Publications by Thinking inside the box

digest 0.4.0 and 0.4.1

24.09.2009

After almost two years, I just made a small update to the digest package for R by adding sha-256 as another supported hashing function. While at this, a few minor edits where made here or there. Version 0.4.0 also included a file src/Makefile.win but as that actually prevents a successful build on the Windows platform I promptly removed it for...

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RInside release 0.1.1, and a fresh example

29.09.2009

Last week’s 0.1.0 release of RInside, and the first to have been published on CRAN, still had some issues with builds and use on OS X. Thanks to testing and fixes by Jan de Leeuw, Jeff Horner and particularly Simon Urbanked, things are said to be better now with the new release 0.1.1 which went onto CRAN yesterday. So no new features, but fix...

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R for system administration and scripting

10.10.2009

On several occassions, R had suggested itself as a language for systems scripting. By this I mean random little adminstrative task such as (re-)moving or maybe renaming files or directories and the like. One of such cases just happened a few minutes ago. The aforementioned Garmin Forerunner 405 can cooperate quite nicely with Linux using the gan...

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Chicago Marathon 2009

11.10.2009

Earlier today the 33rd Chicago Marathon was held. I will organise my comments by pointing out three epic fails. First, of course, was the Chicago weather. After two successive marathon in excessive heat — the 2007 race I completed, poorly, with its thousands of runners forced to abandon when the race was cancelled due to excessive heat, and ...

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Zut alors!

12.10.2009

Christian: of course you will be running the Chicago 2010 marathon as your next fall marathon. Not only are Paris and Chicago jumelée (i.e. sister cities), but the Dollar is so conveniently falling vis-à-vis the Euro that you’d get all this done for about a Euro and a half by the time the race happens. Moreover, 2010 is going to be Debian�...

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RPostgreSQL 0.1-5

13.10.2009

A new version of RPostgreSQL just went out to CRAN and should propagate via the mirrors over the next few days. This is a maintenance and bug fix release that addresses four of the seven issue at the Google Code page. Two more are really enhancement requests for which we encourage patches as we are unlikely to have to write them, and the last is...

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Dianne Reeves: Strings Attached at the CSO

16.10.2009

Another trio concert at CSO, but very different from the most recent classic piano trio. Tonight was once again a chance to see Dianne Reeves (wikipedia) but this time accompanied simply by two guitarists: Russell Malone and Romero Lubambo (wikipedia). Given that Dianne Reeves (who we had seen in just a few month earlier in our neighbourgood) h...

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RPostgreSQL 0.1-6

19.10.2009

A quick bug fix released of RPostgreSQL was uploaded to CRAN earlier today; it updates last week’s 0.1-5 release. An editing error left one of the helper functions broken. I also updated a few of the test scripts to also allow for optional environment variable for the port at which the PostgreSQL server is listening. This is handy when you hav...

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From ORD Sessions to R-Forge in 12 hours with RProtoBuf

22.10.2009

Yesterday, via in invitation from fellow Chicago-area Google Summer of Code mentor Borja Sotomayor, I attended the Second ORD Sessions. These are happening at the HQ of Inventable where a couple of technologists and Open Source geeks from the Chicagoland area get together and riff on code for a few hours after work over some pizza and beer. Sou...

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Adventures with Comcast: Part ohnoesnotanotherone in an ongoing series

31.10.2009

Regular readers of this blog (yes, both of you!) may remember the computer/broadband/ directory that this post appears in as the collection of my Comcastic (yeah right) experiences with my ISP. But I think this week may top everything. I’ll just try to jot down some notes before I forget all the gory details: On Tuesday, I edited one of th...

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