April 5, 2016

Today there was more testing. More boring testing. The system is still working, which is good and unfortunate at the same time. While I stood there waiting for kids to finish I started working on the script for my tutorial video in my head. I need to record the video but I also need to have a script first.

I heard back from the academic librarian about a possible practicum and we are going to meet next Tuesday to discuss the project she has in mind. Hopefully it is something that is actually interesting and that can fill 120 hours worth of a practicum.

In my downtime I read a lot about video game emulators and the whether or not that is piracy or archiving. I also found a video of Frank Cifaldi's talk at this years GDC which sparked the recent flood of articles, which sparked my interest in the topic. Growing up I always thought that emulators were illegal and a form of piracy. Although, that didn't stop me from modding my original XBOX and filling it with emulators and ROMs. Cifaldi showed that in the only two cases he knows of where major companies sued the makers of emulators, it was found that the emulators weren't illegal. Yet the idea has been perpetuated, mostly by video game companies, probably because they aren't making any money from it. Nintendo doesn't like them but their virtual console games are emulated, and Cifaldi pointed out the first lines of code in the virtual console version of Super Mario Bros. is code from a well known emulator, and he speculates that Nintendo downloaded that version off the internet for free and are now selling it back to people. Interesting stuff.

After work I went and got the dwarf librarian drawing framed, and it should be ready on Friday. The gas station I get my Powerball ticket at is near the frame shop so I stopped there first. As I was headed to the door I saw a lady about to come out so I opened the door for her. She was about to take a step toward the open door when a dude came up behind me and walked through. He said 'thank you' but he also cut the lady off. I made eye contact with the lady and I think we both had an expression on our faces that said “so that just happened.” It was kind of funny.

Tonight I watched a conference presentation recording of Herbert Van de Sompel talking about preservation and archiving of the internet. It was almost an hour and a half long but it was pretty interesting. One of the biggest issue on the internet is broken links, or link rot. This can become reference rot if you link to something in a paper and the information linked to either disappears or is altered from the information that was originally linked to. One solution to this is an on-demand archiving system where you can submit a website to be archived and then you can link to the archived link. de Sompel pointed out that this is a good idea but you are really just replacing one link with another, and who's to say how long that link will be around. He then mentioned a few different internet archiving sites that had either gone away or had to change their address, which in turn changed all the archived links. Much like preserving video games, it was interesting stuff.

Now I'm going to listen to music and click around the internet for a little bit before going to bed. Last night I dosed off while listening to Rage Against The Machine. Hopefully we don't get to that point tonight.