Publications by Jeffrey Breen
rgdal and other GIS-related packages for Mac OS X
CRAN contains ready-made binary packages for nearly all of its packages, but rgdal is one which I keep finding myself trying to install from source whenever I upgrade R. Compiled versions of rgdal, along with prerequisites and complements like the GDAL framework, GRASS, and even the old FFTW3 can be found at KyngChaos’s Wiki: http://www.kyngch...
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Nightlights: cool data, bad geocoding
A global source of population density has been on my low-priority wish list for some time, so I was very excited when I found Steve Mosher’s work with the Nighlights data set. “Nightlights” refers to the artificial lights seen from space at night. Astronomers call it “light pollution” which is pretty accurate since it’s decidedly no...
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vecLib: Why Mac users are better off with Open Source R
The July and August meetings of the New England R Users group focused on two different aspects of R performance: parallel processing techniques and the effects of compiler & library selection when compiling the R executable itself. It was during Amy Szczepanski’s excellent introduction to multicore, Rmpi, and foreach (slides here) that she ment...
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Incremental improvements to Nightlights mapping thanks to R-Bloggers
My recent post Nightlights: cool data, bad geocoding highlighted some of the geocoding challenges Steve Mosher has been finding as he works with this interesting “light pollution” data set. It was also my first article reposted on Tal Galili’s fantastic R-Bloggers site which I have been following for a while. But even better than the surge ...
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how to install 64-bit rggobi on Mac OS X 10.5
I was surprised when everything seemed to “just work” when I made the jump to 64-bit R 2.11.1 a while back. “Surprised” because my previous attempt to join the 64-bit world under 2.10.x was a dead-end: the must-have RMySQL package didn’t like the 32-bit MySQL drivers, but Leopard’s 32-bit perl couldn’t deal with 64-bit drivers, etc....
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My first R package: zipcode
You may know that I am a fan of the CivicSpace US ZIP Code Database compiled by Schuyler Erle of Mapping Hacks fame. It contains nearly 10,000 more records than the ZIP Code Tabulation Areas file from the U.S. Census Bureau upon which it is based, so a lot of work has gone into it. I have been using the database a lot recently to correlate with s...
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Abusing Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce Hadoop service… easily, from R
I built my first Hadoop cluster this week and ran my first two test MapReduce jobs. It took about 15 minutes, 2 lines of R, and cost 55 cents. And you can too with JD Long’s (very, very experimental) ‘segue’ package. But first, you may be wondering why I use the word “abusing” in this post’s title. Well, the Apache Hadoop project, and...
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4 lines of R to get you started using the Rook web server interface
Now that Jeffrey Horner has settled on a name for his new package… the Rook web server interface is now available on CRAN. Rook provides an interface for R programmers to build web applications which can run in R 2.13′s built-in web server or (soon) rApache. Jeffrey’s provided some great documentation and sample code on his blog, in the RE...
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Slides: “Accessing Databases from R” #rstats
For the past few meetings of the Greater Boston useR Group, we have been opened with an introductory “useR Vignette” talk on a topic which may be helpful for new R users. This week, I presented an overview of accessing databases from R. Several people have tweeted and blogged nice things about my talk and have asked for the slides, so here th...
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quantmod makes it easy to watch silver prices crash in R #rstats
As if there hasn’t been enough going on this week, silver prices have fallen nearly $10 per ounce. That’s a reduction of over 20%. Jeffrey Ryan’s quantmod package makes it easy to download the latest prices from OANDA’s web site and plot the excitement. The getSymbols() function is at the heart of quantmod’s data retrieval prowess, curr...
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