And yet another upstream Armadillo update -- version 5.600.2 was released yesterday by Conrad. So I pushed a new and matching RcppArmadillo release 0.5.600.2.0 to CRAN and to Debian. Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. This release contains small upstream improvements:

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.5.600.2.0 (2015-09-19)

• Upgraded to Armadillo 5.600.2 ("Molotov Cocktail Deluxe")
  • expanded .each_col() and .each_row() to handle out-of-place operations
  • added .each_slice() for repeated matrix operations on each slice of a cube
  • faster handling of compound expressions by join_rows() and join_cols()

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent CRAN release. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Once again time for the monthly upstream Armadillo update -- version 5.500.2 was released earlier today by Conrad. And a new and matching RcppArmadillo release 0.5.500.2.0 in already on CRAN and will go to Debian shortly. Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. This release contains mostly bug fixes and some internal code refactoring:

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.5.500.2.0 (2015-09-03)

• Upgraded to Armadillo 5.500.2 ("Molotov Cocktail")
  • expanded object constructors and generators to handle size() based specification of dimensions
  • faster handling of submatrix rows
  • faster clamp()
  • fixes for handling sparse matrices

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent CRAN release. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Review: Kanban, by David J. Anderson

Publisher:	Blue Hole
Copyright:	2010
ISBN:	0-9845214-0-2
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	240

Another belated review, this time of a borrowed book. Which I can now finally return! A delay in the review of this book might be a feature if I had actually used it for, as the subtitle puts it, successful evolutionary change in my technology business. Sadly, I haven't, so it's just late. So, my background: I've done a lot of variations of traditional project management for IT projects (both development and more operational ones), both as a participant and as a project manager. (Although I've never done the latter as a full-time job, and have no desire to do so.) A while back at Stanford, my team adopted Agile, specifically Scrum, so I did a fair bit of research about Scrum including a couple of training courses. Since then, at Dropbox, I've used a few different variations on a vaguely Agile-inspired planning process, although it's not particularly consistent with any one system. I've been hearing about Kanban for a while and have friends who swear by it, but I only had a vague idea of how it worked. That seemed like a good excuse to read a book. And Anderson's book is a good one if, like me, you're looking for a basic introduction. It opens with a basic description and definition, talks about motivation and the expected benefits, and then provides a detailed description of Kanban as a system. The tone is on the theory side, written using the terminology of (I presume) management theory and operations management, areas about which I know almost nothing, but the terminology wasn't so heavy as to make the book hard to read. Anderson goes into lots of detail, and I thought he did a good job of distinguishing between basic principles, optional techniques, and variations that may be appropriate for particular environments. If you're also not familiar, the basic concept of Kanban is to organize work using an in-progress queue. It eschews time-bounded planning entirely in favor of staging work at the start of a sequence of queues and letting the people working on each queue pull from the previous queue when they're ready to take on a new task. As you might guess from that layout, Kanban was originally invented for assembly-line manufacturing (at Toyota). That was one of the problems that I had with it, or at least the presentation in this book: most of my software development doesn't involve finishing one part of something and handing it off to someone else, which made it hard to identify with the pipeline model. Anderson has clearly spent a lot of time working with large-scale programming shops, including outsourced development firms, with dedicated QA and operations roles. This is not at all how Silicon Valley agile development works, so parts of this book felt like missives from a foreign country. That said, the key point of Kanban is not the assembly line but the work limit. One of the defining characteristics of Kanban, at least as Anderson presents it, is that one does not try to estimate work and tile it based on estimates, not even to the extent that Scrum and other Agile methodologies do within the sprint. Instead, each person takes as long as they take on the things they're working on, and pulls a new task when they have free capacity. The system instead puts a limit on how many things they can have in progress at a time. The problem of pipeline stalls is dealt with both via continuous improvement and "swarming" of a problem to unblock the line (since other teams may not be able to work until the block is fixed), and with being careful about the sizing of work items (I'm used to calling them stories) that go in the front end. Predictability, which Scrum uses story sizing and team velocity analysis to try to achieve, is basically statistical. One uses a small number of buckets of sizes of stories, and the whole pipeline will finish some number of work items per unit time, with a variance. The promise made to clients and other teams is that some percentage of the work items will be finished within some time frame from when they enter the system. Most importantly, these are all descriptive properties, determined statistically after the fact, rather than planned properties worked out through story sizing and extensive team discussion. If you, like me, are pretty thoroughly sick of two-hour sprint planning meetings and endless sizing exercises, this is rather appealing. My problem with most work planning systems is that I think they overplan and put too much weight our ability to estimate how long work will take. Kanban is very appealing when viewed through that lens: it gives up on things we're bad at in favor of simple measurement and building a system with enough slack that it can handle work of various different sizes. As mentioned at the top, I haven't had a chance to try it (and I'm not sure it's a good fit with the inter-group planning methods in use at my current workplace), but I came away from this book wanting to do so. If, like me, your experience is mostly with small combined teams or individual programming work, Anderson's examples may seem rather large, rather formal, and bureaucratic. But this is a solid introduction and well worth reading if your only experience with Agile is sprint planning, story writing and sizing, and fast iterations. Rating: 7 out of 10

