard to the gang violence problem. It is your typical liberal form-over-substance response to a serious problem that needs serious action, not new-age hullabaloo."

Hello!Project dressed you funny, and they were really pushing a slut look that didn’t flatter you. Avex’s wardrobe and makeup artists? Kill them. Kill them all. Make them suffer.

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Way to win hearts and minds, you spoiled little children.

In every Apple retail store is a so-called "Genius Bar" -- a technical support station, the purpose of which is to offer help and support for Apple products.

You can use Apple's helpful online booking system (no registration required) to reserve time slots at the Genius Bar. There are currently 217 Apple stores in seven countries, giving us plenty of slots to book. We want as many people as possible to book slots this Friday and Saturday. Why not book more than one? Having lots of slots booked will get Apple's attention and ensure that the Geniuses have done their homework.

Head over to your local Apple Store at your designated time. Be sure to get a business card from your Genius first and then politely ask them the questions. For each question, give them a score between 1 and 32, with 1 being a really bad answer, and 32 being an answer that really showed insight into the restrictive practices of the iPhone.

In other words, “we’re not Apple customers, and we’re not even going to pretend to be; we just want to fuck up a real customer’s day and annoy people who’d rather be solving actual problems”. This is right up there with Barlow’s asshatted dancing protest outside the Republican National Convention in 2004.

My latest order from Amazon Japan arrived today, and one of the things I threw in was the Miko Moe comic it recommended to me a while back. In case you missed that post, here’s the cover again:

The only way that this is not representative of the actual comic is that the girls are large-breasted and sexually aggressive. Our Hero is a teenage boy helping out at the shrine, and he gets some action in every chapter. It looks like the bluette is Miss Right, but at the moment she’s Miss Alittletootight. Fortunately, the other girls are, um, “filling in”.

[note that I’m not shocked that it’s porn; I was expecting it to at least be ecchi, and wouldn’t have complained if it had been a yuri-fest. I just have to wait until I get home tonight to really look it over.]

[Update: sample picture of a PDF with kanji and furigana below the fold]

Quite a while ago, Sony promised to update their e-ink reader (the 505 model, at least; owners of the original 500 are SOL) to support Adobe Digital Editions (emerging DRM ebook standard), as well as fix a lot of bugs and in general support the product. People have been wondering if it would ever happen, or if it would be a new model. The recent UK release of the 505 was a head-scratcher as well, since it came without any announcement about the overdue update.

It took a while, but it’s here (more precisely, it’s linked from here; there’s no direct download link). Lots of other improvements, including SDHC compatibility and… (wait for it)… kanji in PDF files! You still need to use one of the hacks to see Chinese and Japanese text in text files and menus, but now that there’s a real firmware installer for the 505, you can recover from bad hacks.

Looks good so far.

[Update: the PDF reflow works pretty well for straightforward text-heavy PDFs with sensible internal layout. That is, the order the text was generated in the PDF file is the order it will appear; it doesn’t understand “columns” as such. Unfortunately, the Microsoft Word equation editor violates this constraint, and furigana in Word is implemented as an equation. Net result: Japanese PDFs may turn into crap when you ask the reader to reflow them, so you should format them for its page size.

This also means that graphics-heavy PDF files can’t be resized at all. Maps and complex diagrams must be converted to JPG to be useful, because the PDF viewer still doesn’t scroll, and the resize button is always a reflow button now.

Generally, the UI is much faster (except the date-entry screen, which is glacial), and page-turning is slightly faster. The only EPUB-format document I’ve tried turned out to be very graphics-heavy, which basically locked up the device during rendering. I haven’t tried an SDHC card, but people are reporting very mixed results. I’m loving the kanji support in PDFs, and look forward to trying an updated version of the Unicode font hack to get kanji working in text files as well.]

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