What does the artist who created the Eiken manga do for an encore? Zokusei, with the thoroughly-anonymous 〇〇くん guiding the “reader” through first-person fanservice-y encounters with every bishoujo cliché in the book. He still loves supsersizing, but unlike Eiken (the anime, at least; I avoided the manga…), the things attached to the girls’ chests are probably breasts, and some of their figures are not alien to this species. Being manga, you’re also spared the sloshing-mudsack animation that helped make the anime completely unwatchable. Their eyes tend toward the psychotic, but other than that, most of the art’s actually not bad.

Okay, I wouldn’t have bought it if I’d noticed the small print at the bottom that said “from the creator of Eiken”. I thought one of the girls on the cover looked cute, it was only $5, and it promised 「美少女２０人大集結!!」.

Each chapter is devoted to showing off a different girl, with just enough story to accurately classify her (tsundere, ojou, meganekko, iincho, Yankee, American, etc). All of them have names, ages, blood types, heights, weights, and measurements. For educational purposes, I’ve calculated the average statistics of the girls, excluding the 5 teachers and the little sister: 16 years old, 5’3”, 101 pounds, 34E-22-33. Note that the mean cup size is skewed by three mutants: 2 I’s and a J; the rest average an overstuffed C. The five teachers average 39H, a sure sign that this comic is set on a low-G planet.

Oh, and it has furigana, so I can officially consider it study material.

From the nice folks at the National Weather Service, via the new Weather.com Dashboard widget:

259 PM PST FRI NOV 24 2006 ...Frost advisory in effect from 2 AM to 8 AM PST Saturday...

The National Weather Service in San Francisco has issued a frost advisory…which is in effect from 2 AM to 8 AM PST Saturday.

Further drying was expecrienced today as dew points continued to drop across much of the Salinas Valley. Relatively clear skies tonight combined with low dew points will allow overnight lows to tumble into the upper 20s and lower 30s. Areas of frost will likely develop as several hours of near freezing temperatures are experienced.

A frost advisory means that frost is possible. Sensitive outdoor plants may be killed if left uncovered.

In theory, I’m still working at Digeo. In practice, not so much. As we wind our way closer to the layoff date, I have less and less actual work to do, and more and more “anticipating the future failures of our replacements”. On the bright side, I’ve had a lot of time to study Japanese and prepare for Level 3 of the JLPT, which is next weekend.

I’m easily sidetracked, though, and the latest side project is importing the freely-distributed JMdict/EDICT and KANJIDIC dictionaries into a database and wrapping it with Perl, so that I can more easily incorporate them into my PDF-generating scripts.

Unfortunately, all of the tree-based XML parsing libraries for Perl create massive memory structures (I killed the script after it got past a gig), and the stream-based ones don’t make a lot of sense to me. XML::Twig‘s documentation is oriented toward transforming XML rather than importing it, but it’s capable of doing the right thing without writing ridiculously unPerly code:

my $twig = new XML::Twig(
        twig_handlers => { entry => &parse_entry });
$twig->parsefile('JMdict');
 
sub parse_entry {
        my $ref = $_[1]->simplify;
        print "Entry ID=",$ref->{ent_seq},"\n";
        #...
        $_[1]->delete;
}

SQLite was the obvious choice for a back-end database. It’s fast, free, stable, serverless, and Apple’s supporting it as part of Core Data.

Putting it all together meant finally learning how to read XML DTDs, getting a crash course in SQL database design to lay out the tables in a sensible way, and writing useful and efficient queries. I’m still working on that last part, but I’ve gotten far enough that my lookup tool has basic functionality: given a complete or partial search term in kanji, kana, or English, it returns the key parts of the matching entries. Getting all of the available data assembled requires both joins and multiple queries, which is tedious to sort out.

I started with JMdict, which is a lot bigger and more complicated, so importing KANJIDIC2 is going to be easy when I get around to it. That won’t be this week, though, because the JLPT comes but once a year, and finals week comes right after.

[side note: turning off auto-commit and manually committing after every 500th entry cut the import time by 2/3]

It’s not a bad collection of sci-fi babes, but I’m not the only one who choked on this line about Heinlein’s Starship Troopers:

One of the main plot points of Heinlein’s original novel was that all the experienced officers were killed off, leaving only the kids in charge.

What are they teaching kids in school these days?

Spotted this at Border’s today. I like products that match their descriptions…

The name is effective, though. When I pointed it out to Jeff so he could laugh at it too, the woman in line behind him asked to see it, and ended up buying one.

It’s probably nice, but I think the Zelco Lumifier is better for carrying around. It’s my furigana tool.

The names given to Japanese bands are often peculiar. The folks at Hello!Project have a good track record in this regard, with their 2005 “shuffle” projects having the names セクシーオトナジャン, エレジーズ, and プリプリピンク.

Despite the use of katakana in the names, only one of these is a true loanword, “Elegies”. The other two translate to, respectively, “Sexy Grownups?” and either “Angry Pink” or “Stinky Pink”. They may not be angry, and they probably smell nice, but they’re definitely pink.

But that’s not the puripuri I’m writing about today. I tripped across a completely different use of the word this morning at Kinokuniya. PuriPuri – The Premature Priest:

Five volumes (so far!) of Catholic-school fan service. I don’t see a catgirl, but there’s a meganekko witch on the cover of volume two, and volume three apparently features The Three MusketeersLust-a-teers.

The artist’s official web site includes this nice sample from the volume three cover.

I finally stopped in at a Sony store and checked out the Reader. The display is wonderful for reading (although I’d like to see kanji with furigana), the form factor is just right, and I estimate the battery would last through five complete novels worth of page-turning, but the control layout is clumsy, the UI is a mess, and it’s slooooooooow.

Waking it from sleep is quick, but obviously uses a trickle of power. A cold boot took nearly two minutes, and every UI operation takes nearly a second. Not just “navigate to sub-menu, redrawing entire screen”, but “move the pointer down from option 1 to option 2”. The real reason it has ten numbered buttons across the bottom of the screen is so you can avoid the ten second delay of moving the pointer from choice 1 to choice 10.

I love the screen, though. I didn’t have the patience to find out if you can shut off full justification for books, which looks awful in portrait mode, especially if you increase the font size. I also didn’t spend enough time with it to find out if you can reprogram one of those buttons to switch between portait and landscape modes; doing it through the menus involves six full-page redraws, so it’s not something you want to do often. And, of course, there’s no support for searching, which makes it useless for any kind of reference material.

In a few years, these things should be incredible, and worthwhile at twice the price. Today, not so much. Some of the limitations are technical (I suspect that moving the navigation pointer requires a full redraw), but the controls and UI are Sony’s fault.

On second thought, forget Sony. “Dear Apple…”

Wandering through Kinokuniya today, I saw something in the light novel section that stopped me in my tracks. Adjacent to the ten volumes of キノの旅 was 学園キノ:

I found a blog with a larger photo. I couldn’t resist buying it, so I’ll see if I can get a decent shot of the interior color illustrations. For those fond of Kino’s Journey, I’ll mention that the first chapter is titled “Here comes KINO”, and the last is “Last Man Standing Got Milk”. Don’t ask me about the story; light novels usually have some furigana, but even for the kanji I know I have to look up a lot of words.

Apparently the author also has another series called アリソン, about a young woman with a Broomhandle Mauser and an early-20th-century fighter plane of some sort.

[Update: Just noticed the text on the little wrapper: この作品は「キノの旅」なんかじゃない。, roughly “this book is nothing like Kino’s Journey”]