Dragan Espenschied @despens@digipres.club

iPRES2022 paper accepted!!1

Currently, Rhizome runs 13 projects encapsulated in LXC containers, and these were among the easiest preservation projects I had to do.

My protip is just stay away from Docker for preservation.

Just finished another server preservation project. There was no need to touch the source code or recompile any executables¹, because I just used the same software environment the artwork was originally made for, inside an LXC container.

And once the Linux kernel changes so much that it won't be working with this container anymore, we can import it into emulation via EaaS.

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¹ OK, one small glitch with a perl file that was accidentally saved with DOS line endings, but that was all.

Furiously reloading blog.dshr.org

For preservation purposes I launched a LXC container and typed

sudo apt install apache2 mysql-server php5-*

Now I am one by one uninstalling the php5 extensions that crash everything.

Once that's done I'll have a container that will run 90% of all net art projects using server side code created in the aughts :D

Love these types of dates 17000 years into the future!

(Perl used to express the year part of a date as distance from the year 1900 AD, it was common practice among programmers to just concatenate that behind the string "19" when in fact they were supposed to add it to the number 1900. So glad newer programming languages have improved date handling at least regarding the year, some still use 0-based month indexes, so 0 for January, 1 for February, etc..!)

Award idea: Most Organized Digital Artist Of The Year.

Artists need to be able to describe how their artwork functions, where all resources are located, and how interactions with any remote resources are handled. Jury consists of 3 preservation specialists.

Back then so much was already in place for static sites, like loads of great templating and formatting libraries existed, there was just no standardized way to run them all together.

More than 10 years ago I had written my own static site generator written in perl using TemplateToolkit, and Mojolicious for live previews... Looking at it now I think it wasn't bad at all.

Does it really pay off for tumblr to transcode all of their "legacy" GIFs to webp and "gifv" and keep like 3 versions of every file around and have logic in place to serve them depending on browser's accept headers? Did anybody calculate all of this?

The option to create browser profiles in browsertrix is so hype https://github.com/webrecorder/browsertrix-crawler#creating-and-using-browser-profiles

Personal preservation for today is migrating 4 of my old web projects out of FreeBSD jails into Linux containers.

BTW as a software and system preservation professional only once I encountered FreeBSD in the wild...

The hinged packaging of the German version of 3D Construction Kit for C64, published in 1991