Publications by Yihui Xie
Build Static HTML Help Pages for R Packages
Many R users may still remember the good old days when we had static HTML documentation for R packages. That was probably before R 2.10.0 (in 2009). Then we had the fancy dynamic HTML help based on the built-in httpd server, but it has never really made much sense to me. Ever since then, I have been feeling uncomfortable about writing package doc...
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Can We Live Without Backslashes?
Two months ago there was a discussion in the ESS mailing list about Emacs/ESS started by Paul Johnson, who claimed “Emacs Has No Learning Curve”. While this sounds impossible, he really has some good points, e.g. he encourages beginners to look at the menu. I think this is a good way to learn Emacs. In the very beginning, who can remember C-x...
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IPython vs knitr, or Python vs R
I watched this video by Fernando Pérez a few days ago when I was reading a comment by James Correia Jr on Simply Statistics: This is absolutely a fantastic talk that I recommend everybody to watch (it is good in both the form and content). Not surprisingly, I started thinking ipython vs knitr. Corey Chivers said we could learn a lot from each o...
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ICERM Reproducibility Workshop: Day 1
I’m attending a workshop on reproducibility at ICERM (Brown University) this week. I really appreciate this great opportunity offered by ICERM, Randy and Victoria. It is pretty exciting to meet people that you only knew before through indirect ways. One coincidence was that I met Fernando here (for the first time)! We did not know each other be...
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Find Out Available Usernames with R
Update on 2013/01/05: Xiao Nan in the comments pointed out that apply(combn(letters, 2), 2, paste0, collapse = '') was wrong for all two-letter usernames, and indeed it was. It is not a combination problem. Now I use his elegant outer() solution. One can also use expand.grid(letters, letters). Github decided to take off their downloads service, a...
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Code Pollution With Command Prompts
This is not the first time I have ranted about command prompts, but I cannot help ranting about them whenever I saw them in source code. In short, a piece of source code with command prompts is like a bag of cooked shrimps in the market — it does not make sense, and an otherwise good thing is ruined. I like cooking raw shrimps (way more tasty)....
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Publishing from R+knitr to WordPress
Tal Galili asked a question on StackOverflow on publishing blog posts to WordPress from R + knitr. William K. Morris has written a solution long time ago, and I tweaked it a little bit and created a function knit2wp() in the development version of knitr. See the page for WordPress in the knitr website for details. Below is a sample screenshot: P...
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Contribute to The R Journal with LyX/knitr
(This paragraph is pure rant; feel free to skip it) I have been looking forward to the one-column LaTeX style of The R Journal, and it has arrived eventually. Last time I mentioned “it does not make sense to sell the cooked shrimps”; actually there is another thing that does not make sense in my eyes, which is the two-column LaTeX style. I ju...
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On ENAR, or Statistical Meetings in General
Last year I accepted an invitation from Ben to go to ENAR 2013 — my first ENAR. I used to go to JSM and useR!, and apparently I enjoy useR! most. The reason is not, or not only, because I’m more of a technical person. It is just hard to concentrate at large statistical conferences. I want to make a few suggestions from the perspective of a st...
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Travis CI for R?
I’m always worried about CRAN: a system maintained by FTP and emails from real humans (basically one of Uwe, Kurt or Prof Ripley). I’m worried for two reasons: the number of R packages is growing exponentially; time and time again I see frustrations from both parties (CRAN maintainers and package authors); I have a good solution for 2, whic...
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