Disqus - Latest Comments for mrdwab

Re: Preserve image positioning when switching between 4x3 and 16x9 — PowerPoint templates and presentation design services

mrdwab — Wed, 15 Jul 2020 01:33:36 -0000

In web design, this is usually referred to as using focal points, and is a technique that's used for dealing with responsive web designs. See examples here and here. Perhaps that could save one from having to keep two sets of images.

Re: A sample size calculator function for R

mrdwab — Wed, 02 Mar 2016 21:38:16 -0000

Thanks. I'm not sure that I'll end up putting it on CRAN, but I've been playing with Shiny a bit, and was thinking perhaps I would just create an app for it.

Re: The Spaniard

mrdwab — Sat, 10 Oct 2015 00:38:44 -0000

Here it is:

-------------------

That day I told Anand's grandmother what he and Shirvan had seen. Without hesitation she said "The Spaniard".

There used to be a huge, ancient Governor Cherry tree where our house now stands: it was easily 40 feet tall and its branches spread as wide. The story went that when Christopher Columbus stopped to caulk his leaking ships at the Trinidad pitch lake, this Spaniard went to explore, and found this tree to rest under. The ships left, but the Spaniard remained, making garden in the mornings, resting in the trees' shade in the afternoons, and talking with the locals under its branches at night. He lived in the village until he was old, and died. Out of respect for this adopted stranger, the villagers started making an offering to him every year, of a plate of ground provisions, a freshly killed rooster, and a bottle of rum.

The land became the property of Anandas' great-grandfather, and he continued the tradition of offering food to the Spaniard each Pitr Pak. In time, Anand's grandmother took over this tradition.

When Anand's father was ready to build his own house, they decided it should be next door to his mother's. But the tree was too close to the road to put the house in front of it; and the land dropped behind the tree and would it be a lot of work to level the area. So the tree was cut down, and the house built in its spot.

For 3 or 4 years the grandmother continued to make the offering at the back of the house. But times were changing, and there were many young grandchildren in the two houses to keep the grandmother busy. When she would play with them, telling stories and singing Hindu bhajans, her sons would scold her for being old fashioned, and eventually, as she dropped these customs, she forgot about the Spaniard as well.

Now she went to the village pundit, Baldath Baba, for assistance. She was worried that the Spaniard had come for Shirvan because of his clear skin and green eyes: perhaps he mistook him for one of his own people. So Maa and Baba told the two brothers to go spend the evening in the lagoon with their older brother, then went to the back of Anand's house. They swept the yard and sprinkled water, removed all the laundry and washing tubs, till everything was clean and tidy. Then they took their offerings and performed a puja: there were the ground provisions, the freshly killed rooster, and the bottle of rum; there were flowers and incense and candles. These they lit, and sat down and spoke to the Spaniard, begging him not to hurt the children, apologizing for forgetting to "pay tribute". Then they told him how times were changing, and told him he would be better off finally leaving this place; that Shirvan's big brother, who he had seen that night, would look after the child, so the Spaniard was now free to return to the Old Country, because they would not be making this offering again.

And that was that.

Re: The Spaniard

mrdwab — Fri, 09 Oct 2015 01:19:17 -0000

Axle says she has her version of the story to share. Looking forward to it :-)

Re: Saranomy Dev

mrdwab — Fri, 13 Feb 2015 02:45:14 -0000

Is there a way to specify the seed used rather than randomizing a new seed each time a number is generated?

Re: You Do Not Need to Tell Me I Have A Typo in My Documentation

mrdwab — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 08:19:41 -0000

I understood your intent, but couldn't resist the comment :)

Re: You Do Not Need to Tell Me I Have A Typo in My Documentation

mrdwab — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 10:02:02 -0000

You have a typo in your flowchart. Shouldn't it be "I have a typo in my documentation"? :p

Re: What exactly is “elegant” code in R?

mrdwab — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 02:58:34 -0000

Fellow Stack Exchange user and co-author of "R for Dummies", Andrie, shared the attached comic as his answer. (Caption: The only valid measurement of code quality: WTFs/minute.)

Re: Making an A6 booklet in OpenOffice.org the easy way

mrdwab — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 09:15:34 -0000

No problem. But A6 booklets are tiny and are probably not the best for printing manuals. A5 is much more appropriate for that.

Re: Stratified random sampling in R from a data frame

mrdwab — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 23:27:55 -0000

No problem! I hope you have also checked out the updated version at Stackoverflow (http://stackoverflow.com/a/... which makes use of the "sampling" package.

Re: Graphics: Power of graphics in knitr | knitr

mrdwab — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 00:02:17 -0000

I do use LyX, but I really like the integration between document creation and R in RStudio, where I can directly run code from an R markdown code chunk to make sure that everything in that chunk is working as expected. I guess that since I don't use the HTML export too often, it's more of a convenience factor of not having two programs open!

