Thinking inside the boxThinking inside the boxDead disks, and lvm woes- July 21, 2007 As posted earlier on the rather recently announced CRANberries feed (that is generated and hosted on my box) covering CRAN package updates, my main server bit the dust. The hard disk no longer wants to talk to any of its lvm partitions, leaving me without usr, var, varlocal, home, srv. Fortunately, most of this was backed-up but now I have to go through reconfiguring the replacement machine I already set up. Not fun. If anybody has tips on recovering the lvm partitions, I'm all ears....http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2007/07/21#dead_disks_and_lvm Announcing CRANberries- July 10, 2007 Earlier today I sent an announcement to the r-packages list. It describes CRANberries, two simple RSS feeds that summarize both 'new' and 'updated' packages at CRAN, the archive network for R. I cooked this up rather quickly using a few lines of R, a small SQLite db backend and the old Blosxom blog engine. A tip of the hat to Barry Rowlingson who almost immediately suggested to use the lol format instead. The hope is that this proves helpful for keeping tabs on the amazing growth of CRAN...http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2007/07/09#cranberries_announcement More on 'nicer charts'- July 3, 2007 Via the Planet Debian aggregator and his blog, Sven followed up on my post regarding Lucas' plot of the package age distribution. As some of my points didn't seem to make it across, I will reiterate them more plainly: GNUplot, while easy to use, creates charts that aren't terribly pretty; Lucas' original chart had, to paraphrase an expression by Tufte, a poor 'ink to paper ratio': the data is too concentrated in the last quartile; for that very reason, taking logs is a good...http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2007/07/02#nicer_charts_two_b |