Winding down at Orcfax: a retrospective
With the recent announcement that Orcfax is heading into operational mode, it’s a bittersweet moment that means our adventure in…
Category: Just Code
Turning NASA Wake-up Calls into data
For a while back then I was into space flight again. Scientists, science communicators, and engineers were all excited for a new era of rocket launches and the potential unification of the human race as we look towards the future.
During that time I discovered Colin Fries’ work in the NASA History Division to document all NASA “Wake-up calls”. A wake-up call is simply a piece of music used to wake astronauts on missions, a different piece of music, daily, for the duration of the flight.
Take, for example, the last Space Shuttle mission (Space Transportation System) STS-135; it was in flight for 13 days, and the wake-up call on day one was Coldplay’s Viva la Vida, while on day 13 it was Kate Smith singing God Bless America.
As a huge music buff who has the radio or music television on 18 hours a day, I really wanted to delve into this further. While Colin’s work is great, it’s just a PDF file (@wtfpdf). A PDF is not an ideal file format for querying data and gleaning new insights. So, while I wanted to explore it, I first decided to turn it into a true dataset. The result was a set of resources, a website, a JSON, a CSV, and an SQLite database which are each more functional and more maintainable over time.
Lets take a look at the results and https://nasawakeupcalls.github.io below!
Declarative programming for Digital Preservationists @ NTTW8
Just released on the No Time to Wait (NTTW) YouTube channel is my presentation from NTTW8 in Karlsruhe, Germany. (Slides also available here).
The presentation follows up on my proposal for iPRES 2024 and allowed me to present parts of what was, in the end, a pretty significant paper (in terms of word count).
Some of my reflections on the presentation are below.
File formats as Emoji: 0xffae
tldr: https://emoji.exponentialdecay.co.uk
File Formats As Emoji (0xFFAE or 0xffae) might be my most random file format hack yet. Indeed, it is a random page generator! But it generates random pages of file formats represented as Emoji.
The idea came in 2016 with radare releasing a new version that supported an emoji hexdump. I wondered whether I could do something fun combining file formats and the radare output to create a web-page.
Along came a spare moment one weekend, some pyscript, and bit of sqlite, et voilà. File Formats as Emoji (0xFFAE) was made a reality.
File format building blocks: primitives in digital preservation
A primitive in software development can be described as:
a fundamental data type or code that can be used to build more complex software programs or interfaces.
– via https://www.capterra.com/glossary/primitive/ (also Wiki: language primitives)
Like bricks and mortar in the building industry, or oil and acrylic for a painter, a primitive helps a software developer to create increasingly more complex software, from your shell scripts, to entire digital preservation systems.
Primitives also help us to create file formats, as we’ve seen with the Eyeglass example I have presented previously, the file format is at its most fundamental level a representation of a data structure as a binary stream, that can be read out of the data structure onto disk, and likewise from disk to a data structure from code.
For the file format developer we have at our disposal all of the primitives that the software developer has, and like them, we also have “file formats” (as we tend to understand them in digital preservation terms) that serve as our primitives as well.
What will you bitflip today?
I want to let you into a secret: I enjoy corruption. Corrupting digital objects leads to undefined behavior (C++’s definition is fun). And flipping bits in objects can tell us something both about the fragility, and robustness of our digital files and the applications that work with them.
I had a pull-request for bitflip accepted the other day. Bitflip is by Antoine Grondin and is a simple utility for flipping bits in digital files. I wrote in my COPTR entry for it that it reminds me of shotGun by Manfred Thaller. The utility is exceptionally easy to use (and of course update and maintain written in Golang) and has some nice features for flipping individual bits or a uniform percentage of bits across a digital file.
My pull-request was a simple one updating Goreleaser and its GitHub workflow to provide binaries for Windows and FreeBSD. I only needed to use Windows for a short amount of time thankfully, but it’s an environment I believe is prevalent for a lot of digital preservationists in corporate IT environments.
Bitflip is a useful utility to improve your testing of digital preservation systems, or simply for outreach, but let’s have a quick look at it in action.
Versioning as memory?
So, it turns out my theme of the moment is code hygiene (or maybe memory?).
Today I am thinking about versioning, especially in relation to its impact on digital preservation; both software preservation and the impact of versions on long-term preservation efforts in other contexts.
Code as memory?
It is very poetic to think about code as it containing the memory of its maintainers. I don’t entirely disagree with the idea, but it’s overly poetic and the reality of maintenance on systems that have become too unwieldy is anything but poetic.
simpledroid: completing the loop
Don’t implement PREMIS (re)present it
I got a response to my paper PREMIS Events Through an Event-Source Lens.
There are two strange choices made by this response. I’ll touch on the more personal one at the end, but first, what does the response say?