I am very happy to introduce a new set of packages that has just hit the CRAN. We are calling it the Programming with Big Data in R Project, or pbdR for short (or as I like to jokingly refer to it, 'pretty bad for dyslexics'). You can find out ... [Read more...]

R is my favorite programming language.  It's just so useful for getting work done.  Sometimes people will complain that R is a difficult language.  To me, this begs the questions:  difficult for what?  And for whom?  I personally think R is just about the easiest thing in the world for ... [Read more...]

Background As of ggplot2 0.9.0 released in March 2012, there is a new generic function autoplot.  This uses R's S3 methods (which is essentially oop for babies) to let you have some simple overloading of functions.  I'm not going to get deep into oop, because honestly we don't need to. The idea ... [Read more...]

I had been meaning to start toying with the igraph package for a while. So a few weeks ago (lay off, I'm busy), I decided to grab a bunch of CRAN data about package dependencies. The easiest way that I could think to get this information was to just grab ... [Read more...]

I've been joking for a while now that I was going to start solving project euler problems in LaTeX.  Then today I finally did one.  So let's talk about solving Project Euler problem number 1 (the easy one) using only LaTeX. The problem asks you to sum up all the positive ... [Read more...]

Background (probably boring) Several months ago, my boss and I were discussing how he got the data for his software popularity article; the rest of the background discussion pertains to those plots, so I would recommend going over to take a look before continuing on (or just skip to the ... [Read more...]

What is parallelization?Parallelization is using multiple processing cores to, hopefully, make your programs run faster than serial code, which is the use of just one processing core. Parallel code is not always faster than its serial counterpart (but if you're doing it right and you're careful about what you ... [Read more...]

My last post of substance was all about improving your performance using R to answer programming questions that might be asked during a job interview.  So let's say you nailed the interview and got the job, but you desperately want to be fired for grand incompetence.  Never fear, your pal ... [Read more...]

My time as a grad student will soon draw to a close. With this comes the terrifying realisation that I'm going to start applying for jobs and, hopefully, interviewing soon, forever leaving my comfortable security blanket of academia. With that horrible thought in mind, I've been doing some poking around ... [Read more...]

So maybe I’m a strange guy, but I think fork bombs are really funny.  What’s a fork bomb?  The basic premise is that you spawn a process that spawns a process that spawns a process…, ad infinitum. The most beautiful example of a fork bomb, and really one ... [Read more...]

So that mean old boss of mine is at it again.  This morning I came in beaming about how many people had read my post How Much of R is Written in R (thanks by the way!).  He then asks me about one little line in that post; the one ... [Read more...]

My boss sent me an email (on my day off!) asking me just how much of R is written in the R language.  This is very simple if you use R and a Unix-like system.  It also gives me a good excuse to defend the title of this blog.  It’... [Read more...]

I was hoping to begin tinkering a bit with the multicore package in R beyond some extremely trivial examples.  Thanks to a combination of R’s dumb quirkiness (for example, being worthless on loops), my poor planning, and general bad programming, my Saturday afternoon tinkering project is ultimately worthless in ... [Read more...]