Why should you consider using Pinboard?

As a long-time del.icio.us user I was quite surprised when I first heard about the rumors about its shutdown by Yahoo. As I dug further into it I came across their official blog post dated December 17th, and decided to wait sometime before making a move, figuring Yahoo would not simply shutdown the service...

Printing to PostScript in Windows 7 (or where did Apple Color LW 12/660 go?)

1 – Windows 7: First Impressions I’ve recently purchased a copy of Windows 7 for my wife’s computer, and I have to say that it is indeed a quite nice jump ahead in terms of quality in comparison to Windows XP. After installing it and using it for a while I can certainly vouch that Windows...

Multiple Assignments or the Idiosyncrasies of R and SAS

Working on top of someone else’s code at work a couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon a piece of SAS code that went like this: View Code SAS1 2 3 length check 3; ... check = Name = 'Netter' Being raised in the land of open-source and having programmed in R since I was in college, that struck me...

LaTeX musings: Avoid eqnarray!?

Today while googling about producing mathematical graphics in LaTeX for the reedition of my Math Handbook, I stumbled upon a page on TUG pointing to an article named Avoid eqnarray!. The article goes on to discuss why it’s a bad idea ™ to use the eqnarray environment (and it’s natural...

Sweave Syntax Highlighting in vim

If you use Sweave and vim, you might have wondered if it’s possible to have it syntax highlight Rnw/Snw files properly : the latex bits with LaTeX syntax and the noweb R chunks with R syntax. It is! Take a look a the screenshot below: In order to have this working, you only need to properly configure...

Creating shaded areas in R

Sometimes we want to shade areas under a density on a graphic, for instance to illustrate a p-value or a region under the normal curve. Using the polygon() function from base R we can make graphics like the following one: How to do it First we have to plot the graphic of the function whose areas we are going...

Flashcards in LaTeX

Vocabulary learning is an essential part of learning a new language, and also a tough exercise for your memory. In order to make this task easier, you should devise some techniques for helping you through memorizing new words and concepts. One usual device is vocabulary flashcards, which are two-sided cards...

vqf2ogg converter

History Some years ago, when mp3 was emerging as a popular audio format, there were also some other audio formats being developed. One of the most promising of them back then was the VQF, or SoundVQ, by Yamaha. It had better compression rates and better quality than mp3 files. A VQF with a 80 kbps bitrate...