Comments for Working With Data

Comment on Using R — Package Installation Problems by Error installing R package e1071 | On the other hand

Error installing R package e1071 | On the other hand — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 02:14:23 +0000

[...] solution (from a recent post on Jonathan Callahan’s blog) is to “set the TMPDIR environment variable which R will [...]

Comment on Using R — .Call(“hello”) by R: Advantages of using a Fortran subroutine with .Call and C/C++ wrapper instead of .Fortran? | BlogoSfera

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 12:06:20 +0000

[...] on BLAS and LAPACK routines). As an interface to Fortran, I use .Fortran function. I just read Jonathan Callahan’s blog post about using .Call instead of .C in case of subroutines written in C/C++, and it got me thinking [...]

Comment on Using R — Package Installation Problems by Ben Bolker

Ben Bolker — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 22:29:32 +0000

Other common problems (sorry, I don’t have the characteristic error messages for all of these):

* package not available: same error as above, but may be caused by (1) trying to get packages from CRAN that actually live elsewhere (r-forge, rforge, github); (2) package has been withdrawn from CRAN/archived; (3) wonky repository
* can’t reach repository: network problems (complete lack of connectivity, or firewall issues)
* permissions problems: especially inability to write to library directory (supposed to be auto-detected and handled, but apparently doesn’t always work).

It would be great to see a full decision tree for diagnosis and solutions …

Also see the overlapping information in the R for Windows FAQ, and relevant questions on Stack Overflow (search for [r] package installation, e.g.: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14382209/r-install-packages-returns-failed-to-create-lock-directory ; http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8818065/problems-with-installing-packages-to-r ;

Comment on Using R — Packaging a C library in 15 minutes by Jonathan Callahan

Jonathan Callahan — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 18:15:37 +0000

I don’t do much compilation on Macs and have no direct experience but I see one linker warning and one error:

ld: warning: in libmseed/libmseed.a, file was built for unsupported file format which is not the architecture being linked (i386)
ld: can’t write output file: mseed.so

That last line makes it look like the linker is trying to create a file in a directory where it doesn’t have permission.

To resolve the “architecture” warning you will need to read libmseed/INSTALL to figure out how to compile libmseed for a Mac. Did you do the compile and test of libmseed in step 1)?

Comment on Liberating data from Microsoft Access “.mdb” files by Jonathan Callahan

Jonathan Callahan — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 03:04:34 +0000

Your mdb file has the unicode character ‘\x93′ aka ‘U+0093′. If you google on ‘U+0093′ you will find that U+0093 is the “” character and was previously known as “SET TRANSMIT STATE”. No clue what it’s doing in your .MDB file but you will definitely need to educate python about the encoding used for your MDB file. I would try using the UTF-8 encoding. Either that or try writing some code to replace all ‘\x93′ with blanks in your .MDB file. Read up on python encodings for more information.