with apologies
Although it now generally seems to work, audio on Linux seems to have been a consistent mess for decades. The current preference appears to be to use pipewire as a replacement for pulseaudio —but of course, many things still assume the old way, i.e., pulseaudio . Happily pipewire has compatibility layers to support this. Less happily, I’ve had consistent problems with things failing (from audio…
OK, so even for me that was a long break from this. In my defence, I had to go through a lot of hassle to get a holiday with the children sorted out, and then having sorted it out I didn’t intend to waste it on a computer :) The beach was lovely, since no-one asked… I remain firmly of the view that swimming in swimming pools, even outdoor ones which at least don’t usually smell of chlorine, is…
Well. Apologies for another hiatus—that was a very busy few weeks. I’ll put to one side some personal matters I’ve had to deal with, and some external work that was quite interesting. Ph.D. supervision continued of course, with everyone showing some good signs of progress. Though disappointingly both submissions to SOSP got some pretty poor reviews. I might write more about that at some point—I’m…
A quiet couple of weeks, as I more or less anticipated. Caught up with some reading for various committees. I’m on sabbatical so am not allowed to attend any of them except University Council . However, I still get the papers so it seems sensible to read through them from time-to-time, so there’s less to catch up on. Attended a couple of seminars the Department. Prepared for some external work…
I recently decided to make a push on trying out jujutsu as an alternative to git . Being easily distracted by side-quests I decided that I should sort out my bash prompt so that it displayed similar repository status information inside a jj repository as it did when inside a git repository. This inevitably meant reworking how I set my prompt, and finding a number of dead-ends online. So here’s my…
Some progress this week, as I enter the last third of the sabbatical so the end is really starting to feel imminent. Reviewed a second UKRI research proposal—I dunno, one in ten years then two in a couple of months. Negotiated some updates to the MPhil/Part III module I run (“ Advanced Topics in Computer Systems ”), a paper-reading-and-discussion based class, in light of policy changes by the…
Quieter week with a flurry at the end. A good seminar, an excellent friend’s birthday meal, and of course, I voted. 1 Finally got round to setting up several meetings connected with a couple of research projects. And also spent far too long resurrecting some backups. I like restic as backup software: it seems to have the right set of features, it’s fast, and so far it’s been reliable. But I…
Quite a travelling week in the end. I returned from the UK Systems Challenges workshop and have posted all those slide decks that I’ve been sent (most of them at time of writing). I went to and returned from the EDGELESS project review in Garching, Munich, Germany. The review itself seemed to go very well—the reviewers all seemed very positive about the project outcomes. 1 Munich was, as ever,…
Another delayed one—must try harder… :/ Spent some time doing more paper reviewing: EdgeSys’26 and ICDCS’26 this time, plus a couple of UKRI research funding proposals (none for 10 years then two turn up at once…). Pursued some old contacts for collaboration possibilities with their current employers—here’s hoping the proposals are of interest! Attended a couple of—largely theory—talks which…
Wednesday’s hump day, Hump day’s Wednesday, Over the hump, The week’s half done – J.J. Cale, “ Friday ” Not so much to report for the last week or two due to the Easter holidays, hence the delay publishing this. Though of course with the end of term and Easter came also the half-way point of the sabbatical, almost as J.J. Cale sings. Not with a bang but with a whimper. 1 Taking stock, lots of…
OK, this one was mildly irritating but happily the solution is dead easy. In short, in this repo I have a file that I need to be committed as an empty file but then locally I want to have it be non-empty. 1 And yet I also don’t want to continually be reminded of this by git as that might lead to me checking in the non-empty version by mistake. Adding it to .gitignore would be the usual thing to…
…and with that, the end of the second term 1 of my sabbatical leave. Really getting scarily close to being half-way through. Oh well. Another fortnight of busy-ness with perhaps limited outcomes. More reviewing, of submissions, papers, and Ph.D. dissertations. The end is in sight though—I think I’m now down to none actually late (to all those TPC Chairs affected—sorry!) and only EuroSys 2027 and…
