I just came back from the future and let me be the first to tell you this: Learn some Chinese. And more than just cào nǐ niáng (肏你娘) which your friend in grad school told you means “Live happy with many blessings”. Trust me, I’ve been hanging with Madam Wu and she told me [...]
One of my primary uses for R is to build stochastic simulations of insurance portfolios and reinsurance treaties. It’s not uncommon for each of my simulations to take 20 seconds or more to complete (if you’re doing the math, that’s 55 hours for 10K sims or, approximately 453 games of solitaire) . Initially I ran [...]
Today I called my firms desktop support to talk to them about how to get Iron Mountain Connected Backup to archive files located somewhere other than [C:\Documents and Settings\user\] and through talking with my desktop support guy I discovered that it doesn’t support that. Oh, and by the way it’s a “desktop backup” so it’s [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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’ [...]
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 an [...]
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 [...]