Using Rcpp with Rstudio

It is quite amazing to see how easy and straightforward it has become to integrate C++ and R, with the help from Rcpp (especially with the new "attribute" function) and Rstudio. More information can be found here.

TikzEdt

TikzEdt is an editor and previewer forTikZ LaTeX graphics package.

Generic computers and open source software

The combination of generic hardware and open source software makes sense because of the reasons list here.

Rcpp tutorial

Here is a good introduction to Rcpp.

Use github

I am getting started with github. I found this post helpful.

Knitr, Rstudio, and TikZ

I did not realize that this is such a powerful combination until today. It makes it possible to directly work on a Sweave file that has both text and code in the same document quite attractive (as opposed to begin an R program and a LaTeX file, then combine them together in the end).

Do not use GTK 3 theme wit Mate desktop

I am not sure why, but using GTK 3 theme with Mate desktop significantly slows it down.

Extra themes for ggplot2

Ggthemes is a new package that provides additional themes for ggplot2. It can even be used to draw a Stata-like graph. I particularly like the Tufte-style, as outlined in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. 

Mint Debian

I finally got tired of the old Ubuntu 10.04, which has bee sitting in my main computer for over two years. Instead of a more recent version of Ubuntu or Mint, I replaced it with Mint Debian. I then followed the instruction in this post to install the proprietary NVIDIA driver to get the full power of my graphics card. I really like the simple and elegant design of the Mate desktop and hope I don't ever need to re-install system on this machine ever again (because Mint Debian is a rolling distribution).

Zelig 4 is trouble

Zelig 4 is causing so many problems. I had to uninstall it and went back to the old 3.55.

Excel2latex

Excel2latex is a handy tool to get Word tables into LaTeX.

Gnome is like the protagonist of a romantic comedy ...

Insightful analysis!

R Markdown

The R Markdown that is integrated into Rstudio looks quite promising.