Publications by JD Long

Shell scripting EC2 for fun and profit

Lately I’ve been doing some work with creating ad-hoc clusters of EC2 machines. My ultimate goal is to create a simple way to spin up a cluster of EC2 machines for use with Bryan Lewis’s very cool doRedis backend for the R foreach package. But that’s a whole other post. What I was scratching my head about today was that I’d really just li...

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Fitting Distribution X to Data From Distribution Y

I had someone ask me about fitting a beta distribution to data drawn from a gamma distribution and how well the distribution would fit. I’m not a “closed form” kinda guy. I’m more of a “numerical simulation” type of fellow. So I whipped up a little R code to illustrate the process then we changed the parameters of the gamma distributi...

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Solving easy problems the hard way

There’s a charming little brain teaser that’s going around the Interwebs. It’s got various forms, but they all look something like this: This problem can be solved by pre-school children in 5-10 minutes, by programer – in 1 hour, by people with higher education … well, check it yourself!  8809=6 7111=0 2172=0 6666=4 1111=0 3213=0 7662...

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