The new 4.19 kernel is causing trouble

A "kworker" process is hogging my CPU. I have to go back to 4.18 kernel to resolve this issue.

UPDATE (01/24/2019)

The solution is amazingly simple. Follow this post:

1. Install perf;
2. sudo perf record -g -a sleep 10
3. sudo perf report

Scrolling down the records, it looks like the problem is related to my USB hub. Unplug the hub and the problem goes away. 

Good tmap examples

I learned a lot from this.

How to increase graph resolution in Rmarkdown and more

Very useful information here.

Animate a line plot

This is very helpful.

Visualization and animation

Fascinating resources here.

Installing VMware workstation 15 on Manjaro

A few things to notice:

1. Need to install Linux header files;
2. Consult the pinned comments here.

A few useful commands:

• sudo modprobe -a vmw_vmci vmmon
• sudo vmware-modconfig --console --install-all
• sudo systemctl enable vmware-networks
• sudo systemctl start vmware-networks
  

Zapcc with Rstan

I use the brms package, which uses the standard R formula syntax to generate Stan code, which gets translated into C++ code by rstan, get compiled and executed. In this process, a optimized C++ compiler can make a big difference.

Here I ran the brms sample code for the spatial simultaneous autoregressive (SAR) sample code using clang++ and zapcc and benchmared the performance (three times):

clang++: 66.89 (lagsar), 49.02 (errorsar)
zapcc: 56.80 (lagsar), 18.43 (errorsar)

Such a performance boost can be achieved by simply switching a compiler!

Statistical Rethinking with brms, ggplot2, and the tidyverse

Amazing resource here. Great book, very exciting!

Arch-Data-Science

Data science toolkit for Arch and Arch-based system here.

Useful INLA hints

Here is a list of useful INLA resources:

1. Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation (INLA) for (generalized) linear models
2. R-INLA FAQ
3. Linear regression using INLA 

Scraping HTML tables

A few useful examples:

1. http://bradleyboehmke.github.io/2015/12/scraping-html-tables.html
2. http://blog.rstudio.com/2014/11/24/rvest-easy-web-scraping-with-r/

Advanced graphics using ggplot2

Here are a list of good resources:

1. Top 50 ggplot2 Visualizations - The Master List (With Full R Code)
2. ggplot2 extensions
3. ggthemes

Exploring Minard's 1812 plot with ggplot2

Very cool post.

How to get county FIPS from state and place names

This post demonstrates how to use the acs package to extract county FIPS from arbitrary combination of state and city names.

For Stata users, the geoinpoly package can extract FIPS from a combination of latitude and longitude coordinates.

Bayesian Basics

Useful post.

Free journal articles on Bayesian analysis

Some of them are quite useful.

NetLogoR

NetLogoR is the first serious ABS system implemented in pure R language, and it is based on the proven NetLogo framework.

Bayesian instrumental variable models using brms

Here.

Tmap package on Manjaro

I was having problem installing the tmap package on Manjaro. Here is a fix.

R jumps to 8th position in TIOBE language rankings

This is crazy, R is used by more developers than PHP, Perl, Ruby, and Swift.

Integrating Rstudio and Zotero

It is now possible to integrate Rstudio and Zotero seamlessly via the combination of the citr R package and the Better Bib(La)TeX for Zotero/Juris-M extension for Zotero. This means that there is no long a need to create a separate bibtex library for each project; instead, one can create and maintain one giant Zotero library (with many different subfolders maybe) for all projects. According to this post, it will soon be possible to work with Zotero group libraries (i.e., libraries other than the main "My Library").

01/08/2018 Correction: the group library functionality is already available in the github version of the citr package. Good work.