I should have posted this months ago… better late than never!
Kevin O’Donnell, Alan Gamble and I collaborated with some of the region’s most talented musicians to put together a CD of some great songs by Kevin. Its called Clattering Trees (Ask Kevin) and you can bbuy or download the CD on Amazon.com
My brother Alan, who works at and follows all things NASA sent me this link which I found particularly of interest since I once owned two Ampex FR-600 data recorders that came from NASA in Huntsville. Having resurrected an ancient (by technology standards) Scanimate analog animation computer I have experienced first-hand the joys of reviving old technology, finding players for outmoded media, documentation, and better yet, people that used and worked with that technology back in the day.
Everybody, including NASA, seems to think recording something is all thats required to archive it. Think again! I have a wall full of media, in dozens of different formats, the players for which are long-dead or dying! And even at that, the media itself is decaying day by day.
A recent posting lamented the challenge of Permabits and Petabytes” and suggested that we only need to remember to archive a player as well.
I posted the following response which I’d like to repeat here:
Archiving a reader sounds simple but the reader is often the tip of the iceberg!
Most readers had a lot of electro-mechanical moving parts that wear out. Tape running past heads acts like very fine grain sandpaper, and there aren’t any spares on a shelf somewhere. Tape itself is iron oxide bound to acetate or mylar and even if it has been carefully kept in a controlled temperature and humidity environment, it takes very little time to degrade. I’ve seen old 2″ quadruplex videotapes that shed oxide so badly that you maybe got one chance to run them through the machine, praying that the heads did not clog, and usually they did.
If its computer data, the problem has to include archiving the computer, operating system, and athe backup application that formatted the data. The state of the art has advanced so quickly that most of the manufacturers of vintage storage drives and their attached computer systems are no longer in business. And the computers and OS themselves rely on aging storage systems just to function.I was involved in the conversion of some of the old Hollywood movie negatives to digital masters, and the problem remains: What do you store your data on that is guaranteed to be around for a very long time? There is no good answer! In Hollywood they make numerous film prints of the restored imagery, because film is the only medium that is still functional 100 years later.
If you talk to the manufacturers of CD and DVD media, they tell horror stories of how few years it takes for oxygen to penetrate the plastic disc and oxidize the metallic or dye layers with the data on it. Think of the amount of data that has been stored on that media that will no longer be readable in just a few years, whether the reader is archived or not!The only man-made data that has survived centuries is literally carved in stone!
We can now officially kiss 2008 goodbye - FINALLY! For almost everybody I know its been a horrible year - especially the last 4 months or so. I’ve been taken to task for neglecting these pages, leaving only my grinchy rant about last year’s Christmas for all to find when they come here. It wasn’t that horrible! Really! I was just tired of hearing “little drummer boy” for the zillionth time!
I have a number of pent-up thoughts that I need to unburden myself of from my over-full “post sometime” list. So those of you that get the feed, there will be more shortly.
For now, Happy New Year all and may 2009 be the year everything starts getting better!
Dave
I recently came across an old reel-to-reel recording of the band Shadrack, made back in 1973 or so. My friend Jim Shields invited me to tag along and watch as the band did their recording in Atlanta. I re-mastered the songs as mp3 files, and remembered I had some slides I had shot down there during that magical week.
I’ve put the whole thing together HERE if anybody is interested in a retro-ride back to the days when ELP and Yes were everybody’s heroes. Hope you enjoy!
I’ve been silent almost a year on these pages, and I have no excuse except that I’ve been busy.
I guess my pent-up editorial righteousness has finally reached the boiling point.
Either that or for the first time in almost a year, I’ve had time to inject my thoughts into the blogosphere.
Call me a grinch if you want to. I made it all the way through Christmas being polite and doing my best to be of holiday good cheer despite a growing annoyance with what Christmas has become. Its fairly obvious that the “reason for the season” has become quite simply: Money. I think its been that way for some time now, but its gotten worse. Much worse.
Read the rest of this entry »
Well I’ve finally done it. I’ve been thinking about doing this for awhile, but 2007 seems like a perfect time to start. The genesis of my concept for the ZFiles was that it seems like every conversation I have with people I know covers so many interesting areas that I thought I would share some of them with you. I hope you find them as interesting as I do.
Doc Sade sent this, tried to log in to the blog and got blocked. (I’m working on that!) He said:
Soooo…I was having this “old bull, young bull” discussion about IT in general and how –back in the day– we had to hand-carry bits in a bucket to create bytes; how the bits would fall off perfectly good magnetic tape (don’t get me started on cards & punch-cards); how I used to run an a-basic Star Trek mainframe rip-off on PolyMorphics 8080s, loading the game into memory each time because hard drives… well, didn’t exist outside of Sys36s’ platters; Read the rest of this entry »
I recently discovered some fascinating research into what I can only describe as anomalies in randomness. Before you decide I’ve gone off the deep end, hear me out. Quantum physicists have found that the deeper they dig into the behavior of elemental particles, the more chance comes into play. Einstein was said to be so frustrated by the inevitability of this Read the rest of this entry »
I have to confess I was a little worried there for a while. As an operator of a mail server for my web clients, spam is a huge concern. One of the best ways to combat it is to subscribe to the non-profit Spamhaus database of offenders. Based in the U.K, Spamhaus takes pains to ensure that their database only contains known provable sources of multiple unsolicited spam emails. So when an incoming email is from a host thats on Spamhaus’s database, we toss it. So do most ISPs and hosting providers. Its become one of the best anti-spam measures available.
Then in September, a Chicago bulk email company called E360Insight, got Judge Charles Kocoras to issue a judgement against Spamhaus. Spamhaus was ordered to pay $11.7M in damages, and stop blocking E360Insight’s spam. When Spamhaus refused, saying the judge has no jurisdiction over a U.K company, the judge issued a default judgement against them, and tried to get ICANN to shut down their domain registration.
Fortunately, so far, ICANN has stood their ground, and so has Spamhaus. But it just goes to show that spammers with enough money behind them can bamboozle judges and subvert the legal system to allow them to gum up everybody’s email inboxes with unwanted garbage.
Good for you Spamhaus! Keep up the good work!
Seems like everything is a war these days. War on Terrorism, war on poverty, war on drugs… So I hate to add to the list of wars, but I can’t help thinking there is one looming - over Internet bandwidth. Just when we thought we were starting to have enough Read the rest of this entry »