indywikia – explore Wikipedia visually -

indywikia is a great tool to browse through Wikipedia. But instead of reading through a plenthora of text one can discover Wikipedia visually. Its easy to integrate it in a GNU/Linux KDE desktop. Just make sure

Python and
PyQt4

are installed. Download the latest package from the indywikia project site and place the unpacked folder somewhere on your computer. I have chosen to place it as a hidden folder in my home directory (/home/YOUR_USERNAME/.indywikia/).
To call it from K-menu just create a new entry. In my case I put it the section “Internet”.

The corresponding “command” is:

/usr/bin/python /home/YOUR_USERNAME/.indywikia/indywikia.py

To use the icon in the indywikia folder you need to convert them. I quickly did this by “convert“

cd /home/YOUR_USERNAME/.indywikia/
convert icon.jpg icon.png

from imagemagick but any other tool should also do the trick.

RKWard 0.4.8 Final released

Today RKWard 0.4.8 was released. Several optimizations were done to speed up some aspects, slightly, and to reduce typical memory usage. The complete list of changes include:

User visible additions / improvements:
* New plugins: pie chart, dot chart, crosstabulation, two time-series tests, and basic linear regression
* barplot plugin allow specification of custom labels
* graphics export plugin gains option for EPS compatibility
* CLT plugins allow drawing grid
* commands run through the console from the script editor will now be added to the command history (this can be turned off in the settings)
* object viewer also shows summary information, gains an update button, and MDI integration
* add max.print option to R-Backend settings dialog
* all file selection line edits gain filename-completion
* add a basic file selector window
* show the focus indication (thin red border) also for detached windows
* tool windows can be closed and detached in the same way as regular windows
* Messages, warnings, and errors for plugin commands are shown in the output, instead of in a dialog
* new translation: Simplified Chinese (contributed by Roy Qu)

Bug fixes:
* fixed: promise objects (created by delayedAssign()) directly in globalenv() would be forced early
* make wrapper script work, when konsole is not installed
* correct syntax highlighting for ::: and NA_integer_ and others
* fixed: crash when editing a data.frame with logicals (logicals are still mishandled, but less severe)
* fixed: would not work with R 2.6
* more compilation fixes for GCC 4.3
* fixed: inserting / removing rows in the data editor in the presence of invalid fields in later rows would lead to a crash
* fix some internal problems with enabledness/disabledness of plugin components
* fixed: sometimes detecting created X11() windows would fail, esp. under high load
* fix a crash with detached tool windows

Optimizations:
* syntax highlighting is minimally faster for long outputs
* some complex plotting plugins now start up noticeably faster
* create the workspace browser only when it is first shown
* add possibility to blacklist packages from fetching structure information. Package GO is blacklisted by default.
* when fetching the structure of “promise” R objects, don’t keep them in memory
* optimize the function to retrieve the structure of R objects (for display in the object browser, and completion)

Miscellanious / internal:
* silence some GCC 4.2 warnings
* support for including files and snippets in xml files
* add command line option –disable-stack-check for systems where R C stack checking is buggy
* the modifier “not” for boolean properties returns a (negated) boolean sub-propery instead of just a string

Konqueror Web Shortcuts & Google Scholar & Medline/Pubmed

If you use Konqueror you might also be a user of Konqueror Web Shortcuts. To use them for Google Scholar and Medline/Pubmed
you need to add the strings found here.

Universal Access to Human Knowledge

While searching for some movies of the past (e.g. Nosferatu) I stumbled over a rather interresting internet archive. Namely archive.org. It’s a non-profit internet library providing access for everybody to historical collections that exist in digital format. Moreover it’s free to use (free as in “free speech”, and as in “free beer”), though donations are wellcome.

RKWard 0.4.8

After a rather long period of silence I’m happy to tell that the next release of RKWard (v. 0.4.8) is going to happen soon. This release will include some new and enhanced plug-ins, changes to the core of RKWard and of course bugfixes.

RKWard 0.4.6

Today RKWard 0.4.6. was released. This was a quite fast release (less than a month after the last one) which brings quite a lot new features and fixes to RKWard. Most notebale in my opinion are:

* import of SPSS files
* many new distribution plug-ins and improvements to existing
* support for preview functionality in graphing plugins
* some new tests
* many new plot types
* a rather good help

This makes, to my knowledge, RKWard by far the most feature rich GUI to R. However it’s needless to mention everything here. As usual you can find all important information and downloads at RKWard.

music for one apartment and six drummers

Is it possible to make music with one apartment and six drummers? Yes it is. Amazingly most of it sounds like real instruments (whatever this means). Enjoy it!

R tutorials, manuals, examples and help

This will become a little collection of links to R tutorials and manuals which I found to be useful.

Manuals and Tutorials
PDF

* Statistics with R by Vincent Zoonekynd ~ 21.5 MB
* Using R for Data Analysis and Graphics Introduction, Code and Commentary by J H Maindonald ~ 1.4 MB
* simpleR – Using R for Introductory Statistics by
John Verzani ~ 2.1 MB

Help and Examples
HTML

* Rpad
* Creating Graphs with R

Blogg about R

Today I found a rather good blogg about R. It will cover a lot of questions beginners will have and moreover directs you to some interesting sources for other R-related stuff.

asciidoc

Some days ago I found accidentally an article about AsciiDoc. It seem to be a handy tool for writing short documents like articles, books and man pages. It is a text document format and can be translated to HTML and DocBook markups. You can find some examples on AsciiDoc homepage which demonstrate the capabilities of AsciiDoc.