Hello world, and welcome to my corner of the web. This is where I write words about what I'm working on, and post photographs of things I've seen.
I'm a Software Engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, and so of course my personal website is a wiki (running on MediaWiki). In my spare time I volunteer with WikiClubWest to work on Wikimedia projects, mostly around my family's genealogy and local Western Australian history (especially to do with Fremantle). I try to keep up with issues on all the things I maintain (but usually fail), as well as listing the software that I use.
I try to find time to work in my workshop on various woodworking projects. Recently, that's been focused on building a metalworking bench, and will soon be about a set campaign-style drawers that's in the works. I've a good-sized workshop because I don't have a car.
Travel features in my life, not because I really hugely want to go elsewhere but because I just do — and also because then I can do some interesting mapping on OpenStreetMap, and take photos for Wikimedia Commons. Sometimes I ride my bike to get there, or walk, but more often it's planes, trains and ferries.
I'm currently reading the following books: Arrowsmith (Anon), and Canadian Short Stories (Robert Weaver, 1960), and Doctor Thorne (Anthony Trollop), and Messing About in Earnest (Nick Burningham, 2003), and The Countryside Companion (Tom Stephenson).
To contact me, you can email me, find me on Matrix as '@samwilson:matrix.org', the fediverse as @samwilson@wikis.world, or Telegram as @freosam. If you want to leave a comment on this site (by creating an account), you need to know the secret code Tuart (it's not very secret, but seems to be confusing enough for most spammers).
Below are my recent blog posts.
Pix photo management software
I think Pix is my new favourite program. It seems to be a Mint fork of (or heir to?) the gThumb package. Pix seems to have everything I want at the moment, for simple and quick photo fixing.
Thirteen trail markers
Fremantle
· walking · exploring · Fremantle · OpenStreetMap ·
This morning's walk was a success I think, although I'm growing more disappointed in the Department of Transport's ability to a) put markers where they need to be, and b) use materials that don't degrade to nothing in the sun. Those things don't matter though, because this is really more about ambling around looking at things than it is a necessity to follow the actual trail. I found thirteen trail markers, but only twelve are on this map because two are in the same location.
This is the second of these that I've followed, after the Boardwalks and Brewery Loop a couple of weeks ago. This one goes out to the end of a couple of groynes and so is nicer I think. There's always something totally calming about sitting on the rocks at the water's edge, looking out to sea.
I started at the main sign, but actually it says that the start is in front of Kalis' fish and chip shop, so I headed over there — where there was the lovely sight of a pod of dolphins right in close in the harbour, herding a school of fish up against the wharf. They were being watched by a few excited tourists and some crew on the Marine Rescue boat Resolute. I tried to get a photo of them, but of course that sort of pic never works out (and one should not even try, and just enjoy the moment).
Most of the trail was as boring as expected:
But a few of things stood out:
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Firstly this cor-ten obelisk thing.
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"
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And the seafood factory near it, with it's large flow of water.
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The entrance to what was Quest Apartments, but which now has the sillily-punctuated name of "Be. Fremantle".
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And the cruising yacht club's 'club house' (such as it is; more masts and less pomposity than the nearby Royal Perth Annex I think).
But most useful, and leading to hopefully another Sunday outing for me, is this map of the America's Cup Walk, which shows the locations of all (or some?) of the competitors in 1987:
Reasonably Good Things
Fremantle
· Fremantle · exploring · walking ·
I'm at Good Things café, which I will probably always think of as the Attic. Being here reminds me that there is much more work to be done in documenting Brian Klopper's work around Freo. I've probably posted this before, but there's no point in being a wiki nerd on the internet if you can't get trains into everything:
That's the floor that's below me, as I type this. Bricks supported on what must be quite a number of tonnes of steel.
Anyway, I wasn't planning on working on that bit of Freopedia today; I wanted to get down to the harbour and walk another of DoT's marked trails, the Challenger Cray Trail. What a pun that is, how clever of a government department to try their hand at some word play! No, I'm teasing them. But there is actually an interesting part to the trail, and that the fact that they send people down Molfetta Quays. I'd not thought that it was particularly encouraged for tourists to go there, but I shall take it as license to explore today I think.
After last week's wiki meetup in Ellenbrook I'm feeling rather disappointed in my phone's camera's ability in harsh summer sunlight, and am going to try to keep the aperture small and the ISO down today and probably end up with things that are too dark but which at least have nicer detail.
Archival storage with mixed access controls
Fremantle
· archiving · catalogues · access control ·
I've been working on cataloguing a bunch of (physical) archival records recently, working through various boxes without really knowing beforehand what is to come. 90% are public, but now and then there are documents that need to be kept private. That's fine, there is a private place to catalogue those — but the system being what it is, the public catalogue is online and the private one is not. Which makes for good security, but it's a split in identifiers and an open question about how to represent the gaps that appear in the public catalogue.
