Thinking inside the boxThinking inside the boxAccelerated R in Debian- May 31, 2008 A few months ago, Stephen Milborrow started releasing a patched version of R that performs just-in-time compilation -- see his Ra page for some details and further pointers. In a nutshell, Ra provides a modified R engine so that code preceded by all jit(1) function call, using his jit package from the CRAN archive, will run faster due to just-in-time compilation of loops and arithmetic expressions. Ra offers to pick the low-hanging fruit for users as loops can be a bottleneck. Of...http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2008/05/31#ra_1.1.0 Bike The Drive 2008- May 26, 2008 Memorial Day weekend, so time for the annual Bike The Drive in Chicago. Got the whole family up bright and early, and was it ever nice -- 60-some degrees, sunny blue skies and no wind. Perfect conditions. And the Chicagoist blog has some pictures up.http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2008/05/25#bike_the_drive_2008 smtm bug fix release 1.6.10- May 26, 2008 A new version of smtm just went to Debian and CPAN. Perl 5.10 required a small change in how we test whether certain arrays do, or do not, contain elements. No other changes were made.http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2008/05/25#smtm_1.6.10 JPM Chase Corporate Challenge 2008- May 23, 2008 Just got back a little earlier from running the 2008 edition of the JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge. And again a record crowd of now just over 23000 in Chicago -- announced to be bigger than those at the JP Morgan Chase races in Boston, San Francisco or New York! This year the weather wasn't quite as stunning as it has often been in the past. But at least, temparatures in the high 40s and an overcast sky make for good running conditions. This time, two colleagues and I tried to make it..http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2008/05/22#jpm_chase_cc_2008 Quarryman Challenge 2008- May 11, 2008 This morning was the 2008 edition of Quarryman Challenge, a 5km and 10mile race in Lemont, which is southwest of Chicago along the Illinois-Michigan Canal. Three of us ran the 10 mile race, which was nicely organised. But is it ever friggin' hilly there: the race course takes three turns from the lower levels near the canal up towards those hills. As the elevation chart (that I cut out of this pdf file with the course map) shows, it is not so much the total elevation but rather how steep the.http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2008/05/10#quarryman_2008 On modes of transportation- May 10, 2008 Something I never really mentioned was the purchase of the foldable bike: a Dahon with a reasonably lightweight aluminum frame, a seven-speed hub and high-pressure tires. It's great fun in the city for the rides to and from the commuter train, or across downtown for occasional errrands after work. I have had this foldable bike for nearly two years, and used it almost (work-)daily, even in the Chicago winters. 'Almost' because I did suffer from broken parts on a few occassions: a pedal broke..http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2008/05/09#commuting_bikes On soccer, promises and hair cuts- May 5, 2008 Both my daughters have been playing soccer for a while now. And for another little while, I had been promising that if they ever scored three goals in a game, I'd shave my head. As the attentive reader may have guess by now, that day finally came. This weekend saw a suburban tournament in nearby Oak Brook, and lo and behold Anna scored three goals in the first game! So home we went, out came the tool and she rather professionally separated me from my hair. So today on day two of the new...http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2008/05/04#keeping_ones_word getopt support for littler- May 3, 2008 Practically ever since Jeff and I released littler to add easy scripting for R, questions popped up about how to support getopt-alike command-line parsing. And as of today, a new package r-cran-getopt is in Debian. It provides Allen Day's recently released package getopt from CRAN which provides a new function getopt. Given a suitable data structure that provides long and short-form command-line option names, whether arguments are mandatory, optional or not required (as for flags), and a...http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2008/05/03#getopt_for_littler |