A few weeks ago I published some remarks I’d given on the risks of lawful access . I also tooted about them on Mastodon and Martin kindly referred to them on Bluesky (as I haven’t yet got around to signing up). I was pleased that this generated some interesting commentary and interaction . I think I replied to all those on Mastodon, but I thought I could collate the points here as a sort of…
Slightly belatedly, 1 a more normal week. A bunch of background tasks related to my college . Numerous recommendation letters for various fellowship applications—good luck everyone! Some more paper reviewing (the end is in site) plus examination of a Ph.D. dissertation as external (document only, no in-person viva for me) for IIT Jodhpur . And finally! The end of the EDGELESS Project which meant,…
UIS recently rolled over the certificate for the University’s VPN service, and the same update was applied to the Computer Lab’s service at the same time. This was a bit of a pain as the (as close as we get to) supported Linux distribution is Ubuntu, but I use NixOS. It took me too long to figure this out and was, as is often the case, much simpler in retrospect than I was trying to make it. So…
Well, it was less runny. Though as you can probably guess from a 3-week hiatus, also unproductively busy :/ Proofread the proof of a book chapter that was first conceived and later submitted during the pandemic. To be honest I’d pretty much completely forgotten about it! It looked mostly OK though, so that’s nice. Got round to replying to the various toots on my post about end-to-end…
So. That was a rather stop-start week. It started off pretty well: as noted last week , I was in Brussels to attend FOSDEM 2026 for the first time in a decade. As well as getting my tax return submitted to HMRC before the deadline on the Saturday, I also managed to finish my slides—more precisely, editing Amjad’s slides—to give my talk on Sunday literally hours 1 beforehand. I found as others have…
More personal and suchlike stuff going on the last two weeks, hence the week’s gap. Felt less productive as a result, though some things got done I guess. I engaged with a range of students: some Ph.D. supervising of my newest student, Yaman Kalaji (more later) helped out the SRCF for which I appear to have become Senior Treasurer did some more Ph.D. and M.Phil. assessment and interviewing I…
Last summer I was invited to participate in an informal meeting of the EU Standing Committee on Operational Cooperation on Internal Security (COSI). The session I was asked to join concerned end-to-end encryption (“E2EE”). I was asked to “…set the scene for the discussion laying out in layman’s terms the technical possibilities of access to data and the technical consequences of it”, before being…
I run, at least for the time being, NixOS, generally from the main / unstable branch rather than a stable release. After a recent upgrade I found audio was not working, most likely because pipewire appeared to have stopped running. This is a jotting of the runes I invoked to restart it. 1 First, check whether any suitable looking process seems to be running: : mort@greyjay:~ $; procs pipewire…
That feels like it was a relatively productive week :) I interviewed a couple of Ph.D. candidates—good luck! I obtained a short extension to the EU EDGELESS project to allow us to spend up the remaining funds and complete all the work. I extracted myself from Ramblr: downloaded my existing trips , wrote a script to generate nice visualisations , and integrated it into this website . More polishing…
Over a number of years—in fact, my word, decades—recorded my GPS tracks and taken photos when I go walking. 1 Over the years I’ve used a range of apps with associated cloud services to capture and render this data, predominantly EveryTrail and (until recently) Ramblr (who I think may have bought EveryTrail or been bought by whoever bought EveryTrail). 2 I moved off EveryTrail a decade ago because,…
I run NixOS for the time being, usually tracking unstable . As a result, I have from time to time found myself wanting to pin a package to a particular (older) version because a package update doesn’t work, or at least doesn’t work for me. Given what I understand NixOS’ intention to be—encapsulation of state, eschewing the convenience of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) for a layout that…
The calendar year started with some sysadmin work. Had to get devices reconnected to eduroam and Internal-CL Wi-Fi networks which was happily quite straightforward. Research work was primarily getting a bit more seriously started on unexpected work mentioned previously looking at digital support for HVAC control—a better “Digital Plant Room” if you will. I also did some recreational coding around…
The University recently rolled its public certificate for eduroam and the old one was dropped a couple of days ago. So double-checking that all devices still worked resulted in some fiddling to make it so. Twice over because the local preferred Department Wi-Fi network is Internal-CL for which I can use the same credentials. My phone (iOS 26) was in a weird state. First off, due to having not…
