some kind of blog

Was just reading some interesting articles and thought it might be worth to share some of them here:

• Are we taking supercomputing code seriously?
• Odds Are, It’s Wrong: Science fails to face the shortcomings of statistics
• A survey of cross-validation procedures for model selection

Just found some interesting stuff concerning functional programming using Python. Here are the links:

These articles are from a larger collection of pages on Python called Charming Python on the IBM website.

Boot PowerPC Macs via USB 2.0 drives

Well, should you ever be switching keyboards for your Mac computer, then you may be interested in the following. The following link is to an information sheet (that you may print out!!) which shows your for every symbol which key combination you need to produce it on your Mac keyboard. Or use it the other way round: which combination results in what symbol. In any way, it’s quite useful!
Reference for EVERY Character Key on a Mac

After the last upgrade R didn’t seem to want to install new packages. The likely reason is that one of the UK CRAN mirrors (http://www.sourcekeg.co.uk/cran/) is not working (at least as of 21/02/08). R fails to install packages with
Warning: unable to access index for repository http://www.sourcekeg.co.uk/cran/bin/macosx/universal/contrib/2.6

To be able to choose a different mirror, just issue options(”repos”=c(CRAN=”@CRAN@”)) on the R command line and the next time a package has to be installed from CRAN you will be asked which mirror to use. See ?setRepositories and ?options for more info.

When writing documents, be it literary or scientific text, formatting and style is very important. Here are a couple of pages that I found of use, they do not only apply to LateX documents.

• Robert Dale’s page on style issues with LaTeX
• The Elements of Style by William Strunk, THE guide to writing
• Wikipedia Style guide, see the external links section at the end of the page for links to documents such as The BBC News Styleguide

Part 1. Dabbling with a wealth of statistical facilities: Introduces basic conceptes of R and a general overview.

Part 2. Functional programming and data exploration: Shows vector slices, introduces dataframes and basic operations such as how to get histograms and linear regressions.

Part 3. Reusable and object-oriented programming: A concise but very useful introduction on the object oriented programming that R is capable of doing.

There is a very good short overview about bibliographies with BibTex to be found here at the University of Colorado. Also features a PDF file with examples of quite a few bibliography styles: PDF with style examples