Thursday, December 17, 2015

Thursday, November 12, 2015

Tuesday, October 06, 2015

Monday, October 05, 2015

Friday, August 07, 2015

Emacs key bindings for Rstudio

The preview version of Rstudio (0.99.646), which is stable enough for daily usage, finally implemented an Emacs key binding.

Tuesday, August 04, 2015

Nimble 0.4 is out

Quite a number of new features. More details here.

New package "dplyrr" - Utilities for comfortable use of dplyr with databases

This package is potentially useful for big data analysis.

Sunday, August 02, 2015

rbokeh - R Interface to Bokeh

This new visualization package looks really promising!

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Monday, July 20, 2015

Sunday, July 19, 2015

Ipython notebook in Pycharm

I did not realize Pycharm provides a complete IDE for ipython notebook. This is really cool.

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Sunday, July 12, 2015

SparkRext

This new package looks pretty cool.

Friday, July 10, 2015

Outline view with Rstudio

The daily build version of Rstudio and Rstudio server (v. 0.99.617) finally introduce an outline panel for Rmarkdown documents. This is a highly welcomed feature.

Sunday, June 21, 2015

SageMathCloud

SageMathCloud provides a cloud computation platform for Julia, Python and R. It looks useful, at least for teaching purpose. It does not, however, seem to to allow the users to install third-party packages. Given that one big attraction of R comes from its huge package ecosystem, this can potentially be a problem for serious usage.

Friday, June 19, 2015

Thursday, June 18, 2015

Nimble

Just discovered this little package for Bayesian analysis. I think it is on the right direction. I hope it handle discrete parameters better than Stan.

Sunday, June 14, 2015

How to use SparkR within Rstudio?

Setting up Spark and SparkR is quite easy (assume you are running v.1.4): just grab one of the pre-built binaries and unzip to a folder. There is also a shell script to start SparkR from command line. The document suggest to put the following lines

Sys.setenv(SPARK_HOME="/home/shige/bin/spark")
.libPaths(c(file.path(Sys.getenv("SPARK_HOME"), "R", "lib"), .libPaths()))
library(SparkR)
sc <- sparkR.init(master="local")

into the .Rprofile file. This, however, has the undesirable side effect of adding yet another directory to which R packages can be installed.

My solution is:

1. Create a soft link of the SparkR directory in the the directory where other R packages are installed (ln -s /home/shige/bin/spark/R/lib/SparkR /home/shige/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.2)
2. Add (Sys.setenv(SPARK_HOME="/home/shige/bin/spark")) to the .Rprofile file.
3. Add (Sys.setenv(SPARKR_SUBMIT_ARGS ='"--packages" "com.databricks:spark-csv_2.10:1.0.3" "sparkr-shell"')) to the .Rprofile.

All set.

Saturday, June 13, 2015

SparkR

The SparkR project integrates R and Spark for big data processing. It looks very promising.

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

SEM DiagrammeR

The "sem" package makes use of the "DiagrammeR" package to draw path diagram, very cool!

Sunday, June 07, 2015

A new GTK theme

The paper theme looks really nice.

Rstudio supports Chinese input

Not so long ago, Rstudio did not fully support Chinese characters. The server version seemed fine but the desktop version did not. Now, with the new official version of 0.99.441, the support for Chinese input is complete.

Monday, May 25, 2015

Thursday, May 14, 2015

Great R packages for data import, wrangling & visualization

Nice summary of useful R packages, a few of which are unfamiliar to me before.

Thursday, May 07, 2015

JetBrains development tools are free for academic users

This is definitely a good news. I have been using the free community version of the python development tool and now they have a new tool for C++.

Wednesday, May 06, 2015

Monday, May 04, 2015

Texts, a visual markdown editor

Finally Texts includes the bibliography capability. Now it is a lightweight but complete writing environment for academics.

Friday, April 24, 2015

Thursday, April 23, 2015

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

No reboot patching comes to Linux 4.0

I look forward to this upgrade.

Two of my favorite distros

Ubuntu MATE and Manjaro are my favorite Linux distros.

Saturday, March 14, 2015

DiagrammeR

This might be the best diagram creation solution in R and Rmarkdown.

Friday, March 13, 2015

MultiWriter

MultiWriter is a handy utility to write multiple flash drives all at once.

Sunday, March 08, 2015

Introduction to Hadley's packages

This online slide provides good introduction of various R packages developed by Hadley Wickham.

Thursday, March 05, 2015

dupeGuru

A small Linux utility to find and remove duplicated files in hard drive.

Cheatsheet for ggplot2

Here is a cheatsheet for the ggplot2 package.

Tuesday, March 03, 2015

JASP

JASP is an interesting project. It is based on R with additional facilities and functions such as automatic table generation. There appears to be an R package that provide that functions directly to R users. Very worth checking out.

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Pinker's talk on human nature

Interesting talk about human nature and evolutionary psychology by Steven Pinker.

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

An introduction to psychometric theory with applications in R

This e-book provides useful information on using R for IRT.

Monday, January 26, 2015

Librem 15 looks promising

A laptop armed entirely with free software, looks promising.

Sunday, January 11, 2015

Statistical Rethinking: A Bayesian Course with R Examples

An interesting book. The accompanied R package provides seamless integration between Stan and R.

Saturday, January 10, 2015

The ggplot2 book

According to this post, the updated version of the ggplot2 book is coming. I grab the github repo and compiled the pdf version of the preliminary draft.

Useful cheatsheets

Good resources.

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