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Cross-writing

rajbot — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 05:38:46 +0000

During the 1800′s, letters were sometimes writing using cross-writing to save paper. The Boston Public Library has been scanning letters written by Abolitionists prior to the American Civil War. Here is an example of a letter that shows two levels of cross-writing. However, it is written with a cursive slant so that the ascenders and descenders seem to form additional diagonal layers:

In 1890, Lewis Carrol wrote a booklet titled Eight or nine wise words about letter-writing where he warned against cross-writing:

My ninth Rule. When you get to the end of a note-sheet, and find you have more to say, take another piece of paper — a whole sheet, or a scrap, as the case may demand: but, whatever you do, don’t cross! Remember the old proverb ‘Cross-writing makes cross reading‘. “The old proverb?” you say, en-quiringly. “How old?” Well, not so very ancient, I must confess. In fact, I’m afraid I invented it while writing this paragraph! Still, you know, ‘old’ is a comparative term. I think you would be quite justified in addressing a chicken, just out of the shell, as ” Old boy ! “, when compared with another chicken, that was only half-out!

Proofs of a Conspiracy

rajbot — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 19:53:44 +0000

Boing Boing has an excellent post on the Birth of the Illuminati, which traces the Illuminati conspiracy theory back to a book called Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, published in 1797.

Here is a scan of Proofs of a Conspiracy, scanned from the John Adams Library by the Internet Archive:

Signing Amazon Web Services API Requests in Python

rajbot — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 18:33:09 +0000

I wanted to ping the “Amazon Product Advertising API” which now requires an HMAC signature, and the pyAWS library doesn’t sign requests and is no longer maintained. Here is some Python code to create a signed request:

# pyAWS no longer works with the AWS signed request requirement
# Sign an AWS REST request using the method described here
# http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSECommerceService/latest/DG/index.html?RequestAuthenticationArticle.html
#_______________________________________________________________________________
def getSignedUrl(accessKey, secretKey, params):
 
    #Step 0: add accessKey, Service, Timestamp, and Version to params
    params['AWSAccessKeyId'] = accessKey
    params['Service']        = 'AWSECommerceService'
 
    #Amazon adds hundredths of a second to the timestamp (always .000), so we do too.
    #(see http://associates-amazon.s3.amazonaws.com/signed-requests/helper/index.html)
    params['Timestamp']      = time.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.000Z", time.gmtime())
    params['Version']        = '2009-03-31'
 
    #Step 1a: sort params
    paramsList = params.items()
    paramsList.sort()
 
    #Step 1b-d: create canonicalizedQueryString
    # This code comes from http://blog.umlungu.co.uk/blog/2009/jul/12/pyaws-adding-request-authentication/
    # and the resulting discussion
    canonicalizedQueryString = '&'.join(['%s=%s' % (k,urllib.quote(str(v))) for (k,v) in paramsList if v])
 
    #Step 2: create string to sign
    host          = 'ecs.amazonaws.com'
    requestUri    = '/onca/xml'
    stringToSign  = 'GET\n'
    stringToSign += host +'\n'
    stringToSign += requestUri+'\n'
    stringToSign += canonicalizedQueryString.encode('utf-8')
 
    #Step 3: create HMAC
    digest = hmac.new(secretKey, stringToSign, hashlib.sha256).digest()
 
    #Step 4: base64 the hmac
    sig = base64.b64encode(digest)
 
    #Step 5: append signature to query
    url  = 'http://' + host + requestUri + '?'
    url += canonicalizedQueryString + "&Signature=" + urllib.quote(sig)
 
    return url

Fast manipulation of tar files using 7zip

rajbot — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 01:43:32 +0000

tar always reads every byte in an archive (never calles seek()) and is very slow when trying to extract a single file from a large archive.

