I started using the Fancy Categories plugin by Andrew Rader about 6 or 8 months ago. I have been slowly modifying it for some time now, and it seems appropriate to release it as a new plugin. (Note that I thought that Andrew Rader disappeared as well, but I now have found him at his new home at void*. The functionality is best described by simply looking at my categories list on this blog. The default wordpress categories list is […] (Read more)

I am working on learning R. For those that don’t know, R is a programming language and program a bit similar to Matlab, but is particularly designed for statistics. It is free and open source, and pretty fast and flexible. It has a pretty nice library interface, with lots of user contributed libraries at CRAN (The comprehensive R archive network — modeled after CTAN and CPAN (Tex and Perl respectively)). On *nix systems, R uses the readline library to give […] (Read more)

I upgraded my home computer from kubuntu Feisty to Gutsy yesterday. This was actually my second attempt. I tried once a couple weeks ago, but my satellite internet connection crapped out after downloading about 95% of the packages, and the upgrade process quit. So I decided to download a .iso at work and burn it. The first thing I tried was putting in the DVD and booting the computer. After playing around with the install a bit, it became clear […] (Read more)

The new lab I work in at Indiana University has an annual progress report, with its own stylesheet. There is a template available for Microsoft Word, but I much prefer LaTeX, so I am trying to write my own class file for that. One of the quirks of the stylesheet is that footnotes from the title are numbered. To clarify what I mean, consider the fact that many journal articles include a footnote or two in the title or author […] (Read more)

I am working on doing some monte carlo simulations. I want to do a particular manipulation n times, but I want to constrain what I do based on three parameters, x, y, and z, which are probability distributions coded as arrays. For example, if I want to run this simulation 1000 times, then 24 should be xayaza, 24 xayazb, 72 xaybzc and so on. My code seems to work right when everything is integers, but not when some of the […] (Read more)