As of this morning, the getPass package version 0.1-1 is available on CRAN. The package offers a portable way to read user input without echoing the text, for the purposes of reading passwords. Some screenshots from various platforms are given below....
About The coop package does co-operations: covariance, correlation, and cosine, and it does them quickly. The package is available on CRAN and GitHub, and has two vignettes: Introducing coop: Fast Covariance, Correlation, and Cosine Operations Algorithms and Benchmarks for the coop Package Incidentally, the vignettes don't render correctly on CRAN's end for some reason; if any of you rmarkdown...
Say you have an Amazon EC2 instance running and you want to be able to control your R session running there from your local R session. At heart, this is not a new idea for the R community. You can already control remote R sessions easily with Shiny o...
Title with apologies to the Wu-Tang Clan. In this post, we're going to be discussing: Rcpp R's C interface The importance of CPU caches Performance benchmarking If none of these things is of interest you and you clicked anyway, please enjoy this picture of a cat: Background Cache is like your computer's ram, only very small and 50-100 times...
R is full of things that make "real programmers" (I dislike this term) turn their noses up in disgust. One of my favorites is the dump() function. It is...odd. I think the best way to introduce it to people is without context, because it's just so bizarre: That's right; it's actually dumping out R code that would allow you...
Most search engines have a "did you mean?" feature, where suggestions are given in the presence of likely typos. And while search engines use sophisticated NLP methods on their vast amounts of user-generated data to create accurate suggestions, you can get by with some ancient spellchecker techniques. So a little while ago, I did just that with the Rdym...
The Rfiglet Package For those who don't know what figlet is, it's a command line utility for creating ascii logos. Rfiglet, therefore, is a set of R bindings for figlet. Works about like you would expect: There are over 150 fonts available, and you can see an example of each one in this Rfiglet package vignette. We can even...
Almost 3 years ago, I wrote about how to forkbomb with R. A quick recap is that a forkbomb is a low-tier, malicious misuse of a system; sort of a "baby's first denial of service". The idea is that you write a program that will start an entirely new copy of itself each time it is executed. Executing it...
Warning: this post contains profanity...arguably excessive amounts of it. If you are a humorless no-fun, you are recommended to proceed no further. Seriously though, the title is quite descriptive of the content of this post. If you are offended by the use of such language, or if your boss is likely to come peering over your shoulder soon, I...
R has some extremely useful utilities for profiling, such as system.time(), Rprof(), the often overlooked tracemem(), and the rbenchmark package. But if you want more than just simple timings of code execution, you will mostly have to look elsewhere. One of the best sources for profiling data is hardware performance counters, available in most modern hardware. This data can...
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