Category: Analytics

Cutting Down Office Costs:Downloading by DAP and Bit Torrents

Some of these tips may be familiar.Some may be surprisingly different

Here are ways to 1) search for hard to find softwares 2)download and queue downloads  with resume/pause functions

Bit Torrents are the best way to download anything . To quote the Openoffice website ”

About BitTorrent

BitTorrent is a P2P method where a central ‘tracker’ keeps track of who is downloading and sharing specific files.

When using BitTorrent to download OpenOffice.org, your computer automatically uses spare bandwidth to help share the file with others, and this means that you don’t have to put up with slower downloads during peak download times (such as just after a release), because the more people downloading, the more people sharing.

Also, your download is automatically checked for integrity to make sure that it is identical to the official version.

To use BitTorrent technology, you must have a BitTorrent “client” installed.

BitTorrent Clients

For normal downloads , use DAP from www.speedbit.com. Thats best suited. Also try compressing stuff before uploading.This does have an impact on office bandwidth usage costs. For cutting down on software costs  for your organization, download Ubuntu Linux from http://www.ubuntu.com  and OpenOffice from http://www.openoffice.org and use it for top 10 % technically qualified people, or bottom 10 % computers that basically use simple processing tasks like email, office,front desk etc.Then expand or tweak the percentages based on the results and satisfaction from users.

To cut down on intranet costs , you can use simple softwares from www.wordpress.org and host it on a computer for whole office to use it as an intranet. For creating an office newsletter , you can burn the feed at www.feedburner.com and use the email plugin to offer subscription to the email users.

Compression Tips

1) Stuck with Huge Datasets in SAS.

Use SAS Code,

Options compress=yes

2)Stuck with huge datasets in UNIX Space.

Use compress “filename.extension”

3) Huge data in Windows- Use the following utility

Use 7 Zip.Open source

You don’t need to register or pay for 7-Zip.

www.7–zip.org/

SAVE SPACE ON YOUR SYSTEMS 🙂

Web Forms through Internet:FREE

That is corrct. Thanks to Google Docs, you can create a web form like a spreadsheet, share it with some people, and voila ..its like web form through the internet.

Possible applications:

DATA COLLECTION from multiple sources, then aggregate,download it ,import  and submit it to SAS,SPSS or any statistical software.

OUTSOURCED ON THE FLY Data Entry.

ONLINE SURVEYS also become more easy, given widespread usage of Gmail. I can create a form, short survey send it to all people in my egroup and then collect the results.

“””

Go to http://docs.google.com/

and follow the instructions for creating a web enabled form that collects data into a spreadsheet.

http://documents.google.com/support/spreadsheets/bin/answer.py?answer=87809&hl=en

Features: Creating forms

Print

You can create a form from any spreadsheet. Just follow these instructions:

  1. Open a new spreadsheet.
  2. Save the spreadsheet.
  3. Click the Share tab.
  4. Under ‘Invite people:’ choose the radio button to fill out a form.
  5. Click Start editing your form… In the form template that opens, you can add any questions and options you’d like.
  6. Click the Next, choose recipients tab. Here, you can add email addresses, a custom confirmation message, and choose whether you want people to see the responses.
  7. When you’re finished, click Send.

Here are some additional tips:

  • If you’ve edited a form and need to send it again, click the Edit and resend button in the lower-left corner of the Share tab.
  • To see the results of a form, open the original spreadsheet. It’s a good idea to use the same name for the form as your spreadsheet, so it’s easier to find.
  • To turn off a form, go to the Share tab of your spreadsheet and click Turn off form in the lower-right corner.
  • Remember, the spreadsheet row, cell and column limits apply to the spreadsheets attached to your forms too “””

Learning R Easily :Two GUI’s

Both Rattle and R Commander are very good GUI’s (graphical user interface) for R, and considerably easier for a beginner than the command line console ( but I am more partial to RCmdr for normal statistical analysis while Rattle seemed to have better Data Mining Interfaces and functionality).

Here is a snapshot for both of them.

Installing them both is a breeze as you set a CRAN Mirror from Normal R Console and install package from list of package names . R has hundreds of packages (All free!!) and you can thus install specific packages to your need and usage.The software R automatically downloads and installs them.

rcommdr.GIF..

Installling both these GUI will ensure you cut down the time to learn commands as you can first click and try and learn the syntax that is auto generated side by side.

rattle.GIF

Learning R Easily :Two GUI's

Both Rattle and R Commander are very good GUI’s (graphical user interface) for R, and considerably easier for a beginner than the command line console ( but I am more partial to RCmdr for normal statistical analysis while Rattle seemed to have better Data Mining Interfaces and functionality).

Here is a snapshot for both of them.

Installing them both is a breeze as you set a CRAN Mirror from Normal R Console and install package from list of package names . R has hundreds of packages (All free!!) and you can thus install specific packages to your need and usage.The software R automatically downloads and installs them.

rcommdr.GIF..

Installling both these GUI will ensure you cut down the time to learn commands as you can first click and try and learn the syntax that is auto generated side by side.

rattle.GIF

Choosing GUI for R :Simplify

While trolling through R literature, came across some good GUI ‘s for R. I am currently experimenting with two of them .

Out of these I can recommend R Commander http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Misc/Rcmdr/ 

Not only is the GUI quite neat and clean, the interface actually prints out R code for you. so its a great help if you are learning R and want to learn and do projects at the same time. I imported a dataset of 200,000 rows and while it did take 3-5 secs longer than SAS or SPSS would have taken —Its very very good for a free STATS package. The graphics are also quite good , and I currently evaluating the modeling and scoring capabilities as well .

The second GUI is Rattle. http://rattle.togaware.com/radownload.html 

It is slightly less easy to install than R Commander which automatically downloads the dependencies in terms of packages and its also bigger (nearly 15 mb) for a dependency named RGtk2.

Coming up , a side by side comparison of these two GUI’s in terms of modeling and a search for additional GUIs.

Speaking of search, there  is a FireFox Add on for searching R specific material.