mages' blog

googleVis 0.4.4 released with new formatting options for tables

Over the weekend googleVis 0.4.4 found its way to CRAN. The function gvisTable gained a new argument formats that allow users to define the formats numbers displayed in tables. Thanks to J. Buros, who contributed the code.

Example

Session Info

R version 3.0.1 (2013-05-16)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0 (64-bit)

locale:
[1] en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods  
[7] base     

other attached packages:
[1] googleVis_0.4.4

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] RJSONIO_1.0-3 tools_3.0.1 

ChainLadder 0.1.6 released with chain-ladder factor models

Version 0.1.6 of the ChainLadder package has been released and is already available from CRAN.

The new version adds the function CLFMdelta. CLFMdelta finds consistent weighting parameters delta for a vector of selected age-to-age chain-ladder factors for a given run-off triangle.

The added functionality was implemented by Dan Murphy, who is the co-author of the paper A Family of Chain-Ladder Factor Models for Selected Link Ratios by Bardis, Majidi, Murphy. You find a more detailed explanation with R code examples on Dan's blog and see also his slides from the CAS spring meeting.

Slides by Dan Murphy

Installing a SSD drive into a mid-2007 iMac

I have a mid-2007 iMac with a 2.4 GHz Core2Duo processor and despite the fact that it is already six years old, it still does a good job. However, compared to a friend's recent MacBook Air with a solid state disk (SSD) it felt sluggish when opening programmes and loading larger documents.

So, I thought it would be worthwhile to replace the old spinning hard disk drive with an SSD, instead of buying a new computer. I still like the display of the iMac. Hence, I got myself a Samsung 840 SATA drive, as it came with a USB cable and bracket hard drive holder.

It actually wasn't that difficult to replace the hard drive in my iMac. Of course I can give no guarantee that this works for you as well. Here are the steps I took:

• Connected the new SSD via USB to my iMac
• Cloned old internal hard drive to new SSD, using Carbon Copy Cloner
• Tested new SSD extensively. Booted the Mac from the new SSD connected externally via USB.
• Followed iFixit guide and replaced hard drive
• Crossed my fingers and switched my iMac on again.

So far I am really happy with the new SSD. Applications are opening much faster and overall the computer feels much snappier. It looks like it can serve me quite a little longer.

Here are a few pictures of the surgery:

iMac with glass panel and bezel removed

Display and hard drive removed

New SSD and old HDD

Screen shot of the new system preferences

Setting axes limits with googleVis

I posted about the various googleVis axis options for base charts, such as line, bar and area charts earlier, but I somehow forgot to mention how to set the axes limits.

Unfortunately, there are no arguments such as ylim and xlim. Instead, the Google Charts axes options are set via hAxes and vAxes, with h and v indicating the horizontal and vertical axis. More precisely, I have to set viewWindowMode : 'explicit' and set the viewWindow to the desired min and max values. Additionally, I have to wrap all of this in [{}] brackets as those settings are sub-options of h/vAxes. There are also options minValue and maxValue, but they only allow you to extend the axes ranges.

Here is a minimal example, setting the y-axis limits from 0 to 10:




With more than one variable to plot I can use the series argument to decide which variables I want on the left and right axes and set the viewWindow accordingly. Again, here is a minimal example:

Session Info

sessionInfo()
R version 3.0.1 (2013-05-16)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0 (64-bit)

locale:
[1] en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] googleVis_0.4.3

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] RJSONIO_1.0-3