A new Armadillo release 5.400.2 was just released by Conrad. Consequently, a new RcppArmadillo release 0.5.400.2.0 went out to CRAN and into Debian. Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. This release contains the following extensions:

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.5.400.2.0 (2015-08-17)

• Upgraded to Armadillo 5.400.2 ("Plutocracy Incorporated Deluxe")
  • added find_unique() for finding indices of unique values
  • added diff() for calculating differences between consecutive elements
  • added cumprod() for calculating cumulative product
  • added null() for finding the orthonormal basis of null space
  • expanded interp1() to handle repeated locations
  • expanded unique() to handle complex numbers
  • faster flupud()
  • faster row-wise cumsum()
  • fix for k-means clustering in gmm_diag class
• corrected use of kitten() thanks to Grant Brown

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent CRAN release. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

A new Armadillo release 5.300.4 was prepared by Conrad the other day, and we prepared a new corresponding RcppArmadillo release 0.5.300.4.0 which is now on CRAN and in way into Debian. Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. This release brings a considerable amount of new code extending support for sparse matrices, support for Schur decompositions, and much more as shown in the extract from NEWS file:

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.5.300.4 (2015-08-03)

• Upgraded to Armadillo 5.300.4 ("Plutocrazy Incorporated")
  • added generalised Schur decomposition: qz()
  • added .has_inf() and .has_nan()
  • expanded interp1() to handle out-of-domain locations
  • expanded sparse matrix class with .set_imag() and .set_real()
  • expanded imag(), real() and conj() to handle sparse matrices
  • expanded diagmat(), reshape() and resize() to handle sparse matrices
  • faster sparse sum()
  • faster row-wise sum(), mean(), min(), max()
  • updated physical constants to NIST 2014 CODATA values
  • fixes for handling sparse submatrix views
  • Armadillo can make use of GPUs by linking with NVIDIA NVBLAS (a GPU-accelerated implementation of BLAS), or by linking with AMD ACML (which can use GPUs via OpenCL)
• Added importFrom statements for R functions not from base
• Added explicit Rcpp::sourceCpp() reference as well
• Updated one formatting detail in vignette to please TeXlive2015

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent CRAN release. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Conrad put out a new minor release 5.200.1 of Armadillo yesterday. Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. Our corresponding RcppArmadillo release 0.5.200.1.0 is now on CRAN and on its way into Debian. See below for the brief list of changes.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.5.200.1.0 (2015-06-04)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 5.200.1 ("Boston Tea Smuggler")
  • added orth() for finding the orthonormal basis of the range space of a matrix
  • expanded element initialisation to handle nested initialiser lists (C++11)
  • workarounds for bugs in GCC, Intel and MSVC C++ compilers
• Added another example to inst/examples/fastLm.r

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent CRAN release. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

A new minor release 5.100.1 of Armadillo was released by Conrad yesterday. Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. Our corresponding RcppArmadillo release 0.5.100.1.0 also reached CRAN and Debian yesterday. See below for the brief list of changes.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.5.100.1.0 (2015-05-01)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 5.100.1 ("Ankle Biter Deluxe")
  • added interp1() for 1D interpolation
  • added .is_sorted() for checking whether a vector or matrix has sorted elements
  • updated physical constants to NIST 2010 CODATA values

