New R-Finance Group on LinkedIn

I've created a new group on the professional networking site, LinkedIn. It is oriented toward finance useRs. The goal of this group is to help members:

• Reach other finance useRs (you decide if group members can contact you directly)
• Accelerate careers/business through referrals from R-Finance group members
• Know more than a name; view other members' rich, professional profiles

Click here to join. Joining will allow you to find and contact other R-Finance members on LinkedIn.

70 61 63 6b

I posted earlier about creating the new opentick package. Since it requires reading/writing binary data to a socket connection, I wrote some utility functions to made the conversion to/from raw data easier.

These functions are tangential to opentick and potentially useful to others, so I created yet another package... called pack. pack attempts to replicate the functionality of PERL's pack and unpack functions.

The functions are probably best illustrated via an example:

> computer <- pack('C A3 v x V a*', 3, 'foo', 21, 50000, 'bar')
> computer
[1] 03 66 6f 6f 15 00 00 50 c3 00 00 62 61 72
> human <- unpack('C/A v x V A3', computer)
> human
[[1]]
[1] "foo"

[[2]]
[1] 21

[[3]]
[1] 50000

[[4]]
[1] "bar"

>

(For those curious, the post title is pack in hexadecimal... sorry, but I find it amusing.)

Make the Right Choice

Lifehack.org has a nice post about how to make quality choices. One way to analyze choices is to ask yourself why, 5 times. I have to share this hilarious excerpt below:

Ask why – five times

The Five Whys are a problem-solving technique invented by Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota. When something goes wrong, you ask “why?” five times. By asking why something failed, over and over, you eventually get to the root cause.

Why did my car break down? A spark plug failed. Why? It was fouled. Why? I didn’t get a tune-up. Why? I was too busy playing GTA4. Why? Because I’m miserable and lonely and the people in the game are the only ones that really love me.

See? Your car broke down because you’re a sociopath.

The Past Month

I haven't posted much the past month because I have be remodeling my kitchen. We installed a ceramic tile floor, all new cabinets, new counter top, all new appliances. It's been an adventure, since I've never done any of it before.

I've been working on updates to TTR and making small progress on the opentick package, but blog posts have taken a back seat. I will have much more time to program and post when the kitchen is finished in ~2 weeks.