Jeff Galper

Due to my endless frustrations with the Tar Library we use at work and some limitations of the format in general, I decided to create my own file format and library. There is now Feather. The Feather format can be described as a simple, extensible storage format. By using optional fields, a feather file can include all the information normally stored in a tar, or as little as the name, size, and data of a file.

While UStar formatted Tar files have a maximum filename length of 255 (with some restrictions), Feather has a maximum filename length of 23,767.  Without the GNU extensions, Tar has a maximum file size limit of 8 GB.  Feather, on the other hand, has a maximum file size of 8 EB, or 8 GB * 1024³.  Finally, Feather has native support for UTF-16, which Tar lacks completely.

The current state of the Feather repository is a bit of a mess, because it was originally programmed solely using ByteBuffers and FileChannels, but a need arose for Input and Output Streams.  I will likely remove the use of ByteBuffers and FileChannels so that there is only one official implementation of Feather.

Flicasa is my pet project (created for Django Dash) that I haven’t worked on in a few weeks.  In the meantime, however, I’ve learned quite a bit about Django and Python by convincing my boss that our new internal website should ditch Struts for something sexier.  I hope to find time to work on Flicasa soon.

Anyways, I’ve decided to make the site public.  Head to http://flicasa.com to take it for a spin.  All the public pages should work correctly, even if they’re a little unintuitive.  If you notice a problem head to the contact page and shoot me an email.