Another year in the grip of the pandemic has passed. In many ways it was a very uneventful year filled with work and local walks. We seem to be getting the hang of the pandemic and ended up with 3 1-day self-isolation periods while we waited for our test results …

Despite of the relatively high Covid19 incidence numbers, the UK is returning to some form of normality. The year is coming to an end and the Christmas Market is absolutely packed. We are also preparing for another 3 day strike followed by further industrial action on the Four Fights and …

So you are writing scientific software and are wondering how to tell the world about it. In this blog post I briefly list the things you can do to make your software more visible. Use version control to manage your code. These days that is probably git. Depending on complexity …

CephFS is now an integral part of the School of GeoScience's IT infrastructure. It provides both personal and group storage for windows, mac and linux users. Since our first disaster due to running out of resources it has been running very reliably and it provided all the benefits we had …

We all make mistakes. But they are quite often invisible. Especially when we are programming. Once we know that we have made a mistake we tend to fix it and move on to the next problem. Mistakes are a learning opportunity. Sharing them thus helps others. The Software Sustainability Institute …

Conda is the name of the package manager used with the data science distribution anaconda. It is available for Linux, Windows and Mac systems and is heavily used for managing scientific software environments. In the past we required our users to download and install conda themselves. Earlier versions of conda …

The University of Edinburgh is piloting multifactor authentication for Office 365. This works with the GNOME evolution mail/calendar application and the EWS plugin. In evolution create a new mail account of type Exchange Web Services and username: UUN@ed.ac.uk host URL: https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange …

We are now well over a year into the Covid19 pandemic. So far we, personally, have escaped relatively unscathed: We have our jobs, an income and a large enough flat so that all four of us have their own space. We have technology to access the internet and each of …

In one of my previous posts I outlined the ceph setup used in the School of GeoSciences. In this post, I would like to describe how the various bits fit together in some more detail. The diagram above shows a simplified version of our computing setup. Broadly speaking we distinguish …

We had the opportunity to try out a cold start of all our servers located in the College Server Room on the weekend. We shut down all machines on Friday 11th June to allow contractors to work on the electricity supply on Saturday. From my perspective the most interesting aspect …