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent CRAN release. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

A new major version 5.000 of Armadillo was released by Conrad a couple of days ago. Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. This version brings several new functions for sparse matrices, and automagically switches to 64-bit matrix indices in C++11 mode. See below for a short description of all the major changes based on the NEWS.Rd file. This version is now on CRAN, as well as in Debian. The integration into CRAN was delayed by a few days as my testing had a shortcoming. We run full reverse-dependency checks against all 115 CRAN package depending in RcppArmadillo, and we even made full pre-release 0.4.999.1 and 0.5.000.0 shipped to the drat repo of the RcppCore GitHub organization (which was described in the previous release post). But a minor flaw in my setup made it miss how the change in indexing affected packages dfcomb and dfmta. My thanks to its maintainer Marie-Karelle Riviere for providing updates to her packages permitting this release to get onto CRAN. The testing process has been tightened and this should not happen again.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.5.000.0 (2015-04-12)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release Version 5.000 ("Ankle Biter")
  • added spsolve() for solving sparse systems of linear equations
  • added svds() for singular value decomposition of sparse matrices
  • added nonzeros() for extracting non-zero values from matrices
  • added handling of diagonal views by sparse matrices
  • expanded repmat() to handle sparse matrices
  • expanded join_rows() and join_cols() to handle sparse matrices
  • sort_index() and stable_sort_index() have been placed in the delayed operations framework for increased efficiency
  • use of 64 bit integers is automatically enabled when using a C++11 compiler
  • workaround for a bug in recent releases of Apple Xcode
  • workaround for a bug in LAPACK 3.5

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.4.999.1.0 (2015-04-04)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release preview 4.999.1
• Non-CRAN test release

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent CRAN release. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

A new Armadillo release 4.650.1 was released by Conrad a few days ago. Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. It turned out that this release had one shortcoming with respect to the C++11 RNG initializations in the R use case (where we need to protect the users from the C++98 RNG deemed unsuitable by the CRAN gatekeepers). And this lead to upstream release 4.650.1 which we wrapped into RcppArmadillo 0.4.650.1.1. As before this, was tested against all 107 reverse dependencies of RcppArmadillo on the CRAN repo. This version is now on CRAN, and was just uploaded to Debian. Its changes are summarized below based on the NEWS.Rd file.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.4.650.1.1 (2015-02-25)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release Version 4.650.1 ("Intravenous Caffeine Injector")
  • added randg() for generating random values from gamma distributions (C++11 only)
  • added .head_rows() and .tail_rows() to submatrix views
  • added .head_cols() and .tail_cols() to submatrix views
  • expanded eigs_sym() to optionally calculate eigenvalues with smallest/largest algebraic values fixes for handling of sparse matrices
• Applied small correction to main header file to set up C++11 RNG whether or not the alternate RNG (based on R, our default) is used

Now, it turns out that another small fix was needed for the corner case of a submatrix within a submatrix, ie V.subvec(1,10).tail(5). I decided not to re-release this to CRAN given the CRAN Repository Policy preference for releases no more than every 1 2 months . But fear not, for we now have drat. I created a drat package repository in the RcppCore account (to not put a larger package into my main drat repository often used via a fork to initialize a drat). So now with these two simple commands

## if needed, first install 'drat' via:   install.packages("drat")
drat:::add("RcppCore")
update.packages()

you will get the newest RcppArmadillo via this drat package repository. And course install.packages("RcppArmadillo") would also work, but takes longer to type :) Lastly, courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent CRAN release. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Conrad put up a maintenance release 4.600.4 of Armadillo a few days ago. As in the past, we tested this with number of pre-releases and test builds against the now over one hundred CRAN dependents of our RcppArmadillo package. The tests passed fine as usual, and results are as always in the rcpp-logs repository. Changes are summarized below based on the NEWS.Rd file.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.4.600.4.0 (2015-01-23)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release Version 4.600.4 (still "Off The Reservation")
  • Speedups in the transpose operation
  • Small bug fixes

