GGobi in Wikipedia
GGobi now has an entry in Wikipedia. Feel free to edit it!
Hack-at-it 2008

The 2008 Hack-at-it was held June 22-23, just before Data Vis VI, in Bremen Germany.
The main topics for the meeting were:
- Release of 2.1.7
- Continued design of GGobi 3
maps of Poland in R
Bogdan Taranta (website in Polish) is developing a set of functions for drawing administrative maps of Poland. I wrote similar functionality for myself already some time ago, but only for voivodships, i.e. top-level administrative units, and also in a rather low resolution. Bogdan’s contribution seems to contain all levels, at high resolution, and including the regions’ capital cities and towns! I look forward to testing that!
Smart programming saves computing times
One R tip a day
I just encountered this website http://onertipaday.blogspot.com/: One R tip per day. Very nice collection of R tips.
Speed up R! Make R Run Faster!
Paper describing the weaver package published in Computational Statistics
It seems like a lifetime ago that I developed the weaver package for caching code chunks in Sweave documents. The paper that I presented at the DSC 2007 has finally been published in Computational Statistics. The title is Caching Code Chunks in Dynamic Documents: The weaver package. Here’s the abstract:
Authoring dynamic documents can become tedious for authors when a document contains one or more time consuming code chunks and each edit requires reprocessing all of the document. We introduce the weaver package that allows computationally expensive code chunks to be cached in order to speed up the edit/process/review cycle for dynamic documents authored using the Sweave framework.
And here a link to an unofficial pdf and the weaver package.
Technorati Tags: Bioconductor, R
Paper describing the weaver package published in Computational Statistics
It seems like a lifetime ago that I developed the weaver package for caching code chunks in Sweave documents. The paper that I presented at the DSC 2007 has finally been published in Computational Statistics. The title is Caching Code Chunks in Dynamic Documents: The weaver package. Here’s the abstract:
Authoring dynamic documents can become tedious for authors when a document contains one or more time consuming code chunks and each edit requires reprocessing all of the document. We introduce the weaver package that allows computationally expensive code chunks to be cached in order to speed up the edit/process/review cycle for dynamic documents authored using the Sweave framework.
And here a link to an unofficial pdf and the weaver package.
Technorati Tags: Bioconductor, R
Unmessing my pdfs.
If you google on ‘papers’, the first hit you’ll get is http://mekentosj.com/papers/: linking to mekentosj’ Papers program. The fact that it is the first hit on google shows that it is a popular program -- or at least that a lot of sites link to it. Still, for the people who don’t know about it, I think it deserves a little more publicity.
Papers is basically a library system for scientific publications, it’s often described as iTunes for scientific papers. What it does is giving you a central place to store your pdfs, and making it easier to look through them -- just as in iTunes you can make folders and smart folders; pdfs can appear in multiple folders. Thus, if you make a smart folder on multitasking and one on cognitive models, a paper on a cognitive model of multitasking will appear in both folders. You can also view your papers by author or journal, and in that case Papers immediately shows you the last articles published by the author / in the journal.
Not only does it keep your pdfs organized (also on your harddisk, in a folder structure of your choice), it also lets you search in a couple of popular search engines from within the program (pubmed, scopus, citeseer, google scholar and more). Of course, it also has a couple of standard features, like actually reading the papers (full screen if you like), printing them, sending them by email, and opening them in external viewers, like preview.
So, if you’re pdf’s are piling up around you, having names like sdarticle.pdf or 1191.pdf, give papers a try!

