Ocaml teaching resources

[Update: The Ocaml teaching resource page is now live]

I am helping the folks behind OCaml.org with setting up a page that will useful resources for educators that want to teach OCaml to masses.

We are looking to include helpful guides on how to setup a development environment, provide links to useful VMs as well as list some tips for complete beginners. There is a lot of material on the web, however it is scattered all over the places and sometimes hard to find. We will try to find the best of the lot and have them referenced in one place.

Watch this space...I really meant this space.

We are also listing all the universities where OCaml is being taught.

Let us know if we missed any.

It is great to see them on the Google maps as well :)

Learning OCAML: OcaIDE

OCAML has a growing and loyal community behind it, OCAML.org is a great place to get in touch and contribute.
Nevertheless, in my journey I found in difficult to find much material that is tailored for a total noobie.  This is why I decided to document my journey towards functional-language enlightenment, namely by learning and using OCAML language for  developing the MoanaML  project. Your feedback, guidance and contributions are most welcomed.

So here were are, let's start exploring...our glory awaits! :) By the way, I am running Ubuntu 14.04, so most of my tips will be related to it.

I tend to learn most by doing and to do something useful you need the right tools.

Therefore I think the first post about my journey should be on finding and using the right IDE ¹. There are not many options around, but there are a few. Your main trade off is on how much time you spend fiddling with them.

I tried a few in all the cases I had to tweak the settings and configuration to get reasonable performance. In the end, I started using OcaIDE, which is a plugin for Eclipse. It is far from perfect, but gives you the initial support a noobie might need to get started.

• Source editor for modules (ml files), interfaces (mli files), parsers (mly files) and lexers (mll files)
• Syntax coloring (colors and styles are configurable)
• Automatic indentation while typing in the editor (configurable in the preferences)
• A customizable integrated code formatter, and an interface to the camlp4 formatter (through an AST printer)
• Completion
• Library browser, both for the standard library and user libraries
  
  . . . and much more.

Out of all the Eclipse plugins OcaIDE works pretty much out of the box. However you need to make sure you specify your build command in the Project preferences. This is also the right place to specify all the libraries and/or external packages the you are planning to use in your project.

In any case, the OcaIDE project offers Flash-based tutorials on how to set-up and best utilised your developing environment.

You can find step-by-step instructions for it here from guys in UPenn, which include info on how to install OCAML, Eclipse and finally OcaIDE.
A nice summary of how to install OCAML on different enviroment is also presented by the OCAML.org here.

There is plenty of discussion online about a suitable IDE, here are the links to some of it:

• Nice overview on StackOverflow
• A nice collection from the OCAML birth place - INRIA

---

1 I am not a big fan of Vim and Emacs, so I wanted to find and IDE that gives me slightly more than just syntax highlight and indentation - just kidding :)  This  is a very gross underestimation of the true power behind Vim and Emacs editors, they are truly powerful tools once you master them. I guess in my case, I preferred to minimize my effort on fiddling with the developing environment and remembering key combinations and rather focus on the OCAML language itself. Nevertheless, as it turned out, choosing an IDE introduced plenty of fiddling with configuration as well. You can find numerous Stack Overflow discussions about it online.

I developed my first android app - 360Linkz

I have recently published my first android app. It is very simple but I learnt a lot developing it. I named it 36Olinkz. 

The app detects LinkedIn contacts in your vicinity. Once you login using LinkedIn credentials you can then filter and send messages to your connections. You will also be notified on any of the app users that are located close by (i.e., using the same Wifi point). In case, the detected user is not part of your connections, you can send a LinkedIn invitation or a message.

I plan to continue working on it to introduced new features. There is no grater motivation for a developer than the feedback from the users.

You can download it from the android play store 

 or click on the download link on the www.360linkz.com

From Latex to DOCX

Latex is awesome!  I just thought I needed to say it straight up...seriously, I made the switch from Microsoft Word years ago and never looked back.

Having said that, Microsoft Word has its benefits.

Sometimes you find yourself wanting to convert you tex file into docx or any other format. This is not a trivial task. You can copy & paste or use online services but I always wanted to have a tool to do it on my computer.

I recently came across this nifty tool, pandoc, a universal document converter:

"If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife. Pandoc can convert documents in markdown, reStructuredText, textile, HTML, DocBook, LaTeX, MediaWiki markup, OPML, or Haddock markup to

• HTML formats: XHTML, HTML5, and HTML slide shows using Slidy, reveal.js, Slideous, S5, or DZSlides.
• Word processor formats: Microsoft Word docx, OpenOffice/LibreOffice ODT, OpenDocument XML
• Ebooks: EPUB version 2 or 3, FictionBook2
• Documentation formats: DocBook, GNU TexInfo, Groff man pages, Haddock markup
• Outline formats: OPML
• TeX formats: LaTeX, ConTeXt, LaTeX Beamer slides
• PDF via LaTeX
• Lightweight markup formats: Markdown, reStructuredText, AsciiDoc, MediaWiki markup, Emacs Org-Mode, Textile
• Custom formats: custom writers can be written in lua. "

It works great. I was able to convert from Latex to Word and get very decent results. It was able to port citation, figures and even mathematical equations!

I did have a problem setting it up to support new packages. In particular, it wouldn't detect my acronyms \ac{BLAH}.

I used sed utility to remove them. I know it's not ideal, but it worked for me.

I would like to thank John MacFarlane for creating such a great tool!

Let me know about your experieneces with the tool or maybe you can help me figure out how to make it support additional latex packages :)

Enjoy!

10 Tips...for new PhD students..

1. Small incremental goals (milestones)...

2. Take breaks...

3. Collaborate, work in a group...

4. Write, take notes, comments, blog, tweet...

5. Don't over rely on your supervisor...

6. Measure your progress...

7. Know yourself...

8. Use tools to manage bibliography...

9. Peer-review your work

10. Listen to senior PhD students :P

Compiling C++ code after Ubuntu 12.10 upgrade...

Recently upgraded to Ubuntu 12.10 quantal and almost immediately found out that Omnet++ is not compiling any more :)

It turns out the issue is with the new gcc 4.7 compiler.

After Googling the issue, I stumbled on this post that help me fix it. The problem is with abspath.cc file that throws an error

 add the following lines to fix the issue:

#ifdef _WIN32
#include
#include
#else
#include
#endif

Thanks Georgi for posting it. It worked like a charm.

Hope it helps you as well.

R + Omnet++ = Love++

I have blogged previously about the R Framework.

Now I found this great R packages that allows to import omnetpp results files (*.sca, *.vec) into R.

The package supports loading the contents of OMNeT++ result files into R, organizing the data and creating various plots from them.

 I found the tutorial very helpful.

Enjoy!

Update 28/11/2012: Came across some very helpful tips for using the package here