Filk and Freedom

It’s been a long time since I posted here. The previous time I logged in, Tumblr put a pro-violence post at the top of my feed. Let’s see how it goes this time. The following is a copy of what I posted (in 3 pieces) on Mastodon:

What will happen to Mastodon after the present run of enthusiasm winds down? People will realize it's only as reliable as the instance they use.

Many people who follow the socialist ideal of "I should get stuff for free" are attracted to Mastodon and won't contribute money to their instance. Managers will get tired of working for free and neglect their instances or shut them down.

There will be a period of consolidation. The history of email gives some clues. Anyone can start an SMTP server, but the big ones have perceived advantages in convenience. Some volunteer-run instances will thrive; others will survive on the edges; many will go away.

For-profit businesses will get into the act. If Mastodon is successful enough, there will be a Google Mastodon. Commercial instances have ads or charge for premium usage. The fans of non-commercial Mastodon will scream, but business is what will establish the network as mainstream.

There are filk albums that excite me with their stories, impress me with their musicianship and technical skill, or make me laugh at their humor. Not many, though, grab me from the inside the way Gray Rinehart’s “Taking You Out to See the Stars.” The songs touch on hope for the future, love, painful loss, facing adversity, mortality, and more. It’s billed as a “pre-order,” but don’t be fooled; it’s got thirteen fully-realized songs.

Gray’s vocals give a convincing simplicity to the songs. Mark Minervino’s instrumental arrangements nicely complement them, providing a broad palette of colors without overwhelming the vocal line.

If this is the pre-order, I’m really looking forward to the complete album. This is one of the best filk releases I’ve heard in recent years. I hope the final version has program notes to go with the songs.

What happens if I post something here? I’m probably talking to a vacuum, but let’s try it.

Yesterday I dropped in on Avenue Victor Hugo, a used bookstore in Lee, NH. I hadn’t been there since it was in Boston, decades ago. It’s not as big as the Boston store, but it still has the feeling described in Lawrence Dean’s “Second-Hand Heaven.” It’s open just two days a week.

I picked up copies of “The Time Traveler’s Wife” and that classic of banned books, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” I’ve started reading the latter; while I may have read it before, I’ve almost completely forgotten it. I’ve seen the movie, but it’s already clear that the book contains a lot more than the legal battle which the movie focuses on.

Then I came upon the classical CD collection. It’s bigger than the Plaistow Library’s CD collection. It’s bigger than mine! At 6 CDs for $20, resistance would have been futile. The most unusual item I picked up was Furtwängler’s Second Symphony. I hadn’t known he wrote symphonies; he’s best known as an important conductor with an ambiguous relationship to the Nazis. 

The symphony is an hour and a quarter long, putting it up there with Mahler’s symphonies. The first and last movements are each nearly half an hour long. Musically, it reminds me more of Wagner. It keeps building to climaxes and then avoiding a resolution. Only at the literal last minute does he reach an exuberant conclusion, pounding on E major. It feels insufficient for such a long symphony.

The digital preservation song challenge!

Should there be songs about digital preservation? This is just a special case of the question, “Should there be songs about X?” For nearly all X, the answer is “Yes, and there probably are!” (Even — perhaps especially — if there shouldn’t be, there are.)

Someone in the Australiasian preservation community asked if AusPreserves needed a theme song. The first responses were existing popular songs,…

Fact-checking the GIF format

The Politifact article on the White House’s video “evidence” against reporter Jim Acosta looked plausible enough to me, until I got to the explanation of GIF files. It got significant points wrong, following common misunderstandings.

The regular readers of this blog mostly know what GIF really is, but this article may be a useful reference if you need to explain to anyone. The Politifact article…

How to approach the file format validation problem

For years I wrote most of the code for JHOVE. With each format, I wrote tests for whether a file is “well-formed” and “valid.” With most formats, I never knew exactly what these terms meant. They come from XML, where they have clear meanings. A well-formed XML file has correct syntax. Angle brackets and quote marks match. Closing tags match opening tags. A valid file is well-formed and follows…

Emoji interoperability (or its lack)

Unicode characters ought to have a specific denotation, even if their exact appearance depends on the font. A letter, a punctuation mark, or a Chinese ideograph should have the same meaning to everyone who reads it. There are problems, of course. There’s no systematic difference in appearance between A, the first letter of the Roman alphabet, and Α, Alpha, the first letter of the Greek alphabet.…

In spite of improved file standardization, interoperability of data is often a challenge. Say you’ve got a collection of pictures on Photobucket and you want to move them to a different site. You’ve got a lot of manual work ahead. It would be great if there were a tool to do it all for you. The Data Transfer Projectaims at making that possible. Some big names are behind it: Facebook, Google,…

DNA as data storage

What’s the oldest data format in the world? It’s not any of the ones that computer engineers developed in the 20th century, or even ones that telegraph engineers created in the 19th. Far older than those — by billions of years — is the DNA nucleotide sequence. We can think of it as a simple base-4 encoding of arbitrary length.

According to the usual, somewhat simplified, description, a DNA…

When sloppy redaction fails, resort to censorship

The Broward County School Board used an idiot’s form of “redaction” on a PDF before sending it to the media. The Sun Sentinel removed the blackout layer from the file and found newsworthy information on shooter Nikolas Cruz. They published it. Judge Elizabeth Scherer flew into a rage. She decreed, “From now on if I have to specifically write word for word exactly what you are and are not…

PDF or HTML for public documents?

Should official online documents be PDF files? Many institutions say they obviously should, but the format has some clear disadvantages. An article on the UK’s Government Digital Service site argues that HTML, not PDF, is the right format for UK government documents. Its arguments, to the extent that they’re valid, apply to lots of other documents.

It makes a plausible case against PDF. The…