Skylight Symmetry
Someone with nothing better to do writing for someone with nothing better to read. On software, music, and life.
Latest posts
Swift OTel 1.0 Released 🔗
try! Swift Tokyo: Building a streaming ChatGPT proxy with Swift OpenAPI 🔗
Swift OpenAPI Generator 1.0 Released 🔗
Introducing Swift OpenAPI Generator 🔗
WWDC: Meet Swift OpenAPI Generator 🔗
Blackout notice: Bye-bye for now
I’ll keep this short and sweet. I’ve recently started working for a company that prohibits personal blogging. It’s been a fun ride and should things ever change, I’m sure I’ll be back. bye-bye for now!
Type-safe C bindings #2: Handling flexible array members with ocaml-ctypes
Recently I blogged about how we’ve been using ocaml-ctypes to generate type-safe bindings to some C libraries that we want to use within our OCaml software stack. Over the last few months we’ve added bindings for a few things including: libpci : for for accessing PCI devices; flock(2) : for applying or removing an advisory lock on an open file; and libsanlock : for shared locks on distributed…
Type-safe C bindings #1: Using ocaml-ctypes and stub generation
There’s sometimes you just don’t want to reinvent the wheel. Working day-to-day in OCaml, you start to enjoy the fruits of a statically, strongly typed language. For example, it’s reassuring to know that, whilst your code might be full of bugs, it ain’t gonna segfault on you. But then you find yourself needing to use an existing C library and boom. Tread carefully in this minefield because one…
Wrangling Grafana and InfluxDB into a Docker image
It’s been a few months now, and our information radiator for our team is humming along nicely. It was fun putting it all together and I blogged about the process of hand crafting the system to our team’s needs. Since then it’s become quite a popular tool. What was initially meant for our team (both local and remote) to see at a glance how we were doing quickly gained some other uses. It became our…
Information Radiation with InfluxDB and Grafana
Like woolly socks for your brain, you almost feel warmer inside when you stare at an information radiator. There’s something about capturing the information that can bring a sense of calm. Even if the information paints a bad picture, at least it’s a picture you can see! You have reduced your known-unknowns . Last year, our company made the move to Agile . The very word will conjure a variety of…
Automating Github Pages and Coveralls.io from Travis
With the advent of Travis-ci it has never been easier to setup continuous integration for your Github project. Just sign in to Travis with your Github account, enable some repos, profit! It will then build all commits that are pushed to your repo and alert you when you have broken the build. You can even badge your repo with the current build status: It even tests your pull-requests for you and…
Some extra bells for Mutt's brilliant whistles
Searching (and tab-completion) of all email addresses (via ldapsearch ) Viewing Exchange calendar invitations Showing unread email count in your tmux status line I lasted longer than I would expect, but my compliance budget finally ran out when it came to using Outlook for my work email. I’ve recently made the switch to Mutt and, so far, I’m enjoying the experience. Given that my entire work setup…
Instrumenting XenServer for NVIDIA GRID (vGPU)
Following the recent announcement of XenServer’s upcoming virtual GPU support, we thought it might be nice to share some of the internals that make it work. Having worked on the toolstack side of this project, I hope to explore a little of the underlying architecture, the extensions to the XenAPI and how you can configure your XenServer to use vGPU. XenServer has supported passthrough for PCI…
My day job just got open sourced
I haven’t really ever blogged about my work but that all might change beacause this week saw the announcement that one of the best virtualisation and cloud platforms, XenServer has moved to open source . Open source has always been at the heart of the foundations of XenServer and the Xen Hypervisor . What’s Xen Xen is one of the leading open-source hypervisor that span out work done in the…
Overdrive facelift: pedal plastic surgery
So a while ago I built an overdrive guitar pedal. Here’s what it looked like: Pretty uninspiring, no? Well yeah, that it is hand-drawn with a sharpie… Well since the pedal has found it’s home securely on my board I thought it should look like a proper pedal. Here’s the results:
Hash maps and primality—when & why?
Recently I was posed an interesting question during an interview for a graduate software engineering position. It would be unfair to say which company this was and so I will cryptic-crossword-clue-ify the name by saying finished novel before resounding characteristic of my stride . Anyway(!), I thought I’d share my thoughts on a particular (perhaps bogus) question from that experience. So we got…
Penultimate term review
Well thus ends my final Michaelmas term. I think that in future years I may come to miss October’s sudden onslaught of Freshers’ Flu but not much else. It’s been a manically busy period this time round with project proposals, dissertation work and careers fairs to boot! Not to mention the following plethora of lecture courses which, whilst academically interesting, have questionable value to what…
Git Branch and Status in Bash prompt
Over these last few weeks I’ve really started getting into Git. Everyone has their favourite VCS but for me, what I’ve seen of Git so far makes me think it’s gotta be one of the best and most flexible. So if you love Git then maybe you’ll appreciate this. A bit of Googling and I stumbled upon a way to have your Bash PS1 prompt tell you what branch of a repository you’re on (if applicable) and give…
Tiny C program to compute largest known prime
Having recently discovered the awesome in-browser Javascript Linux kernel , I looked a bit further into the work of Fabrice Bellard and unearthed this gem. I know this is a little old now but I think it’s worth a mention. The following code is just 438 bytes and computes the largest known prime number, 2 43112609 -1, a number with about 13 million digits! So I thought I’d also give it a test run…
Studio Session: You Got Me by Steve Fargher
Happy with the way this has turned out; take a listen! Recorded and mixed by Rich Harris @ Alchemea. Musicians: Stephen Fargher (Guitar & Vocals); Josh Campbell (Drums); Si Beaumont (me) (Bass); Josh Irwin (Guitars). </embed> You Got Me by richharris87
Studio Session: Sober by Charlie Perkin
Singer/songwriter Charlie Perkin’s great song Sober. Recorded and mixed by Rich Harris @ Alchemea. Musicians: Stephen Fargher (Acoustic); Josh Campbell (Drums); Si Beaumont (me) (Bass); Rich Harris (Guitars). Take a listen… </embed> Sober by richharris87
The birth of a DIY guitar FX pedal
So I recently decided I’d try my hand at building my own guitar pedal. It went pretty well and I’m really impressed with it. It really is as amazing-sounding and versatile as they claim. Flippin’ amazing! It’s based on the vintage TS-808 Tubescreamer for it’s main overdrive circuit but has incorporated many tons of the mods that people made to them back in the day. For those interested in how it…