#010

Ph.D

Nothing to report, I didn’t much fancy trying to do work on a computer which was crashing and rebooting every hour.

Work

This week my team shifted focus to investigating if we can use our “finders” (for example, the AAIB, MAIB, and RAIB report finders) to search through arbitrary documents. Currently our finders are set up to search through a specific type of document, determined by the finder, and the type of the document determines the metadata which you can filter by. We instead wanted to find out if we could tag arbitrary documents with some given metadata, and then build a finder to search through all documents with those metadata fields.

We quickly found that we could build a finder for this metadata if documents were tagged with it, but how to tag documents was another matter entirely. We didn’t really want to change every single publishing app. The two applications which consume metadata are rummager and the email-alert-api. Tagging documents would be a fairly simple matter if all of our publishing apps talked to those via the publishing-api, as we could build something to sit in front of the publishing-api and add the needed tags. But, due to hysterical raisins, our whitehall app talks to rummager directly, and our specialist-publisher and travel-advice-publisher apps talk to the email-alert-api directly.

So for now we have something sitting in front of rummager and the email-alert-api adding these tags in. It’s a bit unfortunate, as it means that the tags are not visible in our content API, but even worse the publishing-api is no longer the sole source of truth about a document. We plan to move this all into the publishing-api at some point though.

Miscellaneous

I made a cottage pie, and it was very nice. I wrote up my recipe. There are no quantities; quantities in recipes are for people who lack discernment.
On Friday I got a bunch of new hardware and built myself a new desktop computer and fileserver. Finally, my hardware woes are over. This is my first major upgrade in about 6 years, in that time I’ve only bought new hard drives and graphics cards. I got a couple of NVMe M.2 SSDs for my desktop, and I had to look up a video on youtube to teach me how to plug them in, as I had no idea.

I’m really impressed with the performance. I’m used to Windows taking upwards of 5 minutes to boot and become fully responsive. It now takes about 50 seconds for a cold boot, including POST. Excluding POST, Windows boots, logs in, and starts everything up in about 30 seconds.
In my Call of Cthulhu campaign this week the players have begun investigating the gruesome murder of their good friend Jackson Elias, after a four-year time skip.

Ph.D

Work

Miscellaneous

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