Mark Carroll's Journal

Our couple of small road trips down into England afforded some success though plans were a little derailed by sites having holiday closures that weren't previously obvious. Fortunately, my plans include fallbacks so, among other things, our dog L. had a good time running around on Bamburgh Beach in Northumberland (near the impressive castle) and Roanhead Beach in Cumbria (near Morecambe Bay). He also got to see swans at Annandale Water from as close as I dared let him get. Roanhead Beach turned out to be enormous: by coincidence, we arrived at around low tide when there is an awful lot of walking along the sand that one can do before getting near any sea. I also learned to avoid Windermere: narrow roads full of tourists.

L.'s been suffering some gastrointestinal issue over these holidays; there has been an infection going around. They now seem to be on the mend but it slows us down and distracts us while we focus on making sure they're okay. We actually left Northumberland early to make it to an appointment with our regular vet. With luck, we won't need a second appointment.

After a quiet New Year at home, we'll go to visit family in Dundee then be back at work. R. works tomorrow too, at least from home, helping to fill out the support rota.

My weight remains much higher than it should be, indeed much higher than it was when I lived in Eastern Tennessee, but I am grateful that it at least seems to be remaining stable. In time, as I improve my diet and exercise, it may thus drift back downward. Also, on a health note, we just got our influenza vaccinations, paid for by the family medical coverage from my employer, Addepar. Somebody from Spire Global reached out to me to see if I'd like to work on a project there but, while I'd love to be working locally in Rust on space systems, they pay less and don't appear from the outside to be as pleasant a place to work at this time. With Addepar, at least I am getting to learn a little of complex financial instruments which is differently interesting.

My work is sometimes entertaining in further overloading the acronyms in my head. Recent examples include:

acronym	what I first thought	what it meant
AMA	against medical advice	ask me anything
PTSD	post-traumatic stress disorder	position time-series data
UVF	Ulster Volunteer Force*	unit verification failure†

^*I was born into 1970s Britain, the Troubles were in the news
^†for instance, how much stock someone owns today should be what they owned yesterday plus buys less sells, we check that's so

Given that I am so used to Linux, having a Mac for work always slows me a little. Especially, aspects of the window management and focus ongoingly impede my usual workflows. Another aspect is the keyboard shortcuts. To take a simple example, for cut, copy and paste, where I might be used to control X, C, V on other systems, of course I'm using this command key on the Mac. Except, within Emacs on the Mac, which seems to behave more as I'm used to. Of course, the Mac has a control key too, and it's a common modifier for some other purposes, so I'm often left guessing. For instance, if I recall correctly, in IntelliJ I do use control in pulling up a type hierarchy.

This switching of shortcuts between Linux, Mac, and Emacs-on-Mac is awkward partly because, as above, some of these are quite similar, and I don't yet see a system that helps me remember. Far easier for me was back when I used to use a Programmer Dvorak keyboard layout at work, and regular Qwerty at home, partly because those are just so clearly different. Also, probably it helped that I wasn't switching frequently, just a few times per day.

My illness ran the usual course of a cold, though it took its time somewhat. From yesterday, my head felt rather clearer, even though I still had plenty of physical symptoms. So, I could work, and felt like doing other things too, rather than just sitting and resting. I still have some congestion and a sore throat but they're just inconvenient, I don't feel anywhere near as rotten.

I'll head into the office today. Because of other things going on at home, e.g., I have a dental appointment on Friday morning, today would end up being my only day onsite this week, so I want to go in at least sometime, and in recovery I would think I am well past being infectious.

I am up in the middle of the night because something happened with the toilet cistern so it wouldn't stop filling. I don't know how it gets into that mode, it's easy enough to remedy temporarily, but anything non-trivial in the middle of the night wakes me up. What annoying timing, I already didn't feel great and now I get to be sleep-deprived before commuting for a full day in another city.

I'd feel better if I were already more productive at work. It feels as if I take a while to get to grips with each aspect of what they do and my colleagues already have much of that familiarity. And, whenever it feels like I'm getting nearer finished with a task, it becomes apparent that actually I am not. Nobody's said, goodness, you're dangerously slow here, what's your issue? but I feel it plenty just from myself.

Part of it is getting used to Java again but more of it that I have never used some of their frameworks (my relevant background is mostly Hibernate and Spring) and I am still learning how their code is arranged, and how people like things to be done. It's certainly clear that my intuition often doesn't match others', sometimes quite strongly; each time I misjudge that, more time is wasted. I don't see why I won't get there in the end but, a couple of months in now, I would already rather like to be contributing better than I am. In the meantime, I'll keep on plodding through, and hoping that others remain more patient with me than I am with myself.

I had mentioned how my work Mac, plugged in at home, was applying the wrong keymap for my external keyboard and imposing some godawful acceleration on my scroll-wheel. Now I have adequate solutions for both:

• I installed an open-source utility named DiscreteScroll, which fixes macOS's unnecessary scroll wheel acceleration, making the scroll-wheel behave rather more manageably.


• It turns out that Apple's idea of a UK-layout keyboard is not the typical one, it's kind of halfway to a US one. As the Mac doesn't understand the typical UK layout, I realized that I can just buy a US-layout keyboard, which I am used to anyway. Having despaired of making sense of the differences among the dazzling range of Keychron keyboards, I indulged in a nice, loud Unicomp.

In another keyboard victory, a couple of my UK keyboards had dodgy keys. I can be slow to realize things but, eventually, I had the useful idea of transplanting a keycap (using my pry an old Kindle open at the seams levers) to make one fully able keyboard from the two problem ones.

