Author: grant

Clean and easy string manipulation with stringr for R

Strings are not glamorous, high-profile components of R, but they do play a big role in many data cleaning and preparations tasks. R provides a solid set of string operations, but because they have grown organically over time, they can be inconsistent and a little hard to learn. Additionally, they lag behind the string operations in other programming languages, so that some things that are easy to do in languages like Ruby or Python are rather hard to do in R. The stringr package aims to remedy these problems by providing a clean, modern interface to common string operations.

See also http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/stringr/index.html.

How Yoga Makes You A Fill-In-The-Blank Person

After doing some practice you will surely think that yoga is making you a fill in the blank person. If you don’t think it, then you will read it. If you don’t read it then someone will tell you it. That is OK.

Just know that it isn’t making into anything!

Rather, it is helping you return to that which you already are.

A database on your desktop?

If your business users utilize data that is critical to their success then you need to help provide a pleasant way for them to manage that data. GUI tabular data management programs like MS Excel and LibreOffice or OpenOffice are obvious choices for their ease of use alone. In practice, that ease of use is guaranteed to cause problems for them down the road, and usually at horrible times. Wondering what is a good option if you just stuck with CSV data, I posted here. The replies were informative and helpful, and my take away is that the best option for managing tabular data, if you are not bound to the applications mentioned above, is to use a database… no surprise. How do you do that though while still making it easy for the business and at a reasonable cost? The answer is SQLite.

It uses files that you may share and version. It is a real RBDMS. It runs on every OS. There are graphical management tools. It works well with R.

In practice, there are important details, and it is great to know that there is a realistic and practical solution to manage those details.

sqldf for R

sqldf brokers your dataframe from R into a SQLite database, executes your SQL query, and brokers the data back as a new dataframe. Very nice. The documentation and literature reveals that it works with H2, MySQL, and PostgreSQL, and additionally does a whole lot more than the one-liner claims!

Who ever got fired for compiling code?

Q. How do you fix a memory corruption in S-PLUS?
A. Use R.

The IBM AS/400 is an application-platform consisting of custom hardware, an operating system, and database. It is a quite interesting system giving you literally everything that you need to develop a custom computing environment for a company immediately “out of the box”.

Working to deploy a pretty typical Java based system with DB2 and WebSphere backing it up, my co-worker and I ran into a bug with the JVM. The issue revolved around the fact that the web-application layer utilized a byte-code engineering library that resulted in the revelation of a bug in the JVM itself. First level support explained that it was our bug so we provided a stand-alone example in straight Java and that got us to second level support.

They explained that they would look into it and that that we should watch for a release note in the next version of OS/400. This was getting kind of silly so our department wanted to cash-in in one of their immediate-support “get out of jail free cards” that you get when you spend hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars per quarter for IBM support. That got us to third level support.

Upon reviewing the issue that we researched, tracked down the exact situation where the bug occurred, and demonstrated a reproducible example, they expertly agreed that there was indeed a bug in their JVM, that they would have it fixed for the next release six months from now, and thanks for letting them know.

One of the value-adds of purchasing something from IBM is that every C-level knows that you can’t get fired for buying IBM. Something that you can’t have done either apparently is computing Java! 😛