Author Archives: earl

Unique is broken in R

Posted on July 9, 2011 by earl

Are you kidding me? $ R > unique(1,1,2,3,4) [1] 1 This was the source of yesterday’s nasty to track down bug. What you really want is unique on a vector, as in: > unique(c(1,1,2,3,4)) [1] 1 2 3 4 I … Continue reading →

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Formatted numbers in Ruby

Posted on June 29, 2011 by earl

In C or C++, it’s can be a pain to get thousands separators in printf. In ruby, it can be trivial, as long as you use the right libraries. If you have ActiveSupport installed (which I believe comes with Rails), … Continue reading →

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Finding the sort order of an array in R or Ruby

Posted on June 26, 2011 by earl

Suppose you have an array that you’d like to sort by another array. A common use case might be a set of arrays of somethings and for each something you generate a score in say [0,1]. Now you’d like to … Continue reading →

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Getting the value of a variable from a string in R

Posted on June 25, 2011 by earl

It’s often convenient to use reflection to get the value of a variable from the name as a string. In R, you can use the get function to do this. In R : blog $ R > x = 3 … Continue reading →

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Windows still sucks, can’t read exfat formatted on a mac

Posted on June 19, 2011 by earl

Now that OS X Snow Leopard supports exfat / fat64 and Microsoft Windows theoretically does, you might naively assume that you can share external drives between Vista and Snow Leopard. This is true with one giant caveat: you can’t format … Continue reading →

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Prepping the Reuters 21578 classification sample dataset

Posted on June 18, 2011 by earl

I’ve been playing around with some topic models and decided to look at the Reuters 21578 dataset. For your convenience, this dataset is stored as xml split between 20 files or so. And invalid xml at that. I prefer to … Continue reading →

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Thousands Separator in printf in C++

Posted on June 13, 2011 by earl

I’ve unfortunately been writing some C++. It’s the crappiest language in the world. I just wasted 90 perfectly good minutes attempting to put thousands separators in numbers that I’m printf ing. If you naively read the man pages, it looks … Continue reading →

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Watching Lecture Videos on Your Computer

Posted on May 30, 2011 by earl

I’ve recently been watching some of the lecture videos available on videolectures.net. The site is a great resource, but often the lecturers speak too slowly. I really prefer to watch lecture videos at a higher speed, otherwise I lose focus, … Continue reading →

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Horizontal Paging of Greenplum or Postgres Queries

Posted on January 26, 2010 by earl

When using gpsql or pgsql to query greenplum or postgres respectively, query results which exceed the width of your term will wrap in a very annoying fashion. To get horizontal paging, set the environmental variable PAGER: export PAGER=’less -RSFX’ then … Continue reading →

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Interactive Plotting in R

Posted on January 25, 2010 by earl

There are many ways to compare univariate distributions; one of my favorites is violin plots. However, if you are only comparing two distributions, then the best solution is often a scatter plot. To that end, I’ve build some code that … Continue reading →

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