Nothing of note done, work-wise, for the last week or so. Hey, it was the holidays. Which meant a lot of driving around, and I find it difficult to do much other than think and sing along to the tunes while I’m driving. I did get a chance to watch and listen to a link my mum sent me a while ago though to a film from the BBC series In Their Own Words: British Novelists , linked from…
Another two weeks gone, and suddenly we’re at the end of the Calendar Year. 1 Not an idle two weeks but not the most productive either. A lot of personal stuff—collecting the eldest from University, Christmas preparations and the like. Some M.Phil. and Ph.D. application processing and candidate interviewing. Knowledge transfer from Amjad before he leaves. Made some corrections to a past blog post…
Having gone home to visit my parents for Christmas, I am pleasantly surprised to find that their village has finally acquired fibre broadband. As it’s always been a mobile signal blackspot—typically I find it hovers somewhere between No signal and E , occasionally claiming 3G or 4G , although I am told that most of those indicators are a lie—it is nice to have >100Mb/s and, above all, a…
An odd week that. About 10 reference letters submitted throughout the week, the latest about 30 minutes ago. Remember: a student is for life, not just a degree. There was also a police statement to make following an unpleasant interaction on a train. Apparently photos, CCTV and AI will all be involved seeking the individual in question. Here’s hoping. PhD defence in progress.x However, the main…
1 At the start of the month, I was away at the final EU EDGELESS project plenary meeting. As this was hosted by an industrial partner rather than a University eduroam was of no use to me—I had to use the local guest Wi-Fi. This was fine in fact—but I was pleasantly surprised to encounter a rather neat Linux networking CLI tool feature I’d not come across before. A QR code encoding Wi-Fi network…
Hmm. So that was a blogging hiatus, not for any particularly good reason – just a little busier than expected with a little less time in front of a computer than needed. A covered well in a Lancaster pub floor, apparently Roman. Spent the time reading dissertations and then carrying out Ph.D. vivas – one at Lancaster University , one at Imperial College . Currently en route to the third, at TU…
Another week gone, a little more done. Finally (albeit too slowly) progressing some industrial funding through the system to go alongside the small grant application of last week. Some other paperwork done. Polished this website a little as a reward—see the shiny new Atkinson Hyperlegible font for extra readability. I started using it for all my windowing and editing setup so thought I’d push it…
This is another one of those that’s largely documenting something for myself, but I’m sharing it in case others find it useful. And because self-aggrandisement is what it’s all about these days amirite? I recently had issues because my NixOS installation ran out of space in the root partition wherein lies /nix/store/ , the read-only filesystem containing the Nix store. It’s a pain…
Well, that was a slightly slower week: it was school half-term so I had the children for three days. I did manage to finally finish 1 polishing my Emacs Tree-sitter and Eglot though. Hopefully someone finds that useful, even if only future-me. I also finally did a “proper” sabbatical thing and submitted a proposal for some (small, local) funding to continue developing Amjad’s excellent work . I’m…
Following on from an earlier post about Tree-sitter , Eglot is the Emacs Language Server Protocol (LSP) client. Being also now included in Emacs from v29, it works well with Tree-sitter , integrating servers that can provide rich semantic analysis and tooling for a wide range of languages. Basic Eglot configuration I split my Emacs configuration for Eglot across some default configuration plus…
Not much to say this week – largely more of the same. Blogged about tree-sitter and (written, to be published shortly now published!) eglot , configuring both for an increasing number of languages. Also continued trying to land some small funding for continuing Amjad’s excellent work. Following meticulous characterisation of Linux’s process scheduler, his Ph.D. developed an alternative approach…
First, some background that it took me longer than I would’ve hoped to piece together. Tree-sitter is “a parser generator tool and an incremental parsing library”. What does that mean in pratice? It is a thing which, when paired with a grammar, parses your source code and enables syntax highlighting, code folding, and so on. Syntactic manipulations. It comes with a domain specific language (DSL)…
