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 …

I have decided to wean myself off google services and migrate my blog to pelican. Pelican is a static website generator written in python with theme support. There are many advantages to using a static website. From my perspective the main advantage is that there are fewer things that can …

On Thursday many people in the UK get to vote for our government, for the third time in the last 4 years. Although I have lived here for more than half my life, I don't get to vote. I first came to the UK in the 90ies to study. Initially …

I went to an excellent panel discussion on AI biases, failures and fairness hosted by the University of Edinburgh. This presentations and the following discussion was very interesting, although I think it didn't quite hit the spot I was looking for. A lot of the discussion was on biases. Biases …

So we are going on strike again. In addition to the pension dispute which is still not resolved, we are also striking for better pay, working conditions, workload and the gender pay gap. Both issues are hugely important. But at the same time, it is ridiculous that they need to …

Day 1 The conference started with a keynote by Andy Stanford-Clark, IBM UK Chief Technology Officer, on IoT, AI and Quantum Computing. The talk was very much fun. Although I must say I am still not convinced by IoT and I am somewhat worried by AI. The issue of needing …

I went to very interesting talk by Howard Covington from the Alan Turing Institute on Glimpsing our AI Future at the Bayes Centre, University of Edinburgh. The talk was very interesting albeit short on technical detail and maybe somewhat worrying. This is a summary of what stuck in my mind …