Blog posts tagged webassembly

Searching the SFO Museum Aviation Collection website by color

The search-by-color functionality works by taking an input color, represented as a hexidecimal string, and then “snapping” it to its nearest match on a fixed palette of colors. The RGB color space contains over 16 million individual colors so searching for exact matches will usually yield too few results to make searching by color useful. By “bucketing” all those millions of colors in to a fixed set of a couple of hundred colors, a “palette”, things start to get interesting.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on June 16, 2025 and tagged collection, search, color, api and webassembly.

Browsing the SFO Museum Aviation Collection Through Real Time Flight Data

We’ve created a map-based interface that shows real time (or more specifically real time -ish since there is a delay) flights as they are traveling to and from SFO, inside North America. For each of those flights we know the airline servicing the flight, and both its origin and destination airport. As a flight is updated we plot its location on a map and display a popup with a random object, for each facet, from the SFO Museum Aviation Collection. When you click on an object its dedicated web page on the collection.sfomuseum.org website will be opened in a new tab.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on March 23, 2023 and tagged whosonfirst, flightdata, golang, webassembly and wasm.

Using WebAssembly to parse EDTF date strings using a Go library in Python

This ability to share code across languages using the WebAssembly binary format is novel because it embodies both the theory and the practice of “small focused tools”, by and for the cultural heritage sector.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on February 16, 2023 and tagged python, golang, edtf and webassembly.

Updating (and reverse-geocoding) GPS EXIF metadata

When I save an image of this view of the runways at SFO, from 2017, the newly created image’s EXIF data contains not only the date and the permanent URL for the map but also the latitude and longitude coordinates for the map’s center point.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on April 26, 2021 and tagged golang, exif, javascript, wasm, flickr, reverse-geocoding and webassembly.

Updating EXIF metadata in JavaScript (and WebAssembly)

One question that’s been raised about the camera/save button in zoomable images is whether or not the new image contains, or preserves, existing EXIF metadata information stored in the original file. The answer yesterday was: No. The answer today is: Not yet, but only because we haven’t enabled it and we will do that soon.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on April 14, 2021 and tagged golang, exif, javascript, wasm, zoomable and webassembly.