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Conrad produced another minor release 4.600 of Armadillo. As before, I had created a GitHub-only pre-release(s) of his pre-release(s), and tested a pre-release as well as the actual release against the now over one hundred CRAN dependents of our RcppArmadillo package. The tests passed fine as usual with less than a handful of checks not passing, all for known cases -- and results are as always in the rcpp-logs repository. Changes are summarized below based on the NEWS.Rd file.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.4.600.0 (2014-12-27)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release Version 4.600 ("Off The Reservation")
  • added .head() and .tail() to submatrix views
  • faster matrix transposes within compound expressions
  • faster accu() and norm() when compiling with -O3 -ffast-math -march=native (gcc and clang)
  • workaround for a bug in GCC 4.4

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

A week ago, Conrad provided another minor release 4.550.0 of Armadillo which has since received one minor correction in 4.550.1.0. As before, I had created a GitHub-only pre-release of his pre-release which was tested against the almost one hundred CRAN dependents of our RcppArmadillo package. This passed fine as usual, and results are as always in the rcpp-logs repository. Processing and acceptance at the CRAN took a little longer as around the same time a fresh failure in unit tests had become apparent on an as-of-yet unannounced new architecture (!!) also tested at CRAN. The R-devel release has since gotten a new capabilities() test for long double, and we now only run this test (for our rmultinom()) if the test asserts that the given R build has this capability. Phew, so with all that the new version in now on CRAN; Windows binaries have been built and I also uploaded new Debian binaries. Changes are summarized below; our end also includes added support for conversion of Field types takes to short pull request by Romain.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.4.550.1.0 (2014-11-26)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release Version 4.550.1 ("Singapore Sling Deluxe")
  • added matrix exponential function: expmat()
  • faster .log_p() and .avg_log_p() functions in the gmm_diag class when compiling with OpenMP enabled
  • faster handling of in-place addition/subtraction of expressions with an outer product
  • applied correction to gmm_diag relative to the 4.550 release
• The Armadillo Field type is now converted in as<> conversions

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

A few days ago, Conrad provided another minor release of Armadillo. Once again, I had created a GitHub-only pre-release of his pre-release which was tested against (then) all ninety (!!) CRAN dependents of our RcppArmadillo package, providing a further test for Conrad's code and uploaded RcppArmadillo 0.4.500.0 to CRAN and Debian once his release was finalized. The few changes from his end are summarized below; our end also includes an update / extension to the sample() method provided by Christian Gunning --- and used to great effect in the excellent Rcpp Gallery post by Jonathan Olmsted.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.4.500.0 (2014-10-30)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release Version 4.500 ("Singapore Sling")
  • faster handling of complex vectors by norm()
  • expanded chol() to optionally specify output matrix as upper or lower triangular
  • better handling of non-finite values when saving matrices as text files
• The sample functionality has been extended to provide the Walker Alias method (including new unit tests) via a pull request by Christian Gunning

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Neil Anderson Flies EasyMega to 118k' At BALLS 23 Altus Metrum would like to congratulate Neil Anderson and Steve Cutonilli on the success the two stage rocket, A Money Pit , which flew on Saturday the 20th of September on an N5800 booster followed by an N1560 sustainer. A Money Pit used two Altus Metrum EasyMega flight computers in the sustainer, each one configured to light the sustainer motor and deploy the drogue and main parachutes. Safely Staged After a 7 Second Coast After the booster burned out, the rocket coasted for 7 seconds to 250m/s, at which point EasyMega was programmed to light the sustainer. As a back-up, a timer was set to light the sustainer 8 seconds after the booster burn-out. In both cases, the sustainer ignition would have been inhibited if the rocket had tilted more than 20 from vertical. During the coast, the rocket flew from 736m to 3151m, with speed going from 422m/s down to 250m/s. This long coast, made safe by EasyMega's quaternion-based tilt sensor, allowed this flight to reach a spectacular altitude. Apogee Determined by Accelerometer Above 100k', the MS5607 barometric sensor is out of range. However, as you can see from the graph, the barometric sensor continued to return useful data. EasyMega doesn't expect that to work, and automatically switched to accelerometer-only apogee determination mode. Because off-vertical flight will under-estimate the time to apogee when using only an accelerometer, the EasyMega boards were programmed to wait for 10 seconds after apogee before deploying the drogue parachute. That turned out to be just about right; the graph shows the barometric data leveling off right as the apogee charges fired. Fast Descent in Thin Air Even with the drogue safely fired at apogee, the descent rate rose to over 200m/s in the rarefied air of the upper atmosphere. With increasing air density, the airframe slowed to 30m/s when the main parachute charge fired at 2000m. The larger main chute slowed the descent further to about 16m/s for landing.

