January 12, 2017

Concatenating text nicely with commas and “and”s

Wow, this blog is quiet at the moment. I can’t even remember if I’ve written this anywhere but I had a liver transplant in May and I’ve been repeatedly hospitalised with complications ever since.

October 5, 2016

Working as a coder at a technology company versus working as a coder in other contexts

I was just skimming a book about Python and I found a rather interesting quote:

June 1, 2016

Open document formats and why we need them

The whole world is moving to open document formats for the obvious reason that in order to read and write documents one shouldn’t need to waste money on Microsoft’s increasingly ungainly Office application when perfectly good free and open source alternatives exist (thinking particularly of the mighty LibreOffice).

April 1, 2016

Backing up a remote MySQL database on a remote server using cron

This is more a collection of links, really, than a proper blog post, but I just spent quite a while figuring out how all of these different technologies all fit together to do the job I wanted so if you want to do what it says on the tin of this blog post then you should find it useful.

January 13, 2016

Make your own HTML tables in R

I’ve avoid writing HTML tables by hand in R, reasoning that it would be far too complicated.

November 18, 2015

G++ error compiling on R

I was installing R packages (the httpuv package, but I imagine others would generate the same problem) on my Ubuntu server today and I got a very strange error message:

September 30, 2015

Sharing files from host machine on virtualbox

I’ve really started getting into virtual machines recently. Firstly because I like to try different flavours of Linux and constantly reinstalling partitions is starting to get a bit of a drag, especially when it often takes ages to get the graphical desktop to work because of my silly graphics card.

September 17, 2015

Single file Shiny app to take GET parameters and return date range input boxes

I’ve spent quite a long time fiddling around with some code for the feedback website for which I am responsible for all the reporting so we can distribute custom URLs to individuals who have specific reports they want to run.

September 1, 2015

Producing headings in Word files programmatically using knitr

I love knitr. Sometimes I have to send people documents in Word.

August 31, 2015

Digikam crashes on startup

To be honest, this post is really designed as a reminder to me in case I ever reinstall my OS, but it will probably get a bit of Google juice and could possibly help somebody else.