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On 16 December 2000, a young @dra1 stepped out on to the stage of St Martin-in-the-Fields making what would be the first of many performances of Johann Sebastian Bach’s great Mass in B minor. On 16 November last year, just under 25 years later, a slightly greyer @dra27 stepped out on the stage of King’s Hall at Newcastle University for what, for now at least2, would be his last performance of this great work3. As I write this in the 9 hour window of unemployment between finishing at the University of Cambridge and Tarides and commuting down to 2½ Devonshire Square to start at Jane Street, it’s a new year and a change of course. the “27” wouldn’t be allocated until the next October ↩ never say never… ↩ I’ve never recorded the work, although I recorded Ach, bleibe doch from Himmelfahrtsoratorium BWV 11 with Musik Podium Stuttgart ten years ago, which is one of the source arias for the famous Agnus Dei of the mass ↩

The base image builder has a growing number of failed builds; it’s time to address these.

Early in the upgrade program for Ubuntu 24.04, there were permission issues when extracting tar files. The workaround was to update to the latest dev version of Docker. However, this didn’t resolve all the issues on ARM64, so only one machine was updated and excluded from the base image builder work.

The spring-cleaning continues! When I originally prototyped Relocatable OCaml, it was during the OCaml 4.13 development cycle. The focus for the work originally was always about multiple versions of the compiler co-existing without interfering with each other, so even the early prototypes were done on both OCaml 4.12 and OCaml 4.13. In fact, I see that in this talk, I even demo’d it on both versions. My intention from the start had always been to be able to provide either backports or re-releases of older compilers, on the basis that it would be tedious to have only the latest releases of OCaml supporting the various fixes, given that the failing CI systems which had motivated the project would continue to test older versions for several/many years after completion. In 2021, OCaml 4.08 (from June 2019) was still a recent memory. From a technical perspective, OCaml 4.08 was a very important release. It’s the first version of OCaml with a reliably namespaced Standard Library (the Stdlib module, though introduced in 4.07, had various issues with shadowing modules which weren’t completely addressed until 4.08). For my work, it was the version where we switched the configuration system to autoconf, and thus introduced a configuration system for the Windows ports. It provided a natural baseline in 2022 for the backports, and thus the workshop demonstration I gave in Ljubljana featured Windows and Linux for OCaml 4.08-4.14 as well as preview of OCaml 5.0.

opam 2.5.0 was released on 27th November, and this update needs to be propagated through the CI infrastructure. This post mirrors the steps taken for the release of opam 2.4.1.

In Numberphile’s latest video, Tony Padilla does a ‘magic trick’ with Fibonacci numbers and talks about Zeckendorf decompositions, and I had my laptop out even before the video ended.

Hosting the Conservation Evidence conference at Pembroke, recovering from the India trip, and keeping up with LLM developments.