Publications by Paul Hiemstra
Comparison of ave, ddply and data.table
This is a copy of a post by me on the R-statistics blog. Fortran and C programmers often say that interpreted languages like R are nice and all, but lack in terms of speed. How fast something works in R greatly depends on how it is implemented, i.e. which packages/functions does one use. A prime example, which shows up regularly on the R-help li...
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Etiquette on the mailing list, to RTFM or not to RTFM
Sometimes people ask very basic questions on the R-help mailing list, which could have easily been answered by reading some R manual or doing a quick Google search. Responses on the mailing range from people answering the question to “Please read the posting guide” or RFTM. I found the following discussion in the R-help archive which contains...
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Drawing polar centered spatial maps using ggplot2
Drawing maps of the polar regions can be done using square spatial maps. A small example says more than a thousand words: xlim = c(-180,180) ylim = c(60,90) # Some fake grid data dat_grid = expand.grid(x = xlim[1]:xlim[2], y = ylim[1]:ylim[2]) dat_grid$value = runif(nrow(dat_grid)) # Polygons data dum = map(xlim = c(-180,180), ylim = c(60,90), ...
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readGrads – An R package to read and manipulate grads data
I created an R package to read grads data. As far as I know, there is no dedicated package to read grads data. The package is still quite new, any remarks on the documentation or code are more than welcome. If you are interested in this R package, please leave a comment below. In the future I plan to release the package to CRAN. To install the pa...
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RStudio: a cross-platform IDE for R
Which text editor do you use? Once in a while this question pops up on the R-help mailing list. Up until recently I used the KDE text editor Kate under Linux. Recently, I came across a new text editor for R, RStudio. Although the term text editor does not do it justice, it is more of an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). RStudio is an op...
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Comparing StackOverflow and the R-help mailing list
Only recently I discovered StackOverflow. I know, as a nerd already programming for many years that is quite late. For those who are not familiar with StackOverflow (aka SO), it is a Question and Answer site for programmers. It is part of the Stack Exchange network, which offers a host of these QA sites on just about anything. In terms of number ...
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RStudio does not start when using a R version built from source
Because I do not have root privileges on some of the machines I use, I build part of my software from source and install it into my own homedirectory. Doing that requires one to download R from CRAN, e.g. R 2.14.1. Compiling R now is a matter of running: tar -xzvf R-2.14.1.tar.gz ./configure --prefix=/home/usrname/local_software make; make instal...
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Converting grads files to NetCDF from within R using CDO
A while back I wrote a blog post on the R package I wrote for reading and manipulating grads data. The library is quite basic, and does not support a number of grads data file options: Using one ctl file, and multiple binary files Some variables have only one vertical level When I faced data that had these properties, I had a choice to either e...
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RStudio Server: accessing the RStudio R IDE through your browser
I like having all my important documents and scripts in one single place. This saves me from having to synchronize them between the different workplaces I have, and makes backupping much less of a pain. One way of achieving this kind of functionality is to use a remote desktop connection tool (e.g. NoMachine for Linux), or an ssh connection. Howe...
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RStudio Server part 2: pros of using RStudio server for a remote connection
After playing around with R studio server for a while, I decided to write a followup to my previous blog post. I want to go over a few of the strong points of using RStudio server to access a remote machine using R. Advantages of RStudio server Before discovering RStudio Server, I would use either plain ssh with X enabled, or NoMachine NX to acce...
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