A question was raised today on the mailing list: Is there an easy way to add a watermark to a ggplot? There are several options, depending on the type of watermark and the required level of control over the output, add a text label using annotate (th... [Read more...]

For the past few meetings of the Greater Boston useR Group, we have been opened with an introductory “useR Vignette” talk on a topic which may be helpful for new R users. This week, I presented an overview of accessing databases from R. Several people have tweeted and blogged nice ... [Read more...]

Jeffrey Horner's new Rook package provides a new interface for developing R-based web applications. Rook allows the same application to run in R's built-in web server or (soon) in the rApache module. This post shows how easy it is to use the package's Rhttpd class to get started with Rook. [Read more...]

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...]

rggobi is the first package which didn't survive my transition from 32-bit to 64-bit in R 2.11.1. Fortunately, installing the package from source fixes it, and Hadley Wickham has posted the prerequisites and procedure. [Read more...]

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In this post I publish a PDF document titled “A collection of tips for R in Finance”. It is a basic 5 page introduction to R in finances by Arnaud Amsellem (linked in profile). The article offers tips related to the following points: Code Editor Organizing R code Update packages Getting ... [Read more...]

CRAN contains ready-made binary packages for nearly all of its packages, but rgdal is one which I keep finding myself trying to install from source whenever I upgrade R. Compiled versions of rgdal, along with prerequisites and complements like the GDAL framework, GRASS, and even the old FFTW3 can be ... [Read more...]

Turning plain-text output into well-formatted tables can be a repetitive task, especially when many tests or models are being incorporated into a paper. For R users, there are several methods that can make this task easier (though not much less repetitive), regardless of what typesetting system you use. LaTeX tables ... [Read more...]