As predicted, this week was some Emacs configuration polishing interspersed with some writing using typst . I quite like typst I think – it seems pretty capable, it’s pretty sensible, and it’s certainly easier to read than LaTeX. And there’s even runes available to invoke pandoc to allow production of body text in Markdown, to be rendered using typst as the backend. The piece of writing in…
Well, the sabbatical began. Your protagonist set off with a song in his heart and the freedom to roam. And all that. So what did I do? Well, initially I spent some time finishing up the handful of things I hadn’t managed to do before 1 October came along. Tedious but probably inevitable. If I forgot something you were waiting for, sorry – you may need to remind me…! I then finally gave up on…
New (academic) year, new responsibilities. Or more precisely, far fewer responsibilities :) I’m on sabbatical for this academic year 1 and, as a result, have been required to give up almost all the various roles I’ve had over the past few years. I keep being – or perhaps more precisely, revert to being – a professor, of course, I’ll remain a Fellow of Christ’s College, and I’m allowed to remain on…
Ok, so this is one of those that comes about because I found myself saying the same thing to different people a couple of times within a week or so. Which I usually think means I should probably write it down. I had been talking with Ph.D. students about selecting research topics, doing research, and what is interesting subsequently to report in papers. In doing so I recalled some advice that was…
This is a bit of a niche one but – here in Cambridge we have a number of quaint / historic / weird / cool (take your pick) traditions. One that I think is at the quite cool end is that, when we award honorary degrees, the University Orator writes and delivers an oration introducing the honorand and explaining why they’re getting the degree. In Latin. And, occasionally, also with…
I recently decided that I had over-egged the pudding and allocated too much space to my swap partition (mounted as /tmp ) under NixOS. At the same time, it had got to the point where I was bouncing off the ceiling a little with the other two partitions, /home and / (wherein lives the Nix store). I tried gparted first for a handy GUI but got nowhere due to (I think) Wayland: $ nix…
As all right-minded people must, I remap the historic, redundant, absurd CAPSLOCK key 1 to be a more conveniently accessible current, useful, sleek CTRL (control) key on any given keyboard. I also do some other minor mods to assist retention of the little sanity I still have – as I get older and more decrepit, it gets harder for me to handle change. Deal with it. I used to do this on my Macbook…
I am hardly the first person to comment 1 on this – I am given to understand AI has been a topic of some interest to many for a few years now. I’m sure I’ve seen, and possibly even re-tooted things about it in fact. I’m afraid I just don’t keep up. But recent experiences reviewing for a couple of systems/networking venues has led me to feel I need to ask: WHY ? More pointedly, why does the…
Our inestimable and most excellent Chaplain, Revd Dr Helen Orchard, likes to have a theme for the Sunday evensong services for the term. Back in Michaelmas 2023 it was … AI. I said I’d help find someone to give a sermon from a technical perspective but then signally failed to do so (sorry!). So in the end I said I’d do it, even though AI is not my thing and I’d never given a sermon before. Or, for…
A slight delay to this post, but happily I now have no more lecturing to do until 2027 1 :) I switched a year or two ago to using NixOS as my daily driver following about 15 years as an increasingly irritated MacOS user. Shortly before I had become interested in Rust as a systems programming language that seemed to marry several things I like about OCaml with several other desirable things from C…
Well that was fun! Quite high up there in the set of things that I never even considered I might do would’ve been awarding degrees. But by dint of being President and thus standing in for Simon , on Saturday I did exactly that. The University held a Congregation for those being admitted to the Cambridge MA (“Magistri in Artibus” – Master of Arts). Degrees are conferred by the Chancellor,…
EuroSys 2025 was co-located with ASPLOS 2025 this year. Other commitments meant I (again) couldn’t stay for the whole conference, attending primarily because two students had papers in the TDIS workshop . But happily I was able to stay for the first day of the conference – “happily” not only because it gave me a chance to catch up with some old friends I hadn’t seen in a decade or more, but also…
As I find myself once more on a train to parts unknown (to me at least), a brief update :) The parts unknown in question is Rotterdam, NL (so really quite well-known to quite a lot of people, just not me) for EURO/SYS 2025 (being held jointly with ASPLOS 2025 , although I can’t stay for the whole thing unfortunately) and specifically the 3rd International Workshop of Testing Distributed…