Short Notes & thoughts

Nothing about Twitter’s infrastructure (the web app, native app, or other tools) feels like it was designed with user experience in mind. Given that my colleagues and I use Twitter as a stand in replacement for (most) email type activities, having a search functionality is really important to me. After much digging around, I didn’t see much development in the third party landscape. I had used Tweetnest a long time ago and it still seems to be the best way to archive and search one’s own Twitter archives. Since this site is now static on gh-pages, I am now running...

Most of my talks and lecture material over the past several years have been html5 slide decks. Syntax highlighting has been extremely easy since I parse all the code with knitr. However, I’ve had to use keynote again recently and have found it hard to insert readable code chunks. I’ve recently discovered a tool called highlight that makes things easier again. You can install highlight using homebrew. brew install highlight Then highlight code from a script and copy it to your clipboard with this simple command: highlight -O rtf <script_name>.R | pbcopy and paste the result into a slide. voila....

I’ve been wondering what Yihui Xie has been up to for a while and I’m not the least bit surprised that he’s come up with an amazing new tool – Bookdown. Building on his previous work on knitr, Bookdown makes it incredibly easy to publish a book from Rmd source files to multiple formats. Garrett G and Hadley W’s book on R for Data Science uses Bookdown.