librestats

I had been meaning to start toying with the igraph package for a while. So a few weeks ago (lay off, I'm busy), I decided to grab a bunch of CRAN data about package dependencies. The easiest way that I could think to get this information was to just grab the html files for all the package descriptions and chop through them. Quick note before I forget: I'm not looking at any base packages. Only Read more >>

Background (probably boring) Several months ago, my boss and I were discussing how he got the data for his software popularity article; the rest of the background discussion pertains to those plots, so I would recommend going over to take a look before continuing on (or just skip to the next section if you're impatient).  Specifically, we were talking about his figures 7 and 11.  Basically he was Read more >>

So that mean old boss of mine is at it again.  This morning I came in beaming about how many people had read my post How Much of R is Written in R (thanks by the way!).  He then asks me about one little line in that post; the one about how if you looked at the contributed packages, you'd overwhelmingly see them written in R, and that this is what really matters. He asked if I had bothered to verify Read more >>

My boss sent me an email (on my day off!) asking me just how much of R is written in the R language. This is very simple if you use R and a Unix-like system. It also gives me a good excuse to defend the title of this blog. It's librestats, not projecteulerstats, afterall. So I grabbed the R-2.13.1 source package from the cran and wrote up a little script that would look at all .R, .c, and .f Read more >>

Problem: Find the greatest product of five consecutive digits in the 1000-digit number. Commentary: So this solution is probably a little non-standard. I've actually got a huge blog post coming up about the little "trick" I use here, so I won't go into it at length just yet. But before we go into the "trick", I want to explain why it is that I'm doing the weird crap that I'm doing--afterwards Read more >>