“It’s raining ash in California, forcing us to wear a different kind of mask than we wear for the pandemic when we go buy the generator we need for either rolling blackouts or preemptive outages so we can work from home if we haven’t been evacuated or our house hasn’t burned down.”
— How's that one-party rule working out for you, California?Name that novel!
This is the cover of the Japanese translation of a well-regarded American science fiction novel (with title and author crudely hidden). It is not the author’s most famous or controversial work, but even Hollywood knows about it.
[whoops, re-uploaded with the faint red English title also deleted…]
Adobe fails to secure credit cards
Details on nearly three million customers stolen. So, how’s that switch to renting your software by the month working out?
Text acquisition: complete!
[Update: turns out the iPhone hotspot does not route traffic over the iPhone VPN; boo, hiss. I’ll need to rig up a wireless router behind an OpenVPN box to avoid the risk of tripping the region-detection]
The Kindle Paperwhite will not speak to a shared wireless connection hosted on my laptop. It will, however, speak to an iPhone’s built-in hotspot, and the iPhone has a VPN client compatible with HideMyAss VPN, allowing me to pretend that my shiny new second-generation Paperwhite is located in Japan and eligible to purchase and download Kindle books without violating the publishers’ geographic restrictions on ebook licensing.
With that out of the way, the standard DeDRM and KindleUnpack scripts trivially converted my new books into clean XHTML, which required about 60 lines of Perl to massage into input for Yomitori. Diffing the text of Asobi ni Iku Yo book 1 confirmed the accuracy of my new source.
Now if I can figure out the new inline footnote support, I can merge the vocabulary into the main book the way I do for the HTML output, and switch from dual PDFs to a single MOBI file. But that comes later; right now, the complete text of Miniskirt Space Pirates book 1 is waiting on my Kindles, without all the OCR errors I was wading through the last time.
The end of an era
What I want to know is, has some poor soul been maintaining epgparser all this time, or did they finally break free from Andrew’s giant hairy Perl script?
(and when I say “hairy”, I mean “had to run as root so it could newfs file systems, and no one could ever figure out why it needed 4GB of RAM and ran for 26 hours a day”)
Yomitori for Windows
The hardest part of getting my Japanese-novel-hacking scripts working on Windows was figuring out how to build the Text::MeCab Perl module. Strawberry Perl includes a complete development environment, but the supplied library file libmecab.lib simply didn’t work. I found some instructions on how to build MeCab from source with MinGW, but that was not a user-friendly install.
However, there were enough clues scattered around that I was able to figure out how to use the libmecab.DLL file that was hidden in another directory:
copy \Program Files\MeCab\sdk\mecab.h \strawberry\c\include copy \Program Files\MeCab\bin\libmecab.dll \strawberry\perl\bin cd \strawberry\perl\bin pexports libmecab.dll > libmecab.def dlltool -D libmecab.dll -l libmecab.a -d libmecab.def move libmecab.a ..\..\c\lib del libmecab.def cpanm --interactive Text::MeCab
The interactive install is necessary because there’s no mecab-config shell script in the Windows distribution. The manual config is version: 0.996, compiler flags: -DWIN32, linker flags: -lmecab, encoding: utf-8.
Sato's Marika avatar
While checking up on Mouretsu Pirates movie news, I happened to spot director Sato’s twitter profile pic.
Gatchaman Crowds: Katze's fatal mistake
I hereby predict that the unbeatable Berg-Katze will be undone by…
(…poor man’s spoiler-hiding ahead…)
