Category Archives: Personal

Going on standby

I’ve kept this blog going for years. People are still reading it; my stats show 140 views yesterday, and that was on a Saturday! However, I’m no longer active in digital preservation, other people have taken over JHOVE, and professionally I’m now a writer rather than a software developer.

It’s better to do a few things well rather than spread myself too thin. That’s why I’m putting this blog on standby status. There could be occasional posts here if something especially interesting turns up, but they’ll be infrequent. This will help me to focus more on my writing blog and other projects, such as my novel The Magic Battery.

Thanks to everyone who’s read and commented on this blog over the years.

Aside

I have removed all my profiles on Stack Exchange/Stack Overflow because of the way it has treated its people.

Apple hides attachments in malformed multipart mail

Recently I got a PDF of a filk songbook which I had contributed to. More precisely, the email said I was getting it, but there was no sign of an attachment. I wrote back to the editor who’d sent it, and she insisted it was there. Digging it out of the message revealed to me a whole new way of messing up email formats.

A quick look at the message source showed that there really was an attachment with Content-Type of “application/pdf” which took up well over 90% of the message. The question was why Thunderbird didn’t show it to me.
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JHOVE PNG module, progress report

There’s now a JHOVE PNG module on my GitHub site. The relevant new classes are com.mcgath.jhove.module.PngModule and everything in the package com.mcgath.jhove.module.png. I could have continued from Lauri’s code as I mentioned in my previous post, but I like a more factored approach, so I continued with my own code, which has a separate class for each chunk type. Take a look at the top-level file FORKNOTES for what I’ve been doing.

It does a pretty decent job of validating files and extracting metadata now, but some chunk types are still ignored, and there are some design decisions on the extracted metadata that I’m not sure about yet. Also, JHOVE modules usually have a lot of metadata about themselves, and that’s not complete yet. If anyone wants to play with it, keeping in mind that it’s not stable code yet, please do and submit issue reports for bugs and suggestions.

Notes of a reluctant video teacher

Question mark superimposed on file iconsAs you’ve doubtless notice if you follow this blog or my Twitter feed, I’ve made two video courses and put them up on Udemy.com. You may be wondering why I’m doing this, especially if you know how much I hate being on camera.

Several steps have led to my being here. One is that the more gray hair you have, the more likely clients and employers are to assume the gray matter has leaked out of your brain, even though that’s nonsense. So I have to find other sources of income. I’ve been doing writing, including the book Files that Last, and having some successes there. Many people, though, like video learning, and turning written material into video presentation isn’t a huge step. I liked the arrangements Udemy offered, so I’ve given it a try.
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Course on file format identification tools: Progress report

The video course which I’m developing on “File Format Identification Tools” is almost ready to submit to Udemy. I’m holding off for a little more work at the Open Preservation Foundation on JHOVE, because some user interface details are going to change from the current beta (1.12 beta). The other tools covered will include file, DROID, ExifTool, and Apache Tika. This course should be useful to both students and professionals who want to learn how to use the tools.
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Aside

For my upcoming course on File Format Identification Tools, Udemy wants me to provide a graphic. Here’s what I’ve come up with, applying Udemy’s quality standards. I don’t claim to be a graphic designer, but I think it’ll do the … Continue reading

Professional update

Just to keep everyone up to date on what I’m doing professionally:

Currently I’m back in consulting mode, offering my services for software development and consultations. Those of you who’ve been following this blog regularly know I’ve been working with libraries for a long time and I’m familiar with the technology. I’ve updated my business home page at garymcgath.com and moved it to new hosting, which will allow me to put demos and other materials of interest on the site.

The key to success is, of course, networking. so if you happen to hear of a situation where my skills could be put to good use, please let me know.

Format registry browser on Github

I’ve put the format-reg-browser project up on Github, in case anyone wants to play with the code. This is the first time I’ve committed code to any kind of Git site, but it looks as if the code’s really there. Let me know if there are any problems.

LinkedIn

Personal note: I’m now on LinkedIn and looking for contract software development work starting in September.