Earlier today the 33rd Chicago Marathon was held. I will organise my comments by pointing out three epic fails.

First, of course, was the Chicago weather. After two successive marathon in excessive heat --- the 2007 race I completed, poorly, with its thousands of runners forced to abandon when the race was cancelled due to excessive heat, and the 2008 version which...

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On several occassions, R had suggested itself as a language for systems scripting. By this I mean random little adminstrative task such as (re-)moving or maybe renaming files or directories and the like.

One of such cases just happened a few minutes ago. The aforementioned Garmin Forerunner 405 can cooperate quite nicely with Linux using the gant reader for the ant wireless communication protocol...

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Last week's 0.1.0 release of RInside, and the first to have been published on CRAN, still had some issues with builds and use on OS X. Thanks to testing and fixes by Jan de Leeuw, Jeff Horner and particularly Simon Urbanked, things are said to be better now with the new release 0.1.1 which went onto CRAN yesterday. So no new features,...

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After almost two years, I just made a small update to the digest package for R by adding sha-256 as another supported hashing function. While at this, a few minor edits where made here or there. Version 0.4.0 also included a file src/Makefile.win but as that actually prevents a successful build on the Windows platform I promptly removed it for...

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Version 0.1.0 of RInside, my C++ wrapper classes which facilitate embedding R into your own C++ application, has been released and is now an official CRAN package.

This release improves on the build process and should work on any sane Unix-alike operating system. A few more examples were added or extended. Details and the full ChangeLog are on my RInside page, and there is now...

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Today it was once again time for the Chicago Half Marathon (which I have now been running in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008). Conditions were much much better than last year's very heavy rainfall---we were once again treated to a sunny and clear Chicago sky. It was however a little on the humid side and got...

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Yesterday's upload of RQuantLib 0.3.0 contained one minor oversight: I had failed to update src/Makefile.win to the new and enlarged set of source files. The proper fix (of using wildcards and implicit rules) was simple, and Uwe Ligges kindly rebuilt RQuantLib on the Windows builder for CRAN using an updated Makefile so that binaries for Windows will be available. This fix will also be...

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Earlier this evening, I rolled up a new version of RQuantLib. It has been pushed to CRAN and Debian, and source and binary version should appear on the respective mirror networks in due course.

This version, the first in a new '0.3.*' release series, contains all the work that Khanh Nguyen did during his Google Summer of Code participation which I had...

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A maintenance fix was applied to random: following the changes in release 0.2.0 a few months ago that reflected changes at the random.org site, we needed to make one more change in randomSequence. Thanks for Lynn Amon for spotting this.

The new package is available here and should appear on CRAN shortly.

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Our survey paper on the current state of the art in parallel computing with R, previously mentioned here as a technical report is now out as Vol 31, Issue 1 of the all-electronic Journal of Statistical Software.

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