technical steps

After procrastinating as much as feasible, I switched at last to (K)Ubuntu 22.04, Jammy Jellyfish, after security updates stopped for the 20.04 version. While this proceeded mostly without hiccups, the upgrade stalled when upgrading Firefox, which I had foolishly left open. When I turned it off and completed the upgrade, this erased all of my Firefox personal profile… Rather than copying my latest backup, I recovered most of the Firefox profile by syncing from another computer, although that. This was (recklessly) the very day before I flew to KAUST and, upon arriving there, I found out the associated version of beamer (3.65) had an issue, with colours (xcolor). Problem that I brute forced by downloading all files of the latest version (3.70), since a direct upgrade of beamer did not seem feasible… I have now recovered most of my (updated) passwords and my favourite commands are again running. (As a coincidence, I also recently bought a Garmin watch for training, which definitely helps for faster sessions—with possibly side effects on my cycling trips as I am trying to raise my average speed—although I  find the battery life ridiculously small.)

battery recharged!

busted!

My 2017 EliteBook HP laptop broke in the most bizarre fashion, in that the battery started inflating to the point of pushing the back cover (and stopped functioning as well). It happened at the worst moment, of course, as I was boarding a train to Brittany for family matters, whose power plug kept cutting every five minutes. I did not realise the entire issue with the battery until I reached my final destination and rushed to a computer repair shop, which did not want to do anything on the spot (of course!) but pointed out to me the problem with the back cover.  Which I removed a few minutes later in a lawnmower repair shop, held by a dear cousin of mine. Now, the laptop is still working, but waiting for a new battery I ordered as soon as I saw the state of the old one..!

web [mis-]content

For the past two weeks, I have noticed a web content process on my computer, process that eats a lot of my CPU! And I have not found any final solution when looking on Linux/Ubuntu fora/forums… Moving to a new [and neat] laptop [as the older one broke an hinge that could not be fixed!] did not help, while killing the process by itself saw this very tab vanish on Firefox and the process reappear a few seconds later. Solving this issue seems beyond my reach!

Extending R

As I was previously unaware of this book coming up, my surprise and excitement were both extreme when I received it from CRC Press a few weeks ago! John Chambers, one of the fathers of S, precursor of R, had just published a book about extending R. It covers some reflections of the author on programming and the story of R (Parts 2 and 1),  and then focus on object-oriented programming (Part 3) and the interfaces from R to other languages (Part 4). While this is “only” a programming book, and thus not strictly appealing to statisticians, reading one of the original actors’ thoughts on the past, present, and future of R is simply fantastic!!! And John Chambers is definitely not calling to simply start over and build something better, as Ross Ihaka did in this [most read] post a few years ago. (It is also great to see the names of friends appearing at times, like Julie, Luke, and Duncan!)

“I wrote most of the original software for S3 methods, which were useful for their application, in the early 1990s.”

In the (hi)story part, Chambers delves into the details of the evolution of S at Bells Labs, as described in his [first]  “blue book” (which I kept on my shelf until very recently, next to the “white book“!) and of the occurrence of R in the mid-1990s. I find those sections fascinating maybe the more because I am somewhat of a contemporary, having first learned Fortran (and Pascal) in the mid-1980’s, before moving in the early 1990s to C (that I mostly coded as translated Pascal!), S-plus and eventually R, in conjunction with a (forced) migration from Unix to Linux, as my local computer managers abandoned Unix and mainframe in favour of some virtual Windows machines. And as I started running R on laptops with the help of friends more skilled than I (again keeping some of the early R manuals on my shelf until recently). Maybe one of the most surprising things about those reminiscences is that the very first version of R was dated Feb 29, 2000! Not because of Feb 29, 2000 (which, as Chambers points out, is the first use of the third-order correction to the Gregorian calendar, although I would have thought 1600 was the first one), but because I would have thought it appeared earlier, in conjunction with my first Linux laptop, but this memory is alas getting too vague!

As indicated above, the book is mostly about programming, which means in my case that some sections are definitely beyond my reach! For instance, reading “the onus is on the person writing the calling function to avoid using a reference object as the argument to an existing function that expects a named list” is not immediately clear… Nonetheless, most sections are readable [at my level] and enlightening about the mottoes “everything that exists is an object” and “everything that happens is a function” repeated throughout.  (And about my psycho-rigid ways of translating Pascal into every other language!) I obviously learned about new commands and notions, like the difference between

x <- 3

and

x <<- 3

(but I was disappointed to learn that the number of <‘s was not related with the depth or height of the allocation!) In particular, I found the part about replacement fascinating, explaining how a command like

diag(x)[i] = 3

could modify x directly. (While definitely worth reading, the chapter on R packages could have benefited from more details. But as Chambers points out there are whole books about this.) Overall, I am afraid the book will not improve my (limited) way of programming in R but I definitely recommend it to anyone even moderately skilled in the language.