Life is sweet. Yesterday a friend came by. He had purchased a Macbook Pro, and wanted to me his Levovo T60 that he no longer needed. Today Garth Sheldon-Coulson announced Clojuratica, an interface between Clojure and Mathematica. This is the stuff that software dreams are made of.
Archives for tools
Rebinding Mathematica keys
Out of the box, Mathematica expects the user to press the SHIFT-RETURN to trigger the evaluation of an expression. Because of my hard-wired emacs reflexes, I frequently type CONTROL-RETURN instead. Today I finally did something about that. I rebound the SHIFT-RETURN sequence.
Mathematica does not make that easy to do. I found nothing [...]
Selecting random observations from SAS datasets
Here are some simple ways to extract various types of random samples from SAS datasets, using only base SAS.
Sampling without replacement.
A simple way to select N random elements from a dataset without replacement is to first randomly permute the dataset, and then take the first N elements of the permuted dataset. The process of permuting [...]
Too lazy to flip coins
I was helping my daughter with some math homework; one of the problems was to flip three coins and tabulate the number of heads over the course of eighty trials. This struck me as excessively tedious, so I suggested we write a computer simulation instead.
Here it is, in its full glory:
coin := Random[Integer, {0, 1}]
flips [...]
Mirroring an SVN repository
One advantage of a distributed version control system such as Mercurial is that any clone of a project is complete. The clone contains the entire history of the project. That makes backing up a repository trivial.
Not so for a centralized vcs such as Subversion. If you check out a copy of a project, you [...]
leo font rendering woes
It has been months since I converted my work machine from Windows XP to Ubuntu Hardy. There is only one program I miss, the fabulous Leo text editor. Leo is not just a text editor. If it were only that I would have little use for Leo, since I already use Emacs, the one true [...]
Playing with EC2
I’ve been reading the buzz about Amazon’s EC2 technology for a while, and have finally gotten an opportunity to work with it. Basically, I am using virtual machines as test boxes/clusters for a new product release.
So far I am impressed by rich ecosystem that has evolved around EC2, including many machine images and [...]
man page support in erlang-mode
I want to record what I had to do to get man page support working correctly in emacs erlang-mode under Ubuntu Hardy Heron.
First, set the erlang root directory for erlang-mode:
(setq erlang-root-dir “/usr/lib/erlang”)
Next put a symbolic link to the man pages in the erlang root directory.
cd /usr/lib/erlang
sudo rmdir man #the man dir installed by [...]
Mount a gateway-accessed server using MacFuse
It’s been a while since I posted, mostly because I have been swamped at work. But I ran across a sweet tip I want to document. Macosxhints ran a brief article called Mount a gateway-accessed server directly using MacFUSE. That sounded really handy to me, but I had to modify their instructions to get [...]
A virtual domain controller
I want to give props to the fine folks at VMWare. Their products helped me to solve a nagging and difficult problem, quickly and cheaply.
This was the problem. I work at a small java development shop which started with a Windows infrastructure. Back in around 1999 or 2000 someone set up a box to act [...]
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