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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.... [Read more...]

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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 ... [Read more...]

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 A... [Read more...]

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... [Read more...]

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 or ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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; ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

So you've probably heard of King James Programming; if not, you should check it out because it's great. A quick summary is that someone took the King James Bible and Sussman's Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) and used an n-gram babbler to generate new sentences that combine the ... [Read more...]

This is not nearly as interesting as it might first sound, but every function in R contains R code; this is true of core R code as well as extension packages. Sometimes the R code is just a very shallow wrapper around some compiled code, such as in sum() and ... [Read more...]

I have a lot of projects that will take ages to finish (some are in such poor shape that I tuck them away in private repositories, so no one can see my shame).  So sometimes it's nice to just take a weekend and crank out something start to finish, even ... [Read more...]

Naming Rules in R How are objects allowed to be named in R? As it turns out, this is a very different question from how should objects be named. This isn't about style conventions, camelCase, dots.verus_underscores, or anything like that; this is about what is strictly possible. I ... [Read more...]

Sometimes intentionally writing bad code can be a lot of fun. Now here, when I say "bad", I mean something that's functional but completely incoherent to anything but the machine. There are even competitions for this kind of thing, but I only consider myself a dabbler in this dark art. ... [Read more...]

Over the weekend, we updated all of the pbdR packages currently available on the CRAN.  The updates include tons of internal housecleaning as well as many new features. Notably, pbdBASE_0.1-1 and pbdDMAT_0.1-1 were released, which contain lm.fit() methods.  This function in particular has been available at my ... [Read more...]