Python Archives - ross spencer :: exponentialdecay.digipres

A screenshot of a file format (fmt/983) in 0xffae. The title 0xffae sits over the top of the original image.

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.

A tree at sunset photographed from the train on the Bodendsee in Southern Germany

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.

Making DROID work with Wikidata

Wikidata is a good service, Wikibase (on which Wikidata is built) is a better platform.

I have spoken before about its potential to be added into the file-format registry ecosystem in a federated model.

If we are to use it as a registry that can perhaps complement the pipelines going into PRONOM, e.g. in vendor’s digital preservation platforms such as the Rosetta Format Library, a Wikidata should be able to output different serializations of signature file for tools such as Siegfried, DROID or FIDO.

Siegfried ✅: https://github.com/richardlehane/siegfried/wiki/Wikidata-identifier
Fido ❌: I’ll need to revisit this!

And what about DROID?

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.

Demystify-lite is upgraded and demystify 2.0.0 is finally here!

Demystify-lite and Demystify 2.0.0 have been released featuring the denylist for the first time, plus some bonus features! With thanks…

PRONOM release statistics

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

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.