Continuing with his standard pace of approximately one new version per month, Conrad released a new minor release of Armadillo a few days ago. As before, I had created a GitHub-only pre-release which was tested against all eighty-seven (!!) CRAN dependents of our RcppArmadillo package and then uploaded RcppArmadillo 0.4.450.0 to CRAN. The CRAN maintainers pointed out that under the R-development release, a NOTE was issued concerning the C-library's rand() call. This is a pretty new NOTE, but it means using the (sometimes poor quality) rand() generator is now a no-no. Now, Armadillo being as robustly engineered as it is offers a new random number generator based on C++11 as well as a fallback generator for those unfortunate enough to live with an older C++98 compiler. (I would like to note here that I find Conrad's continued support for both C++11, offering very useful modern language idioms, as well as the fallback code for continued deployment and usage by those constrained in their choice of compilers rather exemplary --- because contrary to what some people may claim, it is not a matter of one or the other. C++ always was, and continues to be, a multi-paradigm language which can be supported easily by several standard. But I digress...) In any event, one cannot argue with CRAN about their prescription of a C++98 compiler. So Conrad and I discussed this over email, and came up with a scheme where a user-package (such as RcppArmadillo) can provide an alternate generator which Armadillo then deploys. I implemented a first solution which was then altered / reflected by Conrad in a revised version 4.450.1 of Armadillo. I packaged, and now uploaded, that version as RcppArmadillo 0.4.450.1.0 to both CRAN and into Debian. Besides the RNG change already discussed, this release brings a few smaller changes from the Armadillo side. These are detailed below in the extract from the NEWS file. On the RcppArmadillo side, we now have support for pkgKitten which is both very exciting and likely the topic of another blog post with an example of creating an RcppArmadillo package that purrs. In the process, I overhauled and polished how new packages are created by RcppArmadillo.package.skeleton(). An upcoming blog post may provide an example.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.4.450.1.0 (2014-09-21)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release Version 4.450.1 (Spring Hill Fort)
  • faster handling of matrix transposes within compound expressions
  • expanded symmatu()/symmatl() to optionally disable taking the complex conjugate of elements
  • expanded sort_index() to handle complex vectors
  • expanded the gmm_diag class with functions to generate random samples
• A new random-number implementation for Armadillo uses the RNG from R as a fallback (when C++11 is not selected so the C++11-based RNG is unavailable) which avoids using the older C++98-based std::rand
• The RcppArmadillo.package.skeleton() function was updated to only set an "Imports:" for Rcpp, but not RcppArmadillo which (as a template library) needs only LinkingTo:
• The RcppArmadillo.package.skeleton() function will now prefer pkgKitten::kitten() over package.skeleton() in order to create a working package which passes R CMD check.
• The pkgKitten package is now a Suggests:
• A manual page was added to provide documentation for the functions provided by the skeleton package.
• A small update was made to the package manual page.

