mort’s mythopœia

A slight delay to this post, but happily I now have no more lecturing to do until 20271 :) I switched a year or two ago to using NixOS as my daily driver following about 15 years as an increasingly irritated MacOS user.

Well that was fun!

EuroSys 2025 was co-located with ASPLOS 2025 this year.

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…

Using my fancy (?)

In similar vein to a recent post, I have also started using just when I periodically need to rebuild my OCaml tool1 ocal.

In the last few days I discovered I needed to search back up the filesystem from $CWD to find the first occurence of a file (specifically, a Justfile but that’s by-the-by).

Having recently, happily, had several PhD students completing in short order, I’ve been approaching external PhD examiners.

I recently had colleagues hit an issue that I have hit myself in the past, and so I finally decided to figure out a fix.

I have recently become a fan of just as a replacement for the venerable make.

After some time using various tools and scripts to format and sort my files of BibTeX/BibLaTeX entries, I finally gave up back in March and wrote one myself – bibtox.

Ok, ok, I exaggerate – it’s not really that far.

One of the pleasures of being an academic is to travel to nice places to meet interesting people, and interesting places to meet nice people.

Undergraduate final-year (“Part II”) project supervision goes in fits and starts.

I do not participate in a huge number of TPCs (Technical Programme Committees) as a general rule– partly time constraints but mostly no-one knows who I am so I don’t often get asked… (!)

Well, here we go again, again.

I recently had cause to try to recover some files from my restic backups.

Another short one, this time the magic flags to get debug output and access to webdev tools under Electron apps such as Slack and whatnot on Wayland: APPLICATION --enable-logging --devtools \ --platform=wayland --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --passw…

A short one this; just a crib of commands to redo maestral (unofficial Dropbox client) configuration. # remove existing configuration rm ~/.config/maestral/maestral.ini # appears to fail with `/usr/bin/env 'bash': No such file or directory` maestral autos…

I don’t pretend to understand NixOS configuration fully yet, what with Flakes and channels and so forth.

Starting by reading instructions at: https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive/blob/master/docs/sharepoint-libraries.md https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive/blob/master/docs/business-shared-items.md https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/77734#issuecomment-57…

I naively thought I could just use WSL2 on Windows on my new laptop.

Truly cursed bugs that have become software folklore.

An OCaml operator cheatsheet for OCaml operators that I have found useful.

I once had cause to setup HotCRP for local hosting.

I recently discovered, to some irritation, that the --include PATTERN option to tar seems only to apply to directories – and if the PATTERN doesn’t match, it won’t traverse subdirectories.

Some possibly useful data visualisation links: https://medium.economist.com/why-you-sometimes-need-to-break-the-rules-in-data-viz-4d8ece284919 https://colororacle.org/

Some notes from my first attempt to renovate an old media PC that had a SYSLINUX install without any package management, and a crufty BIOS.

So for some reason I wanted to do this – use Discord on an iPad without installing the app.

This is the set of things that I roughly did to set up my old new Macbook: configurations, packages, etc.

Being a list of some cool “Falsehoods programmers believe about …” sites, now redundant thanks to https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood: …time …time, more …names …addresses …geography

I recently decided to go through some old PCs and hard disks (yes, actual spinning bits of metal) and recycle or simply junk them.

Ed: the first in a likely series, this is one of the posts I drafted but never published during my seven years in the blogging wilderness I have been having persistent issues on MacOS with Time Machine backups interacting badly with several configuration…

Ed: this tool is perhaps less relevant now that both Mirage and OPAM have moved on.

I recently took the plunge and upgraded my OS X.

This is a short addendum to my post of a couple of days ago caused by my carelessness in writing the OPAM file.

I recently decided to refresh and update my ocal package,1 primarily to port it to use the excellent notty before adding support for indicating week-of-year.

As some may know, following the Unikernel Systems acquisition, I currently do contract work for Docker Inc. in addition to my day job here at the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory.

Bootstrapping Docker for ARM64 (aka AARCH64) Basic process is: bootstrap ARM64 go toolchain on x86, and install build ARM64 go1.7.5 toolchain needed for docker build bootstrap ARM64 docker v1.10.3 use bootstrapped docker to provide containerised build env…

Recently had cause to do this as part of the SRG’s and OCaml Labs infrastructure.

Some time ago, for reasons best known to themselves, a Google recruiter decided to “reach out” on the basis of my GitHub profile to see if I were interested in a role as a Site-Reliability Engineer or possibly a Software Engineer.

As I could never remember the command to start the offlineimap service using my customised configuration, here it is: brew services start offlineimap ~/rc-files/homebrew.mxcl.offlineimap.plist

I had cause to do this recently, so here’re the runes from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7474354/include-jquery-in-the-javascript-console for the record: var script = document.createElement('script'); script.src = "https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/li…

Due to the impending finish of the EU FP7 funded User Centric Networking1 I recently had cause to revisit the excellent work that Thomas Leonard did for the project in getting Xen/ARM running on the Cubieboard2 and Cubietruck (aka Cubieboard3).

I think this is a bit of a classic, the first written form of which I came across in Prof.

I’ve had the pleasure of giving a couple of talks at some fun venues recently, extolling both the virtues of unikernels and talking a bit about where we currently see them as usefully being deployed.

As I’ve found myself repeating the same information several times recently, and have to dig out the links in question every time, I figured it’d be useful to write this down once so I can point at it.

Nothing earth-shattering here: I recently had the “pleasure” of setting up an ARM64 server.

A relatively long hiatus this time – blame the Cambridge housing market and the need to simultaneously act both incredibly quickly and mind-numbingly slowly.

A bit of a delay since the last post – lots going on!