Here are the various repos used to create the interactive teaching environment we use for 1A Foundations of Computer Science in Cambridge. It may be useful to other professors who are using OCaml in their courses.

The OCaml Labs initiative within the Cambridge Computer Laboratory is now just over two years old, and it is time for an update about our activities since the last update at the end of 2013 and 2012.

It's the ever-exciting week of the International Conference on Functional Programming again in Sweden, and this time OCaml Labs has a variety of talks, tutorials and keynotes to deliver throughout the week. This post summarises all them so you can navigate your way to the right session. Remember that once you register for a particular day at ICFP, you can move between workshops and tutorials as you please.

This time last year in 2012, I had just announced the formation of a new group called OCaml Labs in the Cambridge Computer Lab that would combine research and community work towards the practical application of functional programming. An incredible year has absolutely flown by, and I’ve put together this post to summarise what’s gone on, and point to our future directions for 2014.

Distributed programming frameworks like Hadoop and Dryad are popular for performing computation over large amounts of data. The reason is programmer convenience: they accept a query expressed in a simple form such as MapReduce, and automatically take care of distributing computation to multiple hosts, ensuring the data is available at all nodes that need it, and dealing with host failures and stragglers.

I'm at the 2011 OCaml Users Group in Paris, reporting on some splendid talks this year. It looked like around 60-70 people in the room, and I had the pleasure of meeting users all the way from Russia to New York as well as all the Europeans! Js_of_ocaml First up was Pierre Chambart talking about the js_of_ocaml compiler. It compiles OCaml bytecode directly to Javascript, with few external dependencies.

The App Engine data collector for Personal Containers is coming on nicely, and is on track for an alpha preview release fairly soon. Working with AppEngine has been interesting; it’s got excellent availability and you can’t beat the price (free), but coding robust Python that doesn’t trip over the tight resource limits for individual requests, asynchronous tasks and queries is tricky.

Well, the big launch of XenServer 5 has gone smoothly, and with it have arrived a flood of questions about how exactly the new High Availability functionality works.  I’ll use this post to explain the overall architecture of HA in XenServer 5, and also how some of the fault detection and failure planning works. Fundamentally, HA is about making sure important VMs are always running on a resource pool.

You won’t be surprised to hear that we spend a lot of time improving XenApp performance when running on XenServer. Although there are some good benchmark comparisons available (such as the Tolly Group report), I still get a lot of customers asking about what the “secret sauce” is. I sat down with George Dunlap, the lead XenServer performance engineer to chat about the very first optimisation we did back in XenServer 4.0 last year.

I thought I’d kick off my Citrix blog with a question I get pretty often from Linux enthusiasts: how to install unsupported Linux distributions on XenServer 4.1. The most common solution people find is to use the "Other Install Media" template, insert the distribution installation CD, and find that the mouse cursor doesn’t work when they boot into X11.