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

I haven't made one of these in a long time, so I have some catching from random purchases to do, which includes a (repurposed) nice parting gift from my previous employer and a trip to Powell's since I was in the area for DebConf14. This also includes the contents of the Hugo voter's packet, which contained a wide variety of random stuff even if some of the novels were represented only by excerpts. John Joseph Adams (ed.) The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination (sff anthology)
Roger McBride Allen The Ring of Charon (sff)
Roger McBride Allen The Shattered Sphere (sff)
Iain M. Banks The Hydrogen Sonata (sff)
Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending (mainstream)
M. David Blake (ed.) 2014 Campbellian Anthology (sff anthology)
Algis Budrys Benchmarks Continued (non-fiction)
Algis Budrys Benchmarks Revisited (non-fiction)
Algis Budrys Benchmarks Concluded (non-fiction)
Edgar Rice Burroughs Carson of Venus (sff)
Wesley Chu The Lives of Tao (sff)
Ernest Cline Ready Player One (sff)
Larry Correia Hard Magic (sff)
Larry Correia Spellbound (sff)
Larry Correia Warbound (sff)
Sigrid Ellis & Michael Damien Thomas (ed.) Queer Chicks Dig Time Lords (non-fiction)
Neil Gaiman The Ocean at the End of the Lane (sff)
Max Gladstone Three Parts Dead (sff)
Max Gladstone Two Serpents Rise (sff)
S.L. Huang Zero Sum Game (sff)
Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson The Wheel of Time (sff)
Drew Karpyshyn Mass Effect: Revelation (sff)
Justin Landon & Jared Shurin (ed.) Speculative Fiction 2012 (non-fiction)
John J. Lumpkin Through Struggle, the Stars (sff)
L. David Marquet Turn the Ship Around! (non-fiction)
George R.R. Martin & Raya Golden Meathouse Man (graphic novel)
Ramez Naam Nexus (sff)
Eiichiro Oda One Piece Volume 1 (manga)
Eiichiro Oda One Piece Volume 2 (manga)
Eiichiro Oda One Piece Volume 3 (manga)
Eiichiro Oda One Piece Volume 4 (manga)
Alexei Panshin New Celebrations (sff)
K.J. Parker Devices and Desires (sff)
K.J. Parker Evil for Evil (sff)
Sofia Samatar A Stranger in Olondria (sff)
John Scalzi The Human Division (sff)
Jonathan Straham (ed.) Fearsome Journeys (sff anthology)
Vernor Vinge The Children of the Sky (sff)
Brian Wood & Becky Cloonan Demo (graphic novel)
Charles Yu How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (sff) A whole bunch of this is from the Hugo voter's packet, and since the Hugos are over, much of that probably won't get prioritized. (I was very happy with the results of the voting, though.) Other than that, it's a very random collection of stuff, including a few things that I picked up based on James Nicoll's reviews. Now that I have a daily train commute, I should pick up the pace of reading, and as long as I can find enough time in my schedule to also write reviews, hopefully there will be more content in this blog shortly.

After two pre-releases in the last few days, Conrad finalised a new Armadillo version 4.400 today. I had kept up with the pre-releases, tested twice against all eighty (!!) CRAN dependents of RcppArmadillo and have hence uploaded RcppArmadillo 0.4.400.0 to CRAN and into Debian. This release brings a number of new upstream features which are detailed below. As included is s bugfix for sparse matrix creation at the RcppArmadillo end which was found by the ASAN tests at CRAN --- which are similar to the sanitizers tests I recently blogged. I was able to develop and test the fix in the very docker r-devel-san images I had written about which was nice. Special thanks also to Ryan Curtin for help with the fix.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.4.400.0 (2014-08-19)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release Version 4.400 (Winter Shark Alley)
  • added gmm_diag class for statistical modelling using Gaussian Mixture Models; includes multi-threaded implementation of k-means and Expectation-Maximisation for parameter estimation
  • added clamp() for clamping values to be between lower and upper limits
  • expanded batch insertion constructors for sparse matrices to add values at repeated locations
  • faster handling of subvectors by dot()
  • faster handling of aliasing by submatrix views
• Corrected a bug (found by the g++ Address Sanitizer) in sparse matrix initialization where space for a sentinel was allocated, but the sentinel was not set; with extra thanks to Ryan Curtin for help
• Added a few unit tests for sparse matrices

