Rule number one in regression testing is to not depend on volatile data. Which I seem to have violated in file t/02simple.t in the Perl package Finance::YahooQuote. Which lead the automated Perl test scripts to remind me for a few days now that the f... [Read more...]

The shiny new 0.2.2 release of RInside has just been uploaded to CRAN; it should hit mirrors tommorow. Sources are also at my RInside page. RInside is a set of convenience classes to facilitate embedding of R inside of C++ applications. It works pa... [Read more...]

The annual March Madness Half Marathon in Cary took place this morning. This is both one of Chicagoland's 'early races' to start the season as well as the classic Boston preparation due to the hilly course. I have now run this consecutively for six y... [Read more...]

Earlier today, Google announced the list of accepted mentor organizations for the Google Summer of Code 2010 (GSoC 2010). And we are happy to report that the R Project is once again a participating organization (and now for the third straight year) jo... [Read more...]

Versions 0.7.7 to 0.7.9 of Rcpp contained a bug: protecting paths with quotes was supposed to help with Windows builds, but did the opposite at least in 'backticks mode' for getting path and/or library information. Using the shQuote() function instead... [Read more...]

Version 0.7.8 of Rcpp, released just a few days ago contained a nasty bug or two which we noticed when trying to built the initial release of RcppArmadillo on 64-bit platforms. So a quick bug-fix release 0.7.9 is now in Debian and should be on CRA... [Read more...]

Besides the new RcppExamples, another new package RcppArmadillo got spun out of Rcpp with the recent release 0.7.8 of Rcpp. Romain and I already had an example of a simple but fast linear model fit using the (very clever) Armadillo C++ library by... [Read more...]

Version 0.1.0 of RcppExamples, a simple demo package for Rcpp should appear on CRAN some time tomorrow. As mentioned in the post about release 0.7.8 of Rcpp, Romain and I carved this out of Rcpp itself to provide a cleaner separation of code t... [Read more...]

Version 0.7.8 of the Rcpp R / C++ interface classes is now on CRAN and in Debian. As of right now. Debian has already built packages for eight more architectures; and CRAN has built the Windows binary. Oh, and cran2deb had Debian packages for 'testin... [Read more...]

Christian Robert blogged about a particularly heavy-handed solution to last Sunday's Sudoku puzzle in Le Monde. That had my symapthy as I like evolutionary computing methods, and his chart is rather pretty. From there, this spread on to the REvolutions blogs where David Smith riffed on it, and showed the ... [Read more...]

Fellow GSoC mentor and local ACM masterminder Borja Sotomayor had invited me a few months ago to give a talk at the ACM chapter at the University of Chicago. Today was the day, and the slides from the 50-minutes talk on R and extending R with Rcpp ar... [Read more...]

The new 0.7.6 release of Rcpp, our set of R / C++ interface classes, is now at CRAN and Debian. This comes just a few days after 0.7.5 as we had made a mistake in Makefile.win which is now fixed. A few other things sneaked in while were at it, see th... [Read more...]

The annoucement below went out to R-SIG-Finance earlier today. For information is as usual the the R / Finance 2010 page: Now open for registrations: R / Finance 2010: Applied Finance with R April 16 and 17, 2010 Chicago, IL, USA The second annu... [Read more...]

Romain uploaded our first release of RProtoBuf to CRAN yesterday. RProtoBuf provides bindings for GNU R to the Google Protobuf implementation. Google Protobuf is (and I quote) a way of encoding structured data in an efficient yet extensible format th... [Read more...]

Yesterday, and about nine days after release 0.7.3 of Rcpp (a set of R / C++ interface classes), Romain and I released version 0.7.4. It has been uploaded to CRAN and Debian, and mirrors should already have new versions. As before, my local page is ... [Read more...]

A quick nine days after release 0.7.2 of Rcpp, our R / C++ interface classes, Romain and I are happy to roll out a new version 0.7.3. It has been uploaded to CRAN and Debian, and mirrors should have the new versions shortly. As before, my local page... [Read more...]

A new version of RQuantLib (a package combining the quantitative analytics of QuantLib with the R statistical computing environment and language) is now out at CRAN and in Debian (where it depends on the 1.0.0 beta of QuantLib that is currently in t... [Read more...]

Somehow missed during the the end-of-year switchover was the fact that my review of Guenther Sawitzki's Computational Statistics: An Introduction to R (CRC / Chapman \& Hall, 2009) is now up on the Journal of Statistical Software website. [Read more...]

The shiny new 0.2.1 release of RInside, a set of convenience classes to facilitate embedding of R inside of C++ applications, just went out to CRAN; sources are also at my RInside page This is a maintenance release building on the recent 0.2.0 rel... [Read more...]

A new littler release (now at 0.1.3) just went out of the door this evening. littler provides r (pronounced littler), a shebang / scripting / quick eval / pipelining front-end to the the R language and system. This version adds a few minor behind-... [Read more...]