A few days ago I wrote about Travis CI, and was wondering if we could integrate the testing of R packages into this wonderful platform. A reader (Vincent Arel-Bundock) pointed out in the comments that Travis was running Ubuntu that allows you to install software packages at your will.

I took a look at the documentation, and realized...

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I'm always worried about CRAN: a system maintained by FTP and emails from real humans (basically one of Uwe, Kurt or Prof Ripley). I'm worried for two reasons: the number of R packages is growing exponentially; time and time again I see frustrations ...

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Last year I accepted an invitation from Ben to go to ENAR 2013 -- my first ENAR. I used to go to JSM and useR!, and apparently I enjoy useR! most. The reason is not, or not only, because I'm more of a technical person. It is just hard to concentrate at large statistical conferences. I want...

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(This paragraph is pure rant; feel free to skip it) I have been looking forward to the one-column LaTeX style of The R Journal, and it has arrived eventually. Last time I mentioned "it does not make sense to sell the cooked shrimps"; actually there is ...

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Tal Galili asked a question on StackOverflow on publishing blog posts to WordPress from R + knitr. William K. Morris has written a solution long time ago, and I tweaked it a little bit and created a function knit2wp() in the development version of knit...

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This is not the first time I have ranted about command prompts, but I cannot help ranting about them whenever I saw them in source code. In short, a piece of source code with command prompts is like a bag of cooked shrimps in the market -- it does not make sense, and an otherwise good thing is...

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Update on 2013/01/05: Xiao Nan in the comments pointed out that apply(combn(letters, 2), 2, paste0, collapse = '') was wrong for all two-letter usernames, and indeed it was. It is not a combination problem. Now I use his elegant outer() solution. One can also use expand.grid(letters, letters).

Github decided to take off their downloads service, and I was very...

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I'm attending a workshop on reproducibility at ICERM (Brown University) this week. I really appreciate this great opportunity offered by ICERM, Randy and Victoria. It is pretty exciting to meet people that you only knew before through indirect ways. O...

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I watched this video by Fernando Pérez a few days ago when I was reading a comment by James Correia Jr on Simply Statistics:

This is absolutely a fantastic talk that I recommend everybody to watch (it is good in both the form and content). Not surprisingly, I started thinking ipython vs knitr. Corey Chivers said we could...

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Two months ago there was a discussion in the ESS mailing list about Emacs/ESS started by Paul Johnson, who claimed "Emacs Has No Learning Curve". While this sounds impossible, he really has some good points, e.g. he encourages beginners to look at the ...

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