I hope my letter could boost this guy up like: I'm not sure if I'm a good observer, but time and time again I feel some people are undervalued, or they were not given better opportunities to show their value. Not surprisingly, I know quite a few such people in ... [Read more...]

It has been a month since the UseR! 2014 conference, and I'm probably the last one who writes about it. UseR! is my favorite conference because it is technical and not too big. I have completely lost interest in big and broad conferences like JSM (to me, it has become Joint ... [Read more...]

While I was sitting in a conference room at UseR! 2014, I started counting the number of times that require() was used in the presentations, and would rant about it after I counted to ten. With drums rolling, David won this little award (sorry, I did not really mean this to ... [Read more...]

What happens if you ask for too much power from Markdown? R Markdown is one of the document formats that knitr supports, and it is probably the most popular one. I have been asked many times about the choice between Markdown and LaTeX, so I think I'... [Read more...]

This guy th3james claimed Testing Code Is Simple, and I agree. In the R world, this is not anything new. As far as I can see, there are three schools of R users with different testing techniques: tests are put under package/tests/, and a foo-test.Rout.save from ... [Read more...]

I thought I could easily jump to a high standard (reproducibility), but I failed. Some of you may have noticed that the knitr book is finally out. Amazon is offering a good price at the moment, so if you are interested, you'd better hurry up. I a... [Read more...]

The BioC 2013 conference was held from July 17 to 19. I attended this conference for my first time, mainly because I'm working at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center this summer, and the conference venue was just downstairs! No flights, no hotel... [Read more...]

This should be what it feels like to bump the major version of your software: For me, the main reason for package versioning is to indicate the (slight or significant) differences among different versions of the same package, otherwise we can keep o... [Read more...]

So I just got yet yet another comment saying "you have a typo in your documentation". While I do appreciate these kind reminders, I think it might be a good exercise for those who want to try GIT and Github pull requests, which make it possible for y... [Read more...]

I just finished fixing (hopefully all) the problems in the knitr book returned from the copy editor. David Smith has kindly announced this book before I do. I do not have much to say about this book: almost everything in the book can be found in the on... [Read more...]

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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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

(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 ... [Read more...]

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... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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... [Read more...]

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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 ... [Read more...]