It's Memorial Day weekend so it was time for the Chicago's JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge on Thursday. The weather was glorious, the usual 20-some thousand runners participated and a good time was had. Work had arranged for a nice tent, food, mu... [Read more...]

Last week I had the opportunity to spend a few days at the Institute for Statistics and Mathematics of the WU Vienna / Wirtschaftsuniversitaet Wien. On Thursday, I gave a seminar on Rcpp and RInside introducing all the recent work with Romain on makin... [Read more...]

With the Rcpp 0.8.0 release on Monday, Romain, Doug and I were able to follow-up with a new RcppArmadillo release. RcppArmadillo uses Rcpp (and a few dozen lines of 'glue') to provide a transparent interface from R to Conrad Sanderson's impressive Arm... [Read more...]

Romain and I are happy to announce the release of Rcpp version 0.8.0. It has been uploaded to CRAN. A Debian upload is delayed until the now-required inline package is accepted into Debian. The source package is also available from here. This rel... [Read more...]

A few hours ago, I sent the following to both the R development list and the informal R / GSoC list: Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2010 15:27:29 -0500 To: R Development List CC: gsoc-r Subject: R and the Google Summer of Code 2010 -- Please welcome our new st... [Read more...]

Last Friday and Saturday the second R / Finance conference took place in Chicago on the UIC campus. As a co-organizer, it was a great pleasure to see so many users of R in Finance---from both industry and academia---come to Chicago to discuss and sh... [Read more...]

A new bug fix versions 0.7.12 of Rcpp is awaiting inclusion into CRAN and Debian. It is also available from here. This is another bug-fix version related solely to a build failure on Windows. Trying to protect paths with spaces has the side-effect... [Read more...]

Thanks to the efforts of the tireless R User Group organizers Szilard Pafka (in Los Angeles, recording the talk) and Drew Conway (in New York, converting and organising hosting), there is now a video and slide combo of my recent talk about Rcpp and R... [Read more...]

We spent last week in the LA area and had a generally good time out west. I was able to sneak in two talks and a group discussion, thanks to the help by Jan de Leeuw (and everybody at UCLA's Stats department) as well as by Szilard Pafka representing ... [Read more...]

Having espoused rule number one in regression testing in the post about yesterday's bug fix upload 0.23, we can now add rule number zero: Do not introduce a new error by omitting the trailing semicolon. I guess it shows that I don't really program in... [Read more...]

A new versions 0.7.11 of Rcpp is awaiting inclusion into CRAN and Debian. It is also available from here. This version fixes a somewhat serious bug uncovered by Doug Bates when working with vectors of strings. We also added a few new accessor func... [Read more...]

Rule number one in regression testing is to not depend on volatile data. Which I seem to have violated in file t/02simple.t in the Perl package Finance::YahooQuote. Which lead the automated Perl test scripts to remind me for a few days now that the f... [Read more...]

The shiny new 0.2.2 release of RInside has just been uploaded to CRAN; it should hit mirrors tommorow. Sources are also at my RInside page. RInside is a set of convenience classes to facilitate embedding of R inside of C++ applications. It works pa... [Read more...]

The annual March Madness Half Marathon in Cary took place this morning. This is both one of Chicagoland's 'early races' to start the season as well as the classic Boston preparation due to the hilly course. I have now run this consecutively for six y... [Read more...]

Earlier today, Google announced the list of accepted mentor organizations for the Google Summer of Code 2010 (GSoC 2010). And we are happy to report that the R Project is once again a participating organization (and now for the third straight year) jo... [Read more...]

Versions 0.7.7 to 0.7.9 of Rcpp contained a bug: protecting paths with quotes was supposed to help with Windows builds, but did the opposite at least in 'backticks mode' for getting path and/or library information. Using the shQuote() function instead... [Read more...]

Version 0.7.8 of Rcpp, released just a few days ago contained a nasty bug or two which we noticed when trying to built the initial release of RcppArmadillo on 64-bit platforms. So a quick bug-fix release 0.7.9 is now in Debian and should be on CRA... [Read more...]

Besides the new RcppExamples, another new package RcppArmadillo got spun out of Rcpp with the recent release 0.7.8 of Rcpp. Romain and I already had an example of a simple but fast linear model fit using the (very clever) Armadillo C++ library by... [Read more...]

Version 0.1.0 of RcppExamples, a simple demo package for Rcpp should appear on CRAN some time tomorrow. As mentioned in the post about release 0.7.8 of Rcpp, Romain and I carved this out of Rcpp itself to provide a cleaner separation of code t... [Read more...]

Version 0.7.8 of the Rcpp R / C++ interface classes is now on CRAN and in Debian. As of right now. Debian has already built packages for eight more architectures; and CRAN has built the Windows binary. Oh, and cran2deb had Debian packages for 'testin... [Read more...]