It’s common knowledge that I struggle wrapping my head around the apply functions in R. That is illustrated very clearly in the following discussion on Stack Overflow: Dirk’s comment is actually spot on. I’ve asked the same damn question at least 4-5 times. Only I didn’t really understand it was the same question. That’s one of the problems of not really being good at something; it’s hard to think abstractly about it.
So for the rest of this conversation big data == 2 Gigs. Done. Don’t give me any of this ‘that’s not big, THIS is big’ shit. There now, on with the cool stuff: This week on twitter Vince Buffalo asked about loading a 2 gig comma separated file (csv) into R (OK, he asked about tab delimited data, but I ignored that because I use mostly comma data and I wanted to test CSV.
The alternative title of this blog post is “How to get your sorry ass fired by violating your internal IT policies.” So keep that in mind as you read this. I say lots of silly crap. Twitter allows me the pleasure of sharing this blather with the world. I was a little surprised that of all the things I have said over the last few months the above Tweet received the most discussion.
Tonight (October 29, 2009) at 5:30 PM is the Chicago R meetup at Jaks tap. Here’s more info. I’ll be making a presentation based on my earlier blog post about plyr. The presentation will only be 8 minutes long so I’ve had to pick and choose my info carefully. OK, who am I kidding? I had a couple of Schlitz (in a bottle!) for lunch over at Boni Vinos and slammed some slides together rather haphazardly.
Today Joel (typo fixed) Jeff Atwood announced via the Stack Overflow blog a new site called Stack Overflow Careers, a programming job site focused at job hunters. This is a compliment to the job listing service which allows companies who are hiring to advertise on Stack Overflow. Seems like the the world’s most ‘no shit’ idea, right? But this is more than a simple idea, this is disruptive innovation in job hunting that will revolutionize how programmers, and later other technical talent, get jobs.
I’m not dead yet! Although it has been rumored that I am. The new job is going great and I’m thrilled to be with a new firm doing interesting work alongside smart people. It makes me seem smarter by simple association. There’s been a lot going on recently in the R user community. There was anR flash mob of Stack Overflow which resulted in a noticeable increase in the number of R questions and answers in SO.
[caption id=”” align="alignleft” width="120” caption="Tatiana Samoilova as Anna-bobanna”][/caption] So back in March, 2009 I blogged about a phenomenon I called the Anna Karenina Yield Anomaly. In short, I postulated that in the production of crops the idea of a national ‘good year’ pretty much means everyone had a good yield and a national ‘bad year’ meant that some had an OK year and some were having a terrible year. And thus I made myself seem more literate than I am by linking that phenomenon back to Tolstoy and his line “All happy families are happy in the same way.
So one glace at my user logs shows the truth: no one gives a rat’s rump thatI just quit my job; you just love you some Twitter R code. And I’m nothing but an attention whore, so come get some! So in mylast ‘Twitter with R’ post I gave you some code I’d written ripped off that allowed you to update your status from R. That’s kinda cool, but really just for annoying your friends, tweeting when your code is finished running or, as Eva pointed out in the comments, maybe Tweeting the outcome of a routine.
[caption id=”” align="alignleft” width="188” caption="Pretty Normal”][/caption] Dave, over at The Revolutions Blog,posted about the big ‘ol list of graphs created with R that are over at Wikimedia Commons. As I was scrolling through the list I recognized the standard normal distribution from the Wikipedia article on the same topic. Below is the fairly simple source code with lots of comments. Here’s the source. Run it at home… for fun and profit.
[caption id="attachment_292” align="alignleft” width="178” caption="Spolsky Drinking Straight Vodka… L’Chaim!"][/caption] I’ve been a long time reader of Joel Splosky. I enjoy his writing. He is Jewish, opinionated, and successful. I, am only opinionated so I enjoy his differing experience from my own. Joel runs a software development firm in NYC. He also really understands developers. His business model is, in short: Hire great developers, keep them happy, count the money. While his writing is almost totally focused on software developers, there are a LOT of allegories with other technical knowledge workers.