“One of the effects of the rapid spread of higher education has been to equip people to criticise and question almost everything. Some of them seem to have stopped there instead of going on to the next stage which is to arrive at new beliefs or to reaffirm old ones.”
— Margaret Thatcher, 1968Don't try this at home, kids
Leave it to trained professionals…
…or, in this case, the idol group Idoling!!!, manufactured by Fuji TV for a weekly variety show. I think the wrestling matches were a fan request…
Warning: they do not lip-sync their songs on the show (live vs studio). You may have already figured this out if you watched the embedded clip…
A club that will have me as a member...
I would guess that somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 people have been qualified to wear this t-shirt. Approximately 99,950 of them paid for the privilege of membership, and the other 50 would have gotten the joke. Of those, perhaps a dozen will still remember it.
[and no, it’s not actually funny unless you’re one of those dozen, so I’m not going to explain]
[Update: Rory suggested a slight modification to improve the reference, and further decrease the number of people who’ll get it]
Oh, yeah, I bought it.
I’m not a big fan of celebrity gossip rags, even though I’ve been published in one. Between not really caring who’s been caught with who and hating the whole paparazzi sleazebucket style of photography, I generally don’t give them a second look.
The Japanese weekly magazine Friday is known to me only as the folks who ran “image-betraying” (read: having a private life) pictures that derailed (and in one case, destroyed) the careers of several members of Hello!Project. I’d never seen an issue, and wasn’t aware that they leaned more towards the Celebrity Sleuth model, interested as much in publishing posed shots of wannabe starlets as in stalking big-name stars to ruin them.
I know this now, because I spotted an issue at Kinokuniya when I was up in San Francisco on Sunday, and found a magazine I could not not buy.
Google Maps street view in Japan
The folks at Akihabara News pass on the good word.
Here, for instance, is the deer park in Nara. And here’s Togetsukyou, the bridge that crosses the river in Arashiyama. How about Kyoto Tower, and the much more interesting Tokyo Tower. This could be fun…
[it looks like they went through Akihabara before all the stores opened in the morning.]
Older Witches
Looking at the covers of this two-volume manga series (1, 2), I’m forced to ask, “older than what, precisely?”.
And, yes, I’m quite certain it’s porn. I’ve seen samples of the mangaka’s work.
This is how the world ends...
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:
Closed Captions provided by...
…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.
Make More People!
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.]
