flypig.co.uk

Now

A /now page, for sharing what I'm currently working on. Updated 2 September 2024.

Work

I'm now feel properly embedded as a Research Data Scientist for the Alan Turing Institute at the British Library in London. I'm part of the Research Compute Platforms team, responsible for the High Performance Computing provision. Access to large numbers of GPUs is increasingly becoming essential for research projects at the Turing and we help ensure users have access and understand how to best make use of the resources.

Although I don't have a background in High Performance Computing, my background in networking and Linux is turning out to be super-useful. It's a fascinating area and I'm glad I get to use my existing skills while still learning new ones.

Rest

Joanna and I recently enjoyed a trip to Jersey, staying in Elizabeth Castle, which was the perfect experience. It struck the perfect balance between culture and isolation. Personally I'm looking forward to the transition from Summer to Autumn. It's the transitions that really thrill me the most.

During the summer I've been doing much more cycling, primarily the return trip to Cambridge once a week which is 16 km and nearly an hour each way. I enjoy it. But also I don't. As Autumn arrives I'll probably have to cut back on this, so maybe I'll try to find something else active to do. Joanna and I also go out with her tricycle and my bike. I enjoy that much more.

I'm also doing my best to fulfil my New Year's Resolution to do at least one thing each month to reduce my environmental impact. I'm not sure I've managed it every month, but I'm doing better than I really expected. As part of this I've been investigating solar panels. We're not quite there yet, but it's definitely in the pipeline.

Play

For the last year I'v e been upgrading Gecko for Sailfish OS from the current version ESR 78 to ESR 91. It's been a huge undertaking and I've been writing about it every day in my Gecko dev diary. I recently submitted the first batch of pull requests and it feels like it'll soon be reaching some sort of natural conclusion.

After that I'm hoping to move on to learning about Information Theory. It's another of my New Year's Resolutions. I also plan to do a bit of work on Plantcraft, specifically converting it into multi-threaded C or C++.