I’ve always had problems with MiKTeX on my work computer. I can install it just fine, or get IT to install it, but then the package manager doesn’t work because of our firewall. You can set up a local repository to get around this problem, and I will ... [Read more...]

An updated version of my package fancycut is on CRAN. The package has one function, fancycut(), that is more versatile than cut() for certain applications. cut() takes a numeric vector and turns it into a factor or categorical vector. It works best ... [Read more...]

I just wanted to share the good experience I have had with creating a virtual personal desktop on Paperspace. A few months ago I started researching whether there was anyone out there providing this service. Paperspace came up in the search but their service was not yet available. But, to ... [Read more...]

Unless you have configured R not to ask, every time you close R or RStudio you are prompted to save your workspace. This saves an RData file to the working directory. The functions save.image() and save() offer a little more flexibility, but basically do the same thing: they save ... [Read more...]

I installed the “SQL Server 2016 Release Candidate” today to start playing around with Microsoft is calling “SQL Server R Services (In-Database)”. I think this is really going to change the way we do things at the office and it’s got me really excited. [Read more...]

About a year ago I was working on an analysis that required me to take about 20 continuous variables and turn each into a factor based on some banding rule. The rules were complicated enough that using cut() was painful. [Read more...]