Open source vs. commercial off the shelf
A government department in Australia reports saving very large amounts of money by shunning paid for proprietary software and implementing their own version with R (link to story). If you follow the link they have some comments with a person who works at SAS who naturally talks down the benefits of free and open source software such as R (but then they would, wouldn’t they?). They report “He said the true cost of the supposedly free software can actually be quite substantial, when human resources and maintenance of the software is factored in”.
Book review: Supercommunicator by Frank J. Pietrucha
This is a book review of Supercommunicator by Frank J. Pietrucha Full disclosure: I received this book free as part of O’Reilly’s reader review program. It’s a fact oft-acknowledged that books about communication and especially about grammar fall at the hurdles they themselves set, with books about grammar often containing solecisms and books about communication including leaden or otherwise dreadful prose. Even with this in mind, this is not a good book.
Make your own Twitter ticker using PHP, CSS3, and JavaScript
I made a little Twitter ticker for work the other day, which will fetch posts with a particular hashtag and then animate them marquee style across the screen, I thought I may as well share it here. This version will fetch the last 100 tweets to the #rstats hashtag, remove the retweeets, and then show up to 50 animated across the screen. All of the Twitter authentication PHP magic is stolen from here.
New guest post at Online behaviour
I’ve just had a guest post published at Online Behaviour, about visualising Google Analytics data using R and Shiny, which can be found here.
Book review: Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and CSS, 2nd Edition
Full disclosure: I received this ebook free under the O’Reilly Reader Review Programme. This is a review of Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and CSS, 2nd Edition by Robin Nixon. As you can tell by the title this is a big book that covers a lot of material. There is a decent treatment of PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and CSS within this book. When I came to it I knew nothing about PHP, a little MySQL, a smidgen of JavaScript, and a little bit of CSS and could follow each of the sections without too much difficulty.
Learn to program, or loads of other stuff, for free
There are more and more free sources of free sources of courses in programming and more besides. I’ve just come across a slew so I thought I’d record them for my benefit and yours. Code academy Khan academy EdX Coursera Swirl
Web application development with R using Shiny new version of code
The new version of Shiny (0.9) is wonderful, hopefully I will talk about it again soon, but it does break the code in my book, Web application development with R using Shiny. It’s only a small difference, the selectInput() function used to ask for preselected elements to be given as the name of a list (i.e. the friendly version that appears to users in the UI, “Egg Salad”) whereas now it asks for the actual value (“eggSalad”, e.
Shiny server working on Windows based virtual machine
Working in the NHS as I do, which runs all of its IT on Windows, I’d always despaired of being able to get Shiny Server working. However, I went to see the IT department and they have very kindly given me access to a virtual machine with Ubuntu 12.04.04 LTS running on it. It’s completely firewalled from the internet and is only visible from within the network, which is quite useful because it means I can put up things on it which are not for public consumption.
Useful R functions
Today seems as good a day as any to start archiving all the useful R functions I see scattered around the internet. And here seems as good a place as any to do it since I can see it and so can anyone else who is interested. Two to start, will add more as I get them. Credit to original authors, follow the link. Removing whitespace <pre class="brush: r; title: ; notranslate" title=""> trimws() Extract the last n characters of a string
Produce Word documents, web pages, and pdfs in R quickly and easily
When I started using R in about 2009 reproducible research was a complete eye-opener for me. Statistical analyses should be reproducible both by the author of them and by the scientific community and by embedding the analysis and outputting code within a literate programming framework such as Sweave this was possible. Nearly everything I produce now, whether for regular reports on patient experience for the NHS Trust for which I work or for scientific papers is reproducible.