Author: grant

The Wealth of Information

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

— Herbert Simon
Via EMR.

Force unified coding style from all your contributors

EditorConfig helps developers define and maintain consistent coding styles between different editors and IDEs. The EditorConfig project consists of a file format for defining coding styles and a collection of text editor plugins that enable editors to read the file format and adhere to defined styles. EditorConfig files are easily readable and they work nicely with version control systems.

Via rapporter.

littler: a scripting front-end for GNU R

littler provides the r program, a simplified command-line interface for GNU R. This allows direct execution of commands, use in piping where the output of one program supplies the input of the next, as well as adding the ability for writing hash-bang scripts, i.e. creating executable files starting with, say, #!/usr/bin/r.

Wonderful, wonderful to know that this exists as it fills a definite void.
Via Dirk Eddelbuettel.

Milwaukee Data Science: Introductions

The purpose of this Meetup is to provide a safe, pleasant, and convenient venue (physical and virtual) to facilitate the growth and nurturing of the Data Science community in Southeastern Wisconsin.

Since Data Science covers the entirety of all human endeavors, this group serves to facilitate dialogue and discussion between all realms of mastery. Strategic advisers, managers, investors, health-care administrators, and quantitative analysts will feel equally at home here, as will mathematicians, statisticians, ecologists, biologists, and social-scientists. All realms of mastery are invited and welcomed to join.

Given the limitless application of technology here, all members of the Information Technology field are welcomed to join. All roles are welcome ranging from technical (developers, architects, system and devops administrators) to project managers and business analysts.

Experts and neophytes with interest in particular languages, environments, frameworks, and technologies have a home here. Be it R, Python, Java, or Octave, there is a place for everyone to learn and share. Our doors are equally open to practitioners applying specific technological offerings for every industry and platform.

With a laid back approach open to all ideas, this group will reflect the contributions and participation of its members, in whatever form time and resources permit.

Key links:

How to debug within R

In my words this is how to debug within R:

  • If you want to print a stack trace for the most recent exception
    • then use traceback
    • you may or may not have the source
  • If you want to set a breakpoint at a specific location in the code
    • then use browser
    • you must have the source
    • it may be conditional
  • If you want to set a breakpoint on a function at its
    entry point

    • then use debug
    • you may or may not have the source
    • delegates work to browser
  • If you want to install a global exception handler that will immediately start
    debugging

    • then use recover
    • you may or may not have the source
  • If you want to add watch statement to a function
    • then use trace
    • you may or may not have the source

Tracer360 – Noxgear

It’s dark outside and all you want is to hit the road for some well-deserved miles. Our Tracer360 uses the full color spectrum in specially designed illumination modes to keep you highly visible. Paired with high quality 3M reflective materials the Tracer360 is the perfect, lightweight replacement for your bulky and uncomfortable safety vest.

Want it for motorcycling, will start running just to be able to wear it.

Thanks for the link M. Arnott via Facebook.

rbenchmark: Benchmarking routine for R

rbenchmark is inspired by the Perl module Benchmark, and is intended to facilitate benchmarking of arbitrary R code. The library consists of just one function, benchmark, which is a simple wrapper around system.time. Given a specification of the benchmarking process (counts of replications, evaluation environment) and an arbitrary number of expressions, benchmark evaluates each of the expressions in the specified environment, replicating the evaluation as many times as specified, and returning the results conveniently wrapped into a data frame.

This is an absolute must have for every situation where you want to do some
simple benchmarking.
For some reason when I read the documentation it sounds harder to use then it
really is.
Give it a try and you will be rewarded greatly.