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

While I was out at the (immensely impressive and equally enjoyable) useR! 2014 conference at UCLA, Conrad provided a bug-fix release 4.320 of Armadillo, the nifty templated C++ library for linear algebra. I quickly rolled that into RcppArmadillo release 0.4.320.0 which has been on CRAN and in Debian for a good week now. This release fixes some minor things with sparse and dense Eigen solvers (as well as one RNG issue probably of lesser interest to R users deploying the RNGs from R) as shown in the NEWS entry below.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.4.320.0 (2014-07-03)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release Version 4.320 (Daintree Tea Raider)
  • expanded eigs_sym() and eigs_gen() to use an optional tolerance parameter
  • expanded eig_sym() to automatically fall back to standard decomposition method if divide-and-conquer fails
  • automatic installer enables use of C++11 random number generator when using gcc 4.8.3+ in C++11 mode

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

A new minor / bug fix release 4.300.8 of Armadillo, the templated C++ library for linear algebra, was tagged by Conrad in his SVN repo a few days ago, following earlier snapshots in the 4.300.* series. We had prepared two earlier releases for GitHub but not CRAN in order to accomodate the CRAN maintainer's desire of "a release every one to two months" expressed in the CRAN Repo Policy. However, two actual bugs in the interaction between MinGW and C++11 were reported on the rcpp-devel mailing list, and this releases addresses these. Hence time for new release 0.4.300.8.0 of RcppArmadillo which is now on CRAN and in Debian. This release brings a few upstream changes detailed below such as nice new upstream changes such as more robust norm() (and related) functions, and fixes related to matrix and cube interactions. From our end, we added a better detection of Windows via both _WIN32 and WIN32 (as the former apparently gets undefined by MinGW in C++11 mode). We also added the ability to turn on C++11 support from R (possible since R 3.1.0) yet also turn it off for Armadillo. This is needed as the prescribed compiler on Windows is g++ 4.6.2 -- which offers a subset of C++11 which is good enough for a number of things from the C++11 standard, but not advanced enough for everything which Armadillo uses when C++11 support is turned on. As Armadillo continues to offer a choice of C++ standards, we can use the ability to deploy C++11 only outside of its internals. It is worth repeating that this issue should only affect Windows users wishing to use C++11; other platforms are fine as they generally have more modern compilers.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.4.300.8.0 (2014-05-31)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release Version 4.300.8 (Medieval Cornea Scraper)
  • More robust norm-related functions
  • Fixes between interactions between cube and vector types.
• Adds a #define ARMA_DONT_USE_CXX11 to provide an option to turn C++11 off for Armadillo (but client packages may still use it)
• More robust Windows detection by using _WIN32 as well as WIN32 as the latter gets diabled by MinGW with C++11
• On Windows, C++11 can be turned off as the Armadillo code base uses more features of C++11 than g++ 4.6.2 version in Rtools implements

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.4.300.5.0 (2014-05-19)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release Version 4.300.5 (Medieval Cornea Scraper)
  • Handle possible underflows and overflows in norm(), normalise(), norm_dot()
  • Fix for handling of null vectors by norm_dot()

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.4.300.2.0 (2014-05-13)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release Version 4.300.2 (Medieval Cornea Scraper)
  • faster find()

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

A new release 4.300 of Armadillo, the templated C++ library for linear algebra, was released by Conrad a few days ago. As usual, this was rolled up in a new RcppArmadillo release 0.4.300.0 which is now on CRAN and in Debian. This release brings nice new upstream changes such as faster find() as well as corresponding functions to find elements which are either finite or non-finite, based on a suggestion we made. This may need an RcppArmadillo specific extension as R extends the IEEE logic to supported NA, NaN and Inf on floating point variables whereas standard C++ (and hence Armadillo) only supports the latter two. We hope to work on this shortly. Kevin also put in some code to make sure unsigned int vectors and matrices are converted correctly, and I updated the short configure script checking for complete LAPACK support to account for the R 3.0.3 or later case.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.4.300.0 (2014-05-04)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release Version 4.300 (Medieval Cornea Scraper)
  • faster find()
  • added find_finite() and find_nonfinite() for finding indices of finite and non-finite elements
  • expressions X=inv(A)*B*C and X=A.i()*B*C are automatically converted to X=solve(A,B*C)
• Corrected conversion to unsigned int vectors and matrices
• Configure script now checks for R version 3.0.3 or newer to enable complex divide-and-conquer SVD in case of R-supplied LAPACK

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.