Admittedly, although working with Mac OS X instead of GNU/Linux usually slows me down some, for my day job I am finding the Mac not to be much of a hindrance.

I survived my first week at work. I went on-site in Edinburgh for the first three days, initially picking up my shiny new MacBook M4 Pro running Sequoia. The office turns out to be a pleasant dog-friendly space with the amenities one might hope for. Being a hybrid worker, I book desk space when I need it from the hot-desking pool. The desks are motorized adjustable desks that can become standing desks. There are very many onboarding things to do over the coming weeks, a lot to do and learn, and plenty of friendly, helpful people to meet. Despite the open-plan layout, it's not too hard to focus, not very distracting.

As usual, there's some wrestling with the Mac but, in all fairness, plenty of things did just work quite well. The most obvious wrestling was the usual: Mac users love to see things in blurry-text. Okay, all the problems I ran into this week arise because I have the temerity to plug the Mac into non-Apple hardware. For instance, the external monitors on the desks have low pixel density and recent versions of the OS have removed useful options for fixing that. I was able to solve the blur by installing iTerm2 and unchecking Anti-Aliased. For working from home, other pending issues include it applying the wrong keymap for my external keyboard and imposing some godawful acceleration on my scroll-wheel but they're in progress, I want to get some actual work done too.

Nice though the office environment is, being in transit for at least three hours per day makes me appreciate fully remote work: Wednesday felt as if it should already be Friday. I am currently taking the more expensive option: subway over to Queen Street, and the frequent faster trains aren't as crowded as I'd heard, quite tolerable. (Work has provided my laptop a privacy screen to limit viewing angle.) My current route to the office includes climbing the 124 News Steps which means I get the hardest part of my workday out of the way at the start. The bus would be cheapest except I'd probably want extra bus to and from the stations: at each end, the bus station is further than the railway. A compromise might be the limited rail ticket: I'd end up working long days but could probably just walk at both ends around the intercity portion. Belatedly, I also wonder if I should be masking for the railway journey: perhaps it's outstandingly the riskiest among my habits.

Having been made redundant from my fully remote job, I am starting a new job that has me on-site in Edinburgh twice per week. In looking into how to make this a cost-effective habit, first I thought of railcards but there don't seem to be any that apply. Fortunately, there are flexi ticket bundles that are useful for people taking a few trips within a longer period, which seem to be the best option.

Among the flexible tickets, the two obvious kinds appear to be from ScotRail which would cost me around £22 per day and allow me to travel on all the relevant trains, and from CrossCountry which for around £15 per day allow me to travel on only their trains which are the minority, only a couple of plausible ones each day either way. We need to save money where we can but the latter option has me arriving back into Glasgow at 21.22 at the earliest.

I didn't discover the cheaper option until after I had bought the other, at least for the initial period. After I learn more about the peak-time trains and the culture in the office, I can look into limiting which trains I may take. Perhaps a couple of longer workdays each week will make sense.

Having transcribed the timetable into LibreOffice Calc and tried some sorts, it seems to me that Central Station has those couple of useful CrossCountry trains which take at least an hour, plus some ScotRail services that take rather longer still. Queen Street station is further from me on foot, easy by subway though, and offers only ScotRail services that run frequently and take less than an hour but are anecdotally rather busy.

Filing taxes is on paper for me this year. After Mint Mobile ended their previous international roaming, I allowed my US cellphone plan to lapse. Although the IRS typically expects expats to file taxes, its services also generally require them to have a US telephone number. When they can make it easier for expats to actually deal with them then they won't have to process my paper mail any more. As it is, it helps to be able to attach a separate page anyway because Form 1116 Part II doesn't have enough space for reporting monthly salary deposits. If I end up working as a contractor later this year then I may also have to start attaching a form from the UK's Home Office showing that I am not liable for Self Employment tax.

At work, I had to learn about a particular distributed cryptocurrency exchange. Liquidity is provided by set of reserves that each contain coins of two different kinds, an equal value of each.

For pricing an exchange "from" the coin we hold "to" the coin we want, using one of these reserves of two different kinds of coin, we have:

r_f

how much of the "from" coin is in the reserve

r_t

how much of the "to" coin is in the reserve

a_f

how much of the "from" coin we want to exchange

a_t

how much of the "to" coin we are to receive

c_n

a constant determining the transaction cost

c_d

another constant determining the transaction cost, a little larger than c_n

It turns out that we decide how much currency users receive by,


I found this quite interesting. In my ignorance, I don't know if it's a standard approach for such currency exchanges. The formula seems to have some reasonable properties, in terms of things like how the price increases as one's swapping to a currency that there is now less of (or would be less of after the swap).

(Dreamwidth doesn't appear to allow <math> markup so I did what I could.)

I am a Professional Member of the British Computer Society (BCS) who handle accreditation for my Chartered IT Professional (CITP) status. At the moment, I do not much use my membership except for being able to list it on my resumé. The royal charter granted by the Privy Council to the BCS allows them to award such status so, under the established British conventions, I can reasonably use MBCS, CITP post-nominally after my MA (Cantab).

My latest annual renewal fee was £216 and, right now, money is tight. I went ahead and paid it but I wonder how much employers actually notice and care. I used my membership a little more during the COVID-19 pandemic when more talks were broadcast online but, between work and family, I have little time at the moment for interacting with fellow professionals, etc. and even less for travelling to do so. I suppose that I shall see how things stand when renewal next comes around.