Year: 2018

Registration for eRum 2018 closes in two days!

Why I’m going to eRum this year instead of useR!

I have attended the useR! conferences every year now for the past 9 years, and loved it! However, this year I’m saddened that I won’t be able to go. This is because this year the conference will be held in Australia, and going there would require me to be away from home for at least 8 days (my heart goes to the people of Australia who had a hard time coming to useR all these years). Ordinarily I would do it, but given that my wife and I have a sweet 8 months year old baby (called Maya), I’m very reluctant to be away from home for that long.

The eRum 2018 conference

Fortunately for me, and for many other R users out there, we have a backup plan called eRum (a.k.a: The European R Users Meeting). It is an international conference, similar to useR!, that occurs every two years (specifically, in the years in which useR is taking place outside of Europe), and organized by Gergely Daroczi and others.

About the plan for this year:

If you get to see me around, feel free to come and say Hi 🙂

 

 

R 3.5.0 is released! (major release with many new features)

R 3.5.0 (codename “Joy in Playing”) was released yesterday. You can get the latest binaries version from here. (or the .tar.gz source code from here).

This is a major release with many new features and bug fixes, the full list is provided below.

Upgrading R on Windows and Mac

If you are using Windows you can easily upgrade to the latest version of R using the installr package. Simply run the following code in Rgui:

install.packages("installr") # install 
setInternet2(TRUE) # only for R versions older than 3.3.0
installr::updateR() # updating R.
# If you wish it to go faster, run: installr::updateR(T)

Running “updateR()” will detect if there is a new R version available, and if so it will download+install it (etc.). There is also a step by step tutorial (with screenshots) on how to upgrade R on Windows, using the installr package. If you only see the option to upgrade to an older version of R, then change your mirror or try again in a few hours (it usually take around 24 hours for all CRAN mirrors to get the latest version of R).

If you are using Mac you can easily upgrade to the latest version of R using Andrea Cirillo’s updateR package. The package is not on CRAN, so you’ll need to run the following code in Rgui:

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("AndreaCirilloAC/updateR")
updateR(admin_password = "PASSWORD") # Where "PASSWORD" stands for your system password

Later this year Andrea and I intend to merge the updateR package into installr so that the updateR function will work seamlessly in both Windows and Mac. Stay tuned 🙂

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