Category Archives: commentary

A personal case study in digital obsolescence

Posted on January 25, 2016 | Comments Off on A personal case study in digital obsolescence

Pegasus Winners coverThe nineties saw huge changes in personal computing, as operating systems became more complex, Internet connections became common, and the World Wide Web appeared. This meant a lot of instability as formats came and went.

This past weekend I discovered a CD-ROM in my closet with the production files for a small-run songbook, The Pegasus Winners (optimistically called “Volume 1”), that I produced in 1994. The good news is that the CD is still readable. The bad news is that I can’t read most of the files. The not-so-bad news is that I could probably recover them with moderate effort.
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Unicode security mechanisms

Posted on January 14, 2016 | Comments Off on Unicode security mechanisms

Unicode is a great thing, but sometimes its thoroughness poses problems. Different character sets often include characters that look exactly like common ASCII characters in most fonts, and these can be used to spoof domain names. Sometimes this is called a homograph attack or script spoofing. For instance, someone might register the domain gοοgle.com, which looks a lot like “google.com,” but actually uses the Greek letter omicron instead of the Roman letter o. (Search this page in your browser for “google” if you don’t believe me.) Such tricks could lure unwary users into a phishing site. A real-life example, which didn’t even require more than ASCII, was a site called paypaI.com — that’s a capital I instead of a lower-case L, and they look the same in some fonts. That was way back in 2000.
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DOTS: Almost a datalith

Posted on December 29, 2015 | 3 comments

A lot of people in digital preservation are convinced a “digital dark age” is nothing to worry about. I’ve consistently disagreed with this. The notion that archivists will replace outdated digital media every decade or two through the centuries is a pipe dream. Records have always gone through periods of neglect, and they will in the future. Periods of unrest will happen; authorities will try to suppress inconvenient history; groups like Daesh will set out to destroy everything that doesn’t match their worldview; natural disasters will disrupt archiving.

I’ve proposed the idea of a “datalith,” a data record made out of rock or equivalent material, optically readable and self-explanatory assuming a common language survives. DOTS, Digital Optical Technology System, is burned on tape rather than engraved in stone, but in every other respect it matches my vision of a datalith. It can store digital images in any format but also allows them to be recorded as a visual representation. The Long Now Foundation explains:
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Iterating a directory in command line Tika

Posted on November 26, 2015 | Comments Off on Iterating a directory in command line Tika

Apache Tika is best used as a library to wrap your own code around. Its GUI application is a toy, and its command line version isn’t all that great either. The command line can be improved with a little scripting, though.
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The FLIF format

Posted on November 25, 2015 | Comments Off on The FLIF format

flif logoNew image file formats keep turning up, taking advantage of advances in compression technology. One of the latest is FLIF, Free Lossless Image Format. It claims to outcompress PNG, lossless JPEG2000, lossless WebP, and lossless BPG. Though it has only a lossless mode, it claims that “FLIF works well on any kind of image, so the end-user does not need to try different algorithms and parameters.”
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The coming of WebP (or not)

Posted on November 23, 2015 | 2 comments

The WebP image format has been around for about five years, but till recently it’s been mostly a curiosity. I last blogged about it in 2013, when it didn’t have very wide support. Since then most browsers have adopted it, and now Google+ is making more use of it (no surprise, since Google is the format’s principal backer). It promises smarter lossy compression than JPEG and smaller file sizes for the same image quality.
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A sock puppet mystery

Posted on November 10, 2015 | 1 comment

The SourceForge repository for JHOVE (which is, by the way, obsolete; here’s the active repository) includes three short reviews which give it five stars and make very generic and identical comments. They’re dated on three successive days. Those are clear signs of sock-puppet accounts.

I can understand why people post glowing but fake reviews to their own project sites, but really, I’m not responsible for these, and I was the only person working on JHOVE at the time, so I can’t imagine who else had an incentive to promote it. Checking on one of these accounts, “rusik1978,” I find similar reviews on many other SourceForge projects. If they linked back to something it would make sense, but they don’t.

I’ve learned from this that sock puppet reviews don’t necessarily prove that the project owner is faking praise. Maybe that’s the point, to make it harder to identify the actual paid reviews?

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PDF/R

Posted on November 9, 2015 | 2 comments

The PDF Association and TWAIN Working Group have announced a partnership to develop a specification called PDF/Raster or PDF/R. It’s described as “a component of TWG’s TWAIN Direct™ initiative, a language/protocol that eliminates the need for users to install vendor specific drivers as communication between scanning devices and image capture software applications.”
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McCoy on the future of PDF

Posted on November 4, 2015 | Comments Off on McCoy on the future of PDF

Bill McCoy’s article, “Takeaways on the Future of Documents: Report from the 2015 PDF Technical Conference,” offers some interesting thoughts on the future of PDF. I can’t find much to disagree with. PDF is in practice a format for reproducing a specific document appearance, and that’s becoming less important as the variety of computing devices increases. He makes a point I hadn’t thought of, that the “de facto interoperable PDF format” is well behind the latest specifications, which may explain why I haven’t seen complaints that JHOVE doesn’t know about ISO 32000 PDF!
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Course planning: File identification tools

Posted on October 28, 2015 | 3 comments

My current main project is creating a course to offer on Udemy on file format identification tools. As currently planned, I’ll cover file (the command line tool), DROID, ExifTool, JHOVE, and Apache Tika. Covering more than five tools in one course would make it too big, though I might consider changing the list. If I can keep my schedule, I’ll have it out in December for early feedback, giving me a chance to clean it up before MIT’s Independent Activity Period in January.

Right now I’m occupied with the mechanics. The course insists on 1280 x 720 pixel video, so I need a new camera; a friend is selling me a Canon Elph 520 HS cheap. Screen capture software is proving interesting; I’ve looked at three different Macintosh applications so far.
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