I’ve just released version 1.6.5 of the Computational Journalism Server. This is going to be the last release for a while. Release notes: I removed CoffeeScript and Node.js. I wasn’t using them. I dropped back to Erlang R14B-1.1. Everything tes... [Read more...]

I’ve just received an announcement from Michael Lang that packages BatchJobs and BatchExperiments have been added to the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). From the announcement: The package BatchJobs implements the basic objects and procedu... [Read more...]

The recent Hack/Reduce hackathon in Montreal was a tonne of fun. Our team tackled a data set of consisting of Bixi (Montreal’s bicycle share system) station states at one minute temporal resolution. We used Hadoop and mapreduce to pull out some features of user behaviours. One of the ... [Read more...]

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JD Long's experimental segue package makes it easy to use Amazon's Elastic MapReduce service to fire up a Hadoop cluster and use it for non-Big Data, computationally-intensive tasks. The package provides a cluster-aware version of lapply() which "just works". [Read more...]

A week or so ago I had my first experience using someone else’s cluster on Amazon EC2. EC2 is the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Users set up a virtual computing platform that runs on Amazon’s servers “in the cloud.” Amazon EC2 is not just another cluster. EC2 allows ... [Read more...]