I spent most of last week in Rennes, the capital of Brittany in France, as it was time for UseR! 2009, the annual R conference. Francois Husson, Aline Legrand and others at the Agrocampus Ouest had put together a really well-run conference, and it was a pleasure to reconnect with so many people. It was also pretty nice to walk around town and see bits and pieces of the Tombees de la nuit festival which happened at the same time.

As last year (and again at the BoC in December), I presented a three-hour tutorial on high-performance computing with R. This covers profiling, vectorisation, interfacing compiled code, debugging, parallel computing, as well as scripting and automation. Slides, and a 2-up version, are now on my presentations page.

I also gave two regular conference presentations. The first was on my Rcpp and RInside packages which facilitate interfacing R and C++. The second talk, based on joint work with Charles Blundell, describes our cran2deb system for creating Debian packages of essentially all CRAN packages. I will try to follow up on this with another post. Slides from these talks are also on my presentations page.