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Nibble in Cyberspace, Vol 1: Game-play Screenshot

Nibble in Cyberspace: Digipres Adventures, Vol 1

In 2019 I was staying in Hamburg for a short amount of time while I was waiting for my Canadian visa. It was around the time of the iPRES digital preservation conference and I was only a few hours away. While I hoped my work would send me it was not going to be my year. I then hoped I would take myself there anyway by writing a computer game; inspired by Board Games sessions in 2017 and 2018. Alas, that didn’t work out either, but I did end up with a piece of work I am still very proud of.

Nibble in Cyberspace: Digipres Adventures, Vol 1. Homepage: https://ross-spencer.github.io/nibble/

Client-side file format identification and reporting pipeline with Siegfried and Demystify Lite

With thanks to the sponsorship of Archives New Zealand and Richard Lehane for his great coding expertise and his collaboration; Demystify Lite has a new feature — Siegfried!!

Richard recently posted about this work on LinkedIn but lets look at this effort in more detail below.

iPRES2024 header for DESIGN PATTERNS IN DIGITAL PRESERVATION: DECLARATIVE SOFTWARE FOR DIGITAL PRESERVATIONISTS

Not your first paper from iPRES2024: Design patterns in Digital Preservation: Declarative software for digital preservationists

Well folks, my paper for iPRES2024 was rejected. but the good news is that you get to read it here…

PRONOM release statistics

My contribution to PRONOM research week 2023 (held in November 2023) is a PRONOM summary website and Application Programming Interface…

Shattering the eyeglass: Using Kaitai Structs to dissect the eyeglass’ contents

In my post from 2012: Genesis of a File Format, I created a new file format – the Eyeglass file format. The format provides a mechanism to persist information about a patient’s eye health following a checkup at an opticians. Today in 2023 we can use the format to understand how to make use of Kaitai Structs for understanding file formats.

Given the disclaimer that I am not actually an optician and that the format is purely illustrative, let’s look at the eyeglass again below.

Stop, Look, Listen, retro game style advertising for safety at a Houston Bus Stop

Linting as understanding

I have been working on a Python template repository as part of my day-job at Orcfax.

It is based on the popular pypa sample project and adds important tooling that supports the quality assurance of projects that many developers are expected to engage with.

In my template repository I add editor defaults, linting, and prepare the repository for unit tests, and then deployment.

I have migrated a copy of the template I created for Orcfax to a new file format organisation I have created to capture work I am doing around tools such as ffdev.info (the PRONOM signature development utility).

The new template repository can be found here: ffdev-info/template.py.

I want to talk about how this tooling can be used as a way of understanding legacy, or new code that you are going to be looking at. Looking at how linting can be useful for learning and understanding.

What is the checksum of a directory? Introducing sumfolder1

In Fractal in detail: What information is in a file-format identification report? I describe the different ways of dissecting the information in a file-format identification report.

A file-format identification report is a data-rich artifact created during the processing of digital collections.

I had the idea of using this type of report to attach a checksum to an archival collection (files, and directories) as a whole. This is done using methods akin to a Merkle Tree, similar to those in source control systems such as Git, and Web3 Blockchain projects like Bitcoin.

This project is called sumfolder1.

Programming things: Giving up… (or at least getting bitten by semver and Golang’s unforgiving nature, and wanting to!)

There are good days, and there are bad days when coding, and you never stop learning. Today was not a…

Information Maintainers talk: Something something twenty years open source…

It was back in May, yes, way back when, that Jordan Hale of the Information Maintainers group put the following to me:

I write today to ask if you’d be interested in being our special guest on the next Information Maintainers call … we thought your perspective on working within and maintaining decentralized, small-group systems and development infrastructures would be really rad to hear about. What do you think?

I am a big fan of the Information Maintainers and so I was pretty stoked to be asked. Of course, I jumped at the chance and wrote about “Something something twenty years open source…”

Published: The Hedgehog Review! But not like you nor I imagined…

May 31 I woke to a surprise, an unanticipated message about one of my images from Leann Davis Alspaugh, the…

Category: Just Code (page 2)

Nibble in Cyberspace: Digipres Adventures, Vol 1

Client-side file format identification and reporting pipeline with Siegfried and Demystify Lite

Not your first paper from iPRES2024: Design patterns in Digital Preservation: Declarative software for digital preservationists

PRONOM release statistics

Shattering the eyeglass: Using Kaitai Structs to dissect the eyeglass’ contents

Linting as understanding

What is the checksum of a directory? Introducing sumfolder1

Programming things: Giving up… (or at least getting bitten by semver and Golang’s unforgiving nature, and wanting to!)

Information Maintainers talk: Something something twenty years open source…

Published: The Hedgehog Review! But not like you nor I imagined…

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