Cruz Tablet

This looks interesting. The most impressive part is the battery life: up to 10 hours.

Ggplot2, some tricks

Here is how to remove the grey in the background as well as the grid, a modification of the default black/white theme.

Lotus Symphony 3

A new version of Lotus Symphony is out. Interesting that IBM does not provide a 64-bit build for Linux.

Lattice vs. ggplot2

Both lattice and ggplot2 seem really interesting and worthy of learning. But I only have time to learn one of them, and the choice is not an easy one.

Here is an awesome reference; this blog is generally very interesting; and here is something about the "brew" package.

Useful blog

Here is another useful blog. This post regarding how to use EPS directly in LaTeX file is especially helpful.

Managing a statistical analysis project

This post is very helpful for people who are serious in statistical analysis.

For a wider use of R

Two things that are crucial for a wider use of R among applied researchers. The first one is data manipulation/reshaping tool. I think the package "reshape" and "reshape2" have done good job and have largely removed the barrier. The second one is a universal output processing engine, something like the "eststo, esttab, estsadd" combo in Stata. The package "xtable", "memisc", "aprstable", and "estout" have made some progress, but they all are limited to some estimation procedures and none of them provides a universal output process engine for "all" estimation procedures. One of the main reason I am still paying for Stata is the convenience of directly producing publication quality LaTeX tables from any estimation procedures without having to manually change anything.

I wish more attention can be devoted to this latter issue.

Diagram in LaTeX

This web site provides helpful information on how to make diagrams using LaTeX.

Samsung Galaxy Tab

According to this source, the Samsung Galaxy Tab will cost about $600, which I think is a little too much.

The "tikzDevice" package

The tikzDevice package is quite amazing. Here are two graphs I just made, with (lower) and without (upper) using the tikzDevice package. The difference in quality is huge.

Since the LaTeX source file for the figure is quite large in size and may take significantly longer to compile, it makes sense to export the file into PDF file and include in the main LaTeX file in the usual way. That way, one gets the pleasing effect produced by TikZ and does not suffer from longer compilation time.

Also, the package "pgfSweave" is also very helpful if one wants to combine R sessions with LaTeX session.

Here is a tikz editor that works great on my 32-bit Ubuntu box but cannot be compiled on my 64-bit box. It can produce PDF, EPS, and PNG files directly from LaTeX code. TpX is another editor for tikz. It is currently Windows-only but a alpha version based on Lazarus is under development.

Some additional information is provided by this post.

The lazy economist

Here is a cool blog.

Ubuntu 11.04

Looks like Ubuntu 11.04 will bring some significant changes: new GCC, new Gnome, and new file system.

Harddisk partition guide

Here is a detailed guide to hard drive partitioning for Ubuntu.

Labelbook

The Stata command "labelbook" can be used to create output that shows both the raw values and value labels side by side, a feature very helpful dealing with second-hand data sources.

Estimation of quantile treatment effects with Stata

Here is a very useful article published on Stata Journal.

Linux vs. OSX

Here is another interesting comparison, and some interesting comments there.

Unix philosophy in practice

Here are some hints.

OpenMx 1.0

Just realized that this SEM package for R has released version 1.0. Great...

Using emacs with rcs

I find this blog post regarding how to use emacs and rcs together very helpful.