ProjectTemplate Version 0.1-3 Released
I’ve just released the newest version of ProjectTemplate. The primary change is a completely redesigned mechanism for automatically loading data. ProjectTemplate can now read compressed CSV files, access CSV data files over HTTP, read Stata, SPSS and RData binary files and even load MySQL database tables automatically. For my own projects, this is a big [...]
Two New R Packages: log4r and SortableHTMLTables
I’ve just released two new packages for R: log4r and SortableHTMLTables. log4r is a minimal logging utility for R that’s inspired by the log4j family of logging tools. It has substantially fewer features than other logging tools for R, but it’s hopefully easier to use. SortableHTMLTables uses brew and the jQuery Tablesorter plugin to provide [...]
Higher Order Functions in R
Introduction Because R is, in part, a functional programming language, the ‘base’ package contains several higher order functions. By higher order functions, I mean functions that take another function as an argument and then do something with that function. If you want to know more about the usefulness of writing higher order functions in general, [...]
Doing Maximum Likelihood Estimation by Hand in R
Lately I’ve been writing maximum likelihood estimation code by hand for some economic models that I’m working with. It’s actually a fairly simple task, so I thought that I would write up the basic approach in case there are readers who haven’t built a generic estimation system before. First, let’s start with a toy example [...]
iBad: The FSF Kool-Aid and Other Dystopian Hallucinations
The people who worry that the iPad will bring about a dystopian future for home computing keep forgetting something: for the rest of humanity, their ideal world of perfectly hackable machines is already a dystopian nightmare. It’s a world in which nothing works without spending hours setting it up, in which basic features are missing [...]
Cleaning Up an iTunes Library with MacRuby
For a little more than a year now, I’ve been meaning to write a script to rename all of the files in my iTunes library so that they’re in proper English title case. In large part, this project was inspired by reading John Gruber’s post about a Perl script that he’d written to convert text [...]
Suggestions for TextMate’s Search and Replace
Like so many other programmers, I adore TextMate. For that reasons, here are two simple features that I’d enjoy seeing in the next version: A case-preserving search and replace tool. If I search for a string like my_class and want to replace it with my_new_class, I’d like my_class to transform into my_new_class at the same [...]
Two of Unison’s Quirks
As many people know, I adore the program Unison. That said, Unison has its fair share of quirks. Today I found myself confronting one that I had spent a whole day confused by about a month ago. Unison stores a cache of information about the file system for every directory that it synchronizes. On Macs, [...]
Updating R Packages Automatically
Here’s a very naive program I just wrote to update all of the R packages I have on my system after I update the core R binary. Please let me know if there’s anything obviously wrong with this, such as failing to update items with chains of dependencies. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 [...]
iPhone 3.0 and the End of Jott
For me, one of the best features of the upcoming iPhone 3.0 software is the ability to record voice messages for myself. This will totally replace Jott, which I decided a month or two ago to abandon after their recent — and asinine — decision to only offer voice recording to paying customers. When it [...]