Some weeks ago I switched from Firefox to Safari. While Safari is -- in my experience -- quicker, better looking, and has Top Sites, I was also missing some functionality of firefox. To be more precise, I missed the 'search when start typing' option, a... [Read more...]

In R you can use the system.time(function) function to test the time it takes to execute a function. Because I had to do some extended performance testing in R, I wrote a new function based on system.time which gives you the possibility to run multiple... [Read more...]

Yesterday I figured out (together with a friend, Leendert) how to set your R working directory to the path of the current document you're working on in TextWrangler. We developed two scripts: one for setting the working directory of R directly, and one... [Read more...]

For my research I do Region-Of-Interest (ROI) analyses of BOLD fMRI data. That is, we look at how brain activity develops in certain predefined brain regions during an experiment. On this site I describe a script that automates these analyses, using SP... [Read more...]

Boxplots are a good way to get some insight in your data, and while R provides a fine ‘boxplot’ function, it doesn’t label the outliers in the graph. However, with a little code you can add labels yourself:The numbers plotted next to ... [Read more...]

One of my ongoing annoyances with Microsoft Word is its inability to handle figures in a consistent way. The last quirk I discovered is the following: if you group a figure with a textbox -- something often done for creating captions -- the print quali... [Read more...]

I abuse Adobe InDesign sometimes for creating artwork, for instance to make gant diagrams. Usually, I do not want to export a complete page to pdf in those cases, but only the boxes and text that’s going to make up the illustration. Automaticatio... [Read more...]

While R is certainly a great tool, some functions seem to be missing. Take for instance the standard error, for some reason there is no standard function included, while you would expect se(x) to work. Therefore I usually include a couple of functions,... [Read more...]

A couple of weeks ago, I finally took up running seriously. To keep myself motivated -- especially on dark winter nights -- I bought the Nike+ iPod sports kit. The sports kit was developed by a partnership of Nike and Apple, and consists of a tiny acce... [Read more...]

R is an environment for statistical computing (see also ‘Data Analysts Captivated by R's Power’ in the New York Times) which I use on an almost daily basis. However, the included text editor is not all that great, and that is why I use Text... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

While designing an fMRI experiment, I ran into the problem that the mouse pointer disappears as soon as you start typing on a mac. In itself it is actually a handy feature -- hiding the mouse pointer makes sense as long as you’re typing -- but no... [Read more...]