Free software directory

There are some amazing stuff inside.

Rcpp examples in one place

Very convenient.

Installing the Scythe library

I manged to installed the Scythe statistical library on my Mint system. The authors commented out the line "#include " in the "matrix.h" file, which causes trouble during compiling, but that was easy to fix: just remove the comment mark. 


This article is very good in helping people to get started with the library. 

SBCL + Slime setup tutorial

This is helpful. This post is also very helpful (particularly the last paragraph about the caveat). Here is another one.

Mint Debian vs. Mint Ubuntu

Comparing software selection between the Debian-based and Ubuntu-based Mint distros is interesting. On the one hand, the Debian-based distro has the up-to-date packages for Emacs, SBCL, GCC, etc., but outdated version for Firefox, Thunderbird, etc., while the Ubuntu-based distro has updated Firefox, Thunderbird but outdated Emacs, SBCL, etc.

Mint Debian Upgrade

My Mint Debian installation seemed to have survived the first serious upgrade. The only visible problem I can see is that the configuration for Xfce window manager stopped responding. I can live with the default one but it will be nice to get it back.

Using Inkscape to Post-edit Labels in R Graphs

Here are some helpful tips.

Numerical Methods of Statistics

This is a very useful book.

X file explorer

Xfe is a flexible and lightweight file manager. It can be changed to a two-panel layout just like total commander under windows.

Get rid of unwanted items from the Xfce application menu

If removing an application leaves a zombie item in the Xfce application menu, the easiest way is to go to the /usr/share/application folder and delete the item there.

-------- Edited on Dec. 11, 2014 ------------

Here is a better solution.

Browser problem on Mint Debian

Neither Chrome nor Opera works flawlessly on the new Mint Debian: sometimes they crashed, sometimes they took a long time to load, and sometimes they stopped responding. This is not a show stopper, but it is a weird problem.

Resources for learning C++ and R

Here are a few online resources that I found useful for the purpose of learning C++ and R:

1. University of British Columbia;
2. Purdue University

Armadillo in Linux Mint Debian (Xfce)

It took me a while to figure out that I need to specify "g++ -Wall -o "%e" "%f"  -larmadillo -lblas" instead of "g++ -Wall -o "%e" "%f" -larmadillo" to compile the example program provided by the armadillo tar ball under Mint Linux Debian edition.

New Mint Linux Debian is finally here

Looks very promising.

Here is a helpful post about Mint XFCE.

Advanced C++ template techniques

I found this materials very helpful.

COMPUTING FOR NUMERICAL METHODS USING VISUAL C++

An interesting Wiley book. The source code for console applications can compile using g++ with very minor modifications.