Two lazyweb requests

I have a python script that I run all the time as part of my
process for emailing out “your patch has been accepted” messages when I
accept a Linux kernel patch into one of the many different development
trees I maintain. This script’s goal is to merely determine the
character encoding that the email needs to be sent in, either “UTF-8” or
“ISO-8859-1” or “ANSI_X3.4-1968”. It’s really simple which is great, but
it is slow when fed a file of any real length.

For example, the Linux kernel Makefile takes almost 2 seconds to run
through this file, even if the file is in the filesytem cache.

The script was written for me by someone else who was tired of getting
emails from me in the wrong encoding, and I greatly appreciate it, but
they seem to have disappeared, and my python-foo is quite limited these
days.

So anyone wanting to speed this up for me, or rewrite it in perl so I
can maintain it over time myself (while also speeding it up) would be
greatly appreciated.

I’m a Google Summer of Code mentor for a project to port
Linux to a specific system on a chip that happens to be in a number of
older game platforms. Here’s one of these devices. I’m
going to be in Taipei and Tokyo over the next few weeks, and it would be
great if I could pick up one of these myself to help in the debugging
effort of this project. Does anyone know of anywhere in either of those
cities I might be able to get this device?

And yes, I am pretty familiar with Akihabara in Tokyo and the electronic
area in Taipei but I can’t recall ever seeing anything like this before
in the stores in those areas, but I probably just wasn’t paying
attention.

Any help finding this would also be greatly appreciated.