The current way to approach it looks like it'll be duplicating the private identifiers on the public catalogue but not putting in any info about them. Then, all their info gets added to the private catalogue (but vice versa is not done: there's no need to represent all public items in the private catalogue, I guess the idea being that anyone with access to that also has access to the public side).
The goal is that for each long-term storage box it's possible to get an ordered list of what's in it. That list will actually have to be multiple, but it seems like it's all going to work.
The other aspect that's come up is how to add in — sometimes much later on — things like missing pages of documents that have already been accessioned. So far, this has been done pretty sneakily, with them being catalogued (and their scans uploaded to) the older catalogue record, but then the wayward pages being stored in whatever box is currently being appended to. This is not great, as although the entire original document is recorded together (that's nice) it means that there's no record in the per-box list of the missing pages! Not nice.
The fix to that seems to be to create records for each of the separated parts of the document. Then they're just like separate items, albeit ones that have a very close relationship. That feels most solid and just means that each needs to point to the other (and that's something that happens with different items all the time anyway).
So, in summary:
- The public catalogue gets 'shadow' items that point to the private catalogue.
- Each storage box gets its (multiple) lists of contents.
- Any parts of a document that are separate (either in the original order, or where they're now stored) result in multiple catalogue items.
Archiving organisations' material
Fremantle
· archiving ·
Vanishing Culture: Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications, 14 January 2025 :
Another challenge to preservation and access is membership organizations that keep their material behind paywalls. They sometimes prevent any of their information from being lent in an online library, which it is their right to do. However while they actively thwart efforts at preservation, it remains unclear whether those groups are adequately preserving their own history.
Some material is preserved intentionally, but a good amount was saved purely by accident. The material we recover and digitize has come from attics and basements, from libraries discarding obsolete material, from long-forgotten FTP sites, from scratched CD-ROMs, and from the estates of people who have passed.
Static and images
Fremantle
· websites · photos ·
Static, dynamic by James G., 15 January 2025:
Last year, I spent a lot of time iterating on Publish, the publishing interface for my website. This interface is a static HTML page that generates a markdown file. This markdown file can then be published to my website. The Publish page is public, but you cannot publish a blog post unless you have access to my Git repository.
This paradigm works well with my static website. I have a user interface that lets me prepare a post for publishing, and a button I can click that takes me to GitHub where I can publish the page. Having posts in static files and version control is significant to me. Static files are easy for me to reason with. I can see my data without having to use a database.
With that said, I see opportunities to improve the Publish tool that can only be done with a dynamic page.
The main improvement I would like to make is to streamline image publishing.
I've mentioned it before, but the storage and display of images (and other files) are the main things that keep me from switching fully to a static site. I am slowly working on some ideas for making those better, but really I'm not sure it'll ever be fully solved. It's too annoying to have to manually create derivative versions of every file, and (unlike what is described in the above post) I'm not sure I want to add content images to a Git repository.
Being able to drag and drop photos onto a blog post while editing is convenient, but that's not necessarily the workflow I'm aiming for — I generally want to upload things to Commons if possible, and add as much metadata as I can. So there's a certain laboriousness to adding images anyway, and reducing the time at upload mightn't matter too much.
Unpleasant boating
Messing About in Earnest, page 149:
At 0750, on the morning of 1st March, we landed at East Fremantle boat ramp, rather cold, tired and blistered, but on the whole it had been an interesting and not-too-unpleasant trip.
"Not-too-unpleasant" is about what I remember of sailing on the Swan river as a boy. Not quite enjoyable — although I don't know how much of that was due to the other sea scouts being just so much more capable and confident than me.
Linking to Freo photos
Fremantle
· URLs · Fremantle · libraries · identifiers ·
The Fremantle History Centre (who have dropped the 'Local' from their name) have a fine home page at
https://www.fremantle.wa.gov.au/fremantle-history-centre
(a sensible URL). Their image database is at
https://fremantle.spydus.com/cgi-bin/spydus.exe/MSGTRN/WPAC/BSEARCH_ARC?HOMEPRMS=ARCPARAMS
(a silly URL), and search results take you to items' pages at URLs such as
https://fremantle.spydus.com/cgi-bin/spydus.exe/FULL/WPAC/ARCENQ/10765420/1876703,1
where they proclaim their 'bookmark link' to be
https://fremantle.spydus.com/cgi-bin/spydus.exe/ENQ/WPAC/ARCENQ?SETLVL=&RNI=72417
(again, silly) where that RNI is the 'record number' of the item. There is also a 'reference number' that is not present in the URL but which is the far more common ID for these photos because it's often present in the actual scan.
(Books on the other hand have a BRN, and URLs like
https://fremantle.spydus.com/cgi-bin/spydus.exe/ENQ/WPAC/BIBENQ?SETLVL=&BRN=53356
but that's a task for another day.)
There doesn't seem to be any way to link to a record by the reference number, unfortunately. The advanced search doesn't have anything.
So it looks like we'll do best to record both the reference and record numbers, and hope that whatever new database system they're going to move to next will work with one of those.
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