Other Projects

 

Here are a few random projects that don't fit very well in the other site categories.

Access '96 Website Restoration. The Access '96 conference in Vancouver has over the years become the stuff of myth and legend, and it is one of my minor regrets that I wasn't able to attend. I gained custody of its website a couple of years afterward when I took over as BC ELN webmaster from Sheila Comeau, who created the website for the conference. I reconstructed the site in 2005 after its original host, the Open Learning Agency, shut down the server on which it ran. But then I changed jobs, and lost track of the files until 2018. The site never made it into the Internet Archive, so this is the only remaining copy as far as I know. Apart from the nostalgia value, I think it's interesting to see what the hot topics in library tech were back then. The Conference Proceedings are available from the Internet Achive. And the conference announcement can still be found in the Web4Lib list archive.
 
Nell Tenhaaf's Telidon Artworks. Four of my reconstructions of Nell Tenhaaf's ground-breaking Telidon artworks are featured on her website.
 
Videotex (NAPLPS) Web Demo (updated May 2021). As part of my Telidon work, I've been working out a way to show interactive videotex via in-browser emulation. I'm using the same basic approach that the Internet Archive uses for DOS games, DOSBox compiled with emscripten. The emulator runs a slide show I created in Microstar Graphics editor, with the interactivity supplied by a display controller program I wrote with the very rare Microstar MVDI toolkit. The demo itself isn't much, designed primarily to test the three different ways frames can advance: keypress, automatically after a timeout, or automatically with an optional keyboard interrupt. This updated version now works in all browsers that support web assembly (as far as I have been able to test) and also works on keyboard-less mobile devices. I am using JS-DOS as the API.
 
Binary Adder for Minetest. The link points to a Worldedit schematic for a binary adding machine I created using virtual logic gates in the open source Minecraft clone, Minetest. It was featured the Access 2020 workshop, "Minetest as Virtual Maker Space". One day I may get around to writing up proper instructions on how to deploy it, but for now I will simply note its dependencies comprise the following modpacks: basic_materials, basic_signs, digilines, digiterms, display_modpack, mesecons, signs_lib, and of course worldedit.
 
My old libtech blog (2013-2016). For 4 years in the mid-teens I maintained a blog on the University of Victoria's Online Academic Community Wordpress site. I eventually lost interest in updating it, and in due course the blog was expunged from the server due to lack of activity. This static version was created using a perl script to convert a Wordpress XML export to HTML. In a small way, it documents a transitional moment in library technology that is now (2023) barely visible in the rear view mirror.

 

Last modified: June 18 2024 15:39:41.