One solution is to use 7z instead, which is found in the p7zip-full debian package. For some operations, 7z is three orders of magnitude faster than tar. Here are some timings that illustrate how much faster 7z is:

#4.5GB archive listing using tar
time tar tvf fifteenthcensus00reel2149_jp2.tar 
 
(output suppressed, timing stable whether file cache is warmed or not)
 
real	2m1.876s
user	0m0.444s
sys	0m7.740s
 
#4.5GB archive listing using 7z with cold file cache
time 7z l fifteenthcensus00reel2149_jp2.tar 
 
(output suppressed)
 
real	0m10.419s
user	0m0.080s
sys	0m0.124s
5:28 PM
 
#4.5GB archive listing using 7z with hot file cache
time 7z l fifteenthcensus00reel2149_jp2.tar 
 
(output suppressed)
 
real	0m0.145s
user	0m0.052s
sys	0m0.040s
 
 
#extraction of last file in a 4.5GB archive using tar
time tar xvf fifteenthcensus00reel2149_jp2.tar fifteenthcensus00reel2149_jp2/fifteenthcensus00reel2149_0185.jp2
 
real	2m3.545s
user	0m0.436s
sys	0m7.824s
 
#extraction of last file in a 4.5GB archive using 7z and a hot file cache
time 7z e fifteenthcensus00reel2149_jp2.tar fifteenthcensus00reel2149_jp2/fifteenthcensus00reel2149_0185.jp2
 
real	0m0.104s
user	0m0.036s
sys	0m0.036s

The Church

shag — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 23:39:41 +0000

The Internet Archive recently moved into a large Christian Science church.

This is, of course, completely absurd. I mean, the Archive now has a full pipe organ, and a gathering room filled with wooden pews, and a stained-glass skylight with a cross in the middle.

But apart from the absurdity, there is the reality that, from 1923 until just a few days ago, this church was a community center, a gathering place, a place to celebrate. Some of us had the chance to meet some of the church members during their celebration and farewell service two weeks ago; this post will try to honor them.

As we spoke, I was surprised that they didn’t seem very sad about leaving. Frances pointed out to me that the building is simply a building, and that the people who attend are the real church: a true Christian sentiment. They expressed gratitude that someone had come along to purchase the building.

After the farewell service at the church

Where would they go now for community? They said that it was up to each member to find her or his own way to other churches.

Hopefully, the Archive can carry on their spirit and grace.

The Archive recently moved into a (former) Christian Science church.

Remembering GeoCities and KickTam

rajbot — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 20:07:56 +0000

After fifteen years, GeoCities is shutting down for good today. The Internet Archive has been working with Yahoo to make sure that the Wayback Machine has a complete, final snapshot of GeoCities before it goes offline.

The Archive Team, another archivist group run by Jason Scott of textfiles.com, is also archiving GeoCities. Jason created an under construction animated gif gallery to show the important cultural artifacts that we are going to lose with the GeoCities closure. I was browsing the gallery and found this little guy:

That penguin looks a lot like Tux, the linux penguin, but he’s actually the old-school mascot of QuickTime. I think his name was KickTam, which was how someone’s kid pronounced QuickTime. I forget the details.

KickTam isn’t used by Apple marketing, but you can sometimes find him hanging out with the QuickTime developers. He’s seen less and less everyday, and I was surprised to stumble upon him wearing a hard hat.

I think the only place that Apple still has KickTam up on apple.com is on the Letters from the Ice Floe page. Icefloe were tech notes that were useful to developers. I remember pointing people to Icefloe #19 every once in a while, and was surprised to see it is ten years old now. It seems the last Icefloe was written in 2001, and I imagine these will slip off apple.com soon, and KickTam will be gone from the net forever.

skylight at the internet archive’s new bldg

flickr — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 02:44:07 +0000

skylight at the internet archive’s new bldg, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

may

Book Server Launch at the Internet Archive

flickr — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 02:39:22 +0000

Mang demonstrating book purchasing on the iPhone, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

may

E-reader Taste Test

rajbot — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 00:03:32 +0000

We’ve tried a bunch, but have yet to find one that is actually tasty.

Also, I started a new blog about the Archive.

Invasion of the Book Scanners

rajbot — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:25:28 +0000

We’re on a roll scanning books, and are always running out of space for book scanners. I arrived at HQ today and found five book scanners that can been set up in the conference room over the weekend!