Today I have reached another milestone of dealing with Brexit: I have completed the naturalisation process and become a British citizen. For me, the process was as straight forward as it gets: pass the Life in the UK test, fill in some forms, hand over some money, show some documents …

I have been worried for a while now that many arguments against Brexit and the Brexiteers' reply are very similar to arguments against Scottish Independence. These arguments are mostly economic: erecting borders makes trade more complicated it limits movement of people and the economy will loose out the closest neighbours …

It is the end of the year and I am looking through my photos on flickr to select my photo of the year. It is a good time to reflect and the photos remind me of all the things that happened this year. This is obviously the year of the …

The School of GeoSciences is running an aptly debian package repository. The following repositories are available: ubuntu ubuntu mirror inf informatics mirror uoe UoE package repository with component uoe world world package repository with component world geos School of GeoSciences repository with component geos All repositories and mirrors are available …

This post describes in detail how we ended up with a damaged CephFs and our attempts to fix it. Background On 3rd September we scheduled some downtime to reconfigure the network of our ceph cluster. Prior to that we used two networks: one frontend network used by the ceph clients …

I was asked to install the parallel ice sheet model (PISM) by one of our researches. PISM is modern high-order physics ice sheet model that is written in C++ and uses MPI and PETSc. All our Linux machines are LCFG managed Scientific Linux 7 machines. PISM is built from source …

Providing secure, reliable, performant file storage is one of the fundamental services an IT team provides. This post describes in detail how the new CephFS based storage at the School of GeoSciences works. All our Linux machines, servers, compute boxes and desktops are running Scientific Linux and are managed using …

After I published my last post on how our world has become smaller during the Covid-19 crisis I was asked about how this compares to previous years. Well, I have all the data and with some python scripts this question can be answered. The histogram shows the percentage of blips …

We don't own a car. So during the Covid-19 crisis our world was reduced to places we can walk or cycle to. Given that I geotag most of my blip journal entries and I tend to collect GPX tracks for my photo walks it seems quite a natural idea to …

We are now more than a quarter of a year into the Covid-19 pandemic and the first wave of the outbreak has subsided. Time to reflect about the state we are in. News of a new viral disease came at the end of 2019. It quickly became clear that the …