I'll definitely check out your templates though.

Re: Graphics: Power of graphics in knitr | knitr

mrdwab — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 07:49:15 -0000

I really like knitr and I currently use it as follows: (1) create an R-markdown file in RStudio, (2) use "knit html", and (3) use pandoc to convert the markdown file to a PDF. For me, this is a pretty efficient workflow and generally gets me the output I expect.

I also like the tufte LaTeX classes, which you have used in this manual.

I haven't been able to get the tufte classes to work as I expect them in this workflow though, and I'm not really sure where to seek help (you, RStudio, or pandoc). Things like \marginnote do work, but they don't parse the markdown or code chunks in them. In other words, I can get a basic document without a problem, but only without the bells-and-whistles of the tufte classes.

If you can point me in the right direction or suggest an improved workflow, that would be great! I suspect that the problem might be at the pandoc level, and that solving it would require creating a new template for pandoc, but I thought I would ask here first to see if such a thing has already been done.

Re: Code Externalization: Use an external R script with your document | knitr

mrdwab — Sat, 14 Jul 2012 01:18:32 -0000

Ok. Got it working.

Perhaps it would be useful to mention that the title and author declarations in markdown should come before set-options for proper PDF generation.

% title
% author

```{r set-options, echo=FALSE, cache=FALSE}
read_chunk(...)
```

Re: Code Externalization: Use an external R script with your document | knitr

mrdwab — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 13:49:08 -0000

Is there a way to do this with R markdown in RStudio? Currently I use ```{r echo=FALSE, eval=TRUE, comment=NA}
writeLines(readLines("path-to-r-script.R"))
```

Re: http://rpubs.com/gallery/googleVis

mrdwab — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 23:31:53 -0000

But the rank sorting needs to be fixed...

Re: Stratified random sampling in R from a data frame

mrdwab — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 14:31:34 -0000

After almost a year, I've updated this function thanks to something I noted on StackOverflow:

See: http://stackoverflow.com/a/...

I'll probably post an update on this blog too.

Re: Stratified random sampling in R from a data frame

mrdwab — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:26:05 -0000

Hi. I hope you have found the function useful.

It sounds like you've solved the problem you were having, but I'm not sure I understand your follow up response here. Do you have an example you can share?

Re: Using the reshape package in R for pivot-table-like functionality

mrdwab — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 14:35:32 -0000

I still need to get to grips with plyr (pun intended?), but it appears it could also help with the wide-to-long reshape example. That example isn't a simple transpose example though--if it were, the dimensions of the output would be the same as the input, but with the lengths of the rows and columns switched.

Re: Quickly reshaping data from “wide” to “long” formats in R

mrdwab — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 14:27:08 -0000

Thanks!

I know it's not exactly useless knowledge, but honestly speaking, I don't need R or much data organizing/manipulating/analyzing skills in my work... hence the "useless knowledge" part. This is more something I do out of a personal interest to learn and explore things that I find interesting, and hopefully share what I've found in a way that others might find useful.

Re: We 2 Ours 1-1

mrdwab — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 12:58:08 -0000

Glad you enjoyed it. I enjoyed making it!

Re: The new sample size calculator for R (already)

mrdwab — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 12:47:16 -0000

You're welcome.

Just out of curiosity, do you use R at your work? I'm curious about R's uptake in India's professional sector.

Re: Stratified random sampling in R from a data frame

mrdwab — Fri, 20 May 2011 14:56:46 -0000

Of course, standard tricks can also be used. For instance, if you wanted to take a sample of only groups "CA" and "NY" and drop "TX", you can use the following:

> stratified(dat[dat$E!="TX",], 1, 5, .1, 1)
   A  B           C   D  E
2 36 DD  0.33295037 0.2 CA
4 44 CC  0.70021365 0.8 CA
1 23 DD  0.61072635 0.5 NY
3 37 DD  1.06309984 1.5 NY
5 52 EE  0.04211587 1.7 NY
6 91 BB -1.91435943 0.7 NY

Re: New (old) Pictures

mrdwab — Sun, 15 May 2011 09:44:11 -0000

Links have been updated to redirect to the newest photo site on mrdwab.com.... Self-hosting photos has been a pain.

Re: Exciting day!

mrdwab — Sun, 15 May 2011 09:34:09 -0000

Well, the site is gone, but she Amy has moved on to much bigger things at http://tnsms.org. Be sure to check it out!

Re: Using the reshape package in R for pivot-table-like functionality

mrdwab — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 12:08:11 -0000

Mauricio,

I'm not sure I understand entirely what you're looking for. Can you provide an example of the raw data and describe what you want to end up with?