I have been traveling during the last two weeks. I visited Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center on Oct 16 and the Department of Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins at the invitation of Simply Statistics on Oct 23. Today Christian Robert was visiting our department at Iowa State, and I also talked to him. ... [Read more...]

Many R users may still remember the good old days when we had static HTML documentation for R packages. That was probably before R 2.10.0 (in 2009). Then we had the fancy dynamic HTML help based on the built-in httpd server, but it has never really mad... [Read more...]

Two months ago I was told one of my old blog posts was borrowed to this post: Finding patterns in big data with SAS/GRAPH. I wrote my blog post four years ago just for fun. The over-plotting issue is pretty boring to me now, but what caught my attentio... [Read more...]

What is the best resource to learn an R package? Many R users know the almighty question mark ? in R. For example, type ?lm and you will see the documentation of the function lm. If you know nothing about a package, you can take a look at the HTML help... [Read more...]

The Fall semester is coming, which means it is time to log into several stupid systems to be prepared for the new semester. Time and time again I'm annoyed by the bullshit password rules at Iowa State University. I wrote to the IT staff once but no one... [Read more...]

Note: this is a contributed article for the ICSA Bulletin and the basic idea can be summarized in this picture. It is hard to convince people to think about reproducible research (RR). There are two parts of difficulties: (1) tools used to be for ex... [Read more...]

Anthony made a video tutorial on how to use the formatR package, which I think is pretty cool: I wish I could speak English as fast as him... [Read more...]

One week ago I made an early announcement about the markdown support in the knitr package and RStudio, and now the version 0.5 of knitr is on CRAN, so I'm back to show you how I made the HTML5 slides. For those who are not familiar with markdown, you m... [Read more...]

Karthik Ram gave an Introduction to R a couple of weeks ago, and I strongly recommend you to take a look at his cool HTML5 slides. I started trying HTML5 slides last year, and now it is difficult for me to go back to beamer, which I have used for ... [Read more...]

I was writing comments on the blog post A proposal for a really fast statistics journal, and I realized the comment box was too small to write down my ideas. I like the proposal a lot, and I feel really bad about the current model of submitting and rev... [Read more...]

I may want to add a subtitle “Why R-Forge Must Die” (thinking of Barry Rowlingson’s talk earlier this year). I have been a GitHub user for two years, and I was mainly influenced by Hadley. Now I even feel a little bit addicted to GitHub (its slogan is “social ... [Read more...]

The world has changed. You can feel it on GitHub. You can smell it on Google+. The knitr package, as an alternative tool to Sweave, has features that you have been longing for, and features that you might have never imagined. Thumb through the PDF manu... [Read more...]

A couple of days ago we released a package named fun to CRAN, but I did not dare to send an announcement to [email protected] as usual. This package is a collection of some classical computer games (e.g. the Mine sweeper and Five in a row) as well ... [Read more...]

bout half a year ago, I wrote a post on the configuration of (pgf)Sweave and LyX, which was intended to save us some efforts in going through all the details during the configuration. Now many things have changed: LyX 2.0 has internal support for Sweave, and fortunately I have been ... [Read more...]

I remember a few weeks ago, there was a challenge in the R-help list to make the prime symbol in R graphics. In LaTeX, we simply write $X'$ or $X^\prime$. R has a rough support for math expressions (see demo(plotmath)) and they are certainly unsatisfactory for LaTeX users. ... [Read more...]

For those who have been struggling with the installation of GGobi and the rggobi package under Windows: a major update of GGobi 2.1.9 is that GTK+ has been bundled with GGobi, so the installation of GTK+ is no longer required (I recommend you to uninst... [Read more...]

A new version of the formatR package is available on CRAN now (binary packages are still on the way). There are three major updates: the inline comments will also be preserved in most cases (in earlier versions, only single lines of comments are preserved) tidy.source() gained a new argument ... [Read more...]

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Last year I posted an animation created in R to celebrate the new year, and this year I've got a more fabulous animation (available on CRAN) The above animation comes from the demo('fireworks') in the R package animation 2.0-0. Thanks for the contri... [Read more...]

It is well-known that R has several graphics devices — either the screen devices (X11(), windows(), …) or the off-screen devices (pdf(), png(), …). We can query the default graphics device in options(): getOption('device') In a non-interactive session, the default device is pdf(). This is why Sweave has to create a file ... [Read more...]