Around this time each year it is especially useful to know when the rubbish is due to be collected by the local council, since the schedule is inevitably disrupted by the holidays until well into January. In fact where I live we have fortnightly collections, with different types of bin collected on alternate weeks, so I never find it easy to remember which bin is due to be put out. ...

Several references exist that document how to run seL4 on the Raspberry Pi 3 in 32-bit mode. One annoying paper cut encountered when getting this working is the need for a custom u-boot - either a binary distributed by the authors of seL4, or reverting a particular commit in u-boot. A recent release of seL4 mentioned AArch64 support for RPi3. I’ve got it running, and it appears to avoid the need for a custom u-boot. (N.B. you still need a GPIO serial cable!) ...

It seems right that I should mention the pandemic on my personal blog; I doubt very much that I will say anything original or interesting, but it would seem strange to look back on my writings from 2020 and see nothing about COVID-19. I had to check this, but I have been staying at home since Monday 15th March, save for occasional walks around the park. (UK schools closed on 20th March, and we officially announced the lockdown on 23rd March, but our house started a bit early due to having a mild cough.) That’s 52 days at home for me so far, or 7 weeks and 3 days. ...

Life comes at you fast. Since changing jobs three months ago, I have earned several cloud-related certifications, and started an assignment as a cloud security architect with a large financial services client. Consulting is quite different to ordinary employment; a great deal of emphasis is placed on making connections, and building a personal brand. I’m enjoying the variety of work, and the opportunity to develop my skills. My focus this year is on learning; I intend to spend more time reading and writing, especially as a way to distill and clarify my ideas. Who knows, I might even post more on this blog?

In early October, I will be saying goodbye to my colleagues at CV-Library after 7.5 years, and joining PA Consulting in London as a Principal Consultant. Over the course of my time at CV-Library I have got married, had a child, and moved from Southampton to Bedford. I am happy to have played a part in the growth of CV-Library as a leading recruitment brand in the UK, especially helping to make the site more reliable - I can tell more than a few war stories. ...

I have done a small amount of free software work! However, I’m going to cheat and list it since the start of the year. ...

This evening I’ve migrated my blog to Hugo, and made it look a bit prettier. I apologise if I’ve broken any links - in particular, I don’t think listings of blog posts in a particular day or month are working.

One size does not fit all when it comes to building search applications - it is important to think about the business domain and user expectations. Here's a classic example from recruitment search (a domain which has absorbed six years of my life already...) - imagine you are a candidate searching for IT jobs on your favourite job board. Recall how a full-text index works as implemented in Solr or Elasticsearch - the job posting documents are treated as a bag of words (i.e. the order of the words doesn't matter in the first instance). When indexing each job, the search engine tokenizes the document to get a list of which words are included. Then, for each individual word we create a list of which documents include each word. ...

Public Service Announcement for anyone relying on Jenkins for continuous deployment - the milestone step plugin as of version 1.3.1 will not function correctly if you could have more than two builds running at once - older builds could get deployed after newer builds. See JENKINS-46097. A possible workaround is to add an initial milestone at the start of the pipeline, which will then allow builds to be killed early. (Builds are only killed early once they have passed their first milestone.) Going by the source history, I reckon this bug has been present since the milestone-step plugin was created.

Packet.net offer an ARMv8 server with 96 cores for $0.50/hour. I signed up and tried building Libreoffice to see what would happen. Debian isn't officially supported there yet, but they offer Ubuntu, which suffices for testing the hardware. Final build time: around 12 hours, compared to 2hr 55m on the official arm64 buildd. Most of the Libreoffice build appeared to consist of "touch /some/file" repeated endlessly - I have a suspicion that the I/O performance might be low on this server (although I have no further evidence to offer for this). I think the next thing to try is building on a tmpfs, because the server has 128GB RAM available, and it's a shame not to use it.