Tag: GUI

Anonymous grows up and matures…Anonanalytics.com

I liked the design, user interfaces and the conceptual ideas behind the latest Anonymous hactivist websites (much better than the shabby graphic design of Wikileaks, or Friends of Wikileaks, though I guess they have been busy what with Julian’s escapades and Syrian emails)

 

I disagree  (and let us agree to disagree some of the time)

with the complete lack of respect for Graphical User Interfaces for tools. If dDOS really took off due to LOIC, why not build a GUI for SQL Injection (or atleats the top 25 vulnerability testing as by this list http://www.sans.org/top25-software-errors/

Shouldnt Tor be embedded within the next generation of Loic.

Automated testing tools are used by companies like Adobe (and others)… so why not create simple GUI for the existing tools.., I may be completely offtrack here.. but I think hacker education has been a critical misstep[ that has undermined Western Democracies preparedness for Cyber tactics by hostile regimes)…. how to create the next generation of hackers by easy tutorials (see codeacademy and build appropriate modules)

-A slick website to be funded by Bitcoins (Money can buy everything including Mastercard and Visa, but Bitcoins are an innovative step towards an internet economy  currency)

-A collobrative wiki

http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Main_Page

Seriously dude, why not make this a part of Wikipedia- (i know Jimmy Wales got shifty eyes, but can you trust some1 )

-Analytics for Anonymous (sighs! I should have thought about this earlier)

http://anonanalytics.com/ (can be used to play and bill both sides of corporate espionage and be cyber private investigators)

What We Do

We provide the public with investigative reports exposing corrupt companies. Our team includes analysts, forensic accountants, statisticians, computer experts, and lawyers from various jurisdictions and backgrounds. All information presented in our reports is acquired through legal channels, fact-checked, and vetted thoroughly before release. This is both for the protection of our associates as well as groups/individuals who rely on our work.

_and lastly creative content for Pinterest.com and Public Relations ( what next-? Tom Cruise to play  Julian Assange in the new Movie ?)

http://www.par-anoia.net/ />Potentially Alarming Research: Anonymous Intelligence AgencyInformation is and will be free. Expect it. ~ Anonymous

Links of interest

  • Latest Scientology Mails (Austria)
  • Full FBI call transcript
  • Arrest Tracker
  • HBGary Email Viewer
  • The Pirate Bay Proxy
  • We Are Anonymous – Book
  • To be announced…

 

JSS launches special edition for GUI for #Rstats

I love GUIs (graphical user interfaces)- they might be TCL/TK based or GTK based or even QT based. As a researcher they help me with faster coding, as a consultant they help with faster transition of projects from startup to handover stage  and as an R  instructor helps me get people to learn R faster.

I wish Python had some GUIs though 😉

 

from the open access journal of statistical software-

JSS Special Volume 49: Graphical User Interfaces for R

Graphical User Interfaces for R
Pedro M. Valero-Mora, Ruben Ledesma
Vol. 49, Issue 1, Jun 2012
Submitted 2012-06-03, Accepted 2012-06-03
Integrated Degradation Models in R Using iDEMO
Ya-Shan Cheng, Chien-Yu Peng
Vol. 49, Issue 2, Jun 2012
Submitted 2010-12-31, Accepted 2011-06-29
Glotaran: A Java-Based Graphical User Interface for the R Package TIMP
Joris J. Snellenburg, Sergey Laptenok, Ralf Seger, Katharine M. Mullen, Ivo H. M. van Stokkum
Vol. 49, Issue 3, Jun 2012
Submitted 2011-01-20, Accepted 2011-09-16
A Graphical User Interface for R in a Rich Client Platform for Ecological Modeling
Marcel Austenfeld, Wolfram Beyschlag
Vol. 49, Issue 4, Jun 2012
Submitted 2011-01-05, Accepted 2012-02-20
Closing the Gap between Methodologists and End-Users: R as a Computational Back-End
Byron C. Wallace, Issa J. Dahabreh, Thomas A. Trikalinos, Joseph Lau, Paul Trow, Christopher H. Schmid
Vol. 49, Issue 5, Jun 2012
Submitted 2010-11-01, Accepted 2012-12-20
tourrGui: A gWidgets GUI for the Tour to Explore High-Dimensional Data Using Low-Dimensional Projections
Bei Huang, Dianne Cook, Hadley Wickham
Vol. 49, Issue 6, Jun 2012
Submitted 2011-01-20, Accepted 2012-04-16
The RcmdrPlugin.survival Package: Extending the R Commander Interface to Survival Analysis
John Fox, Marilia S. Carvalho
Vol. 49, Issue 7, Jun 2012
Submitted 2010-12-26, Accepted 2011-12-28
Deducer: A Data Analysis GUI for R
Ian Fellows
Vol. 49, Issue 8, Jun 2012
Submitted 2011-02-28, Accepted 2011-09-08
RKWard: A Comprehensive Graphical User Interface and Integrated Development Environment for Statistical Analysis with R
Stefan Rödiger, Thomas Friedrichsmeier, Prasenjit Kapat, Meik Michalke
Vol. 49, Issue 9, Jun 2012
Submitted 2010-12-28, Accepted 2011-05-06
gWidgetsWWW: Creating Interactive Web Pages within R
John Verzani
Vol. 49, Issue 10, Jun 2012
Submitted 2010-12-17, Accepted 2011-05-11
Oscars and Interfaces
Antony Unwin
Vol. 49, Issue 11, Jun 2012
Submitted 2010-12-08, Accepted 2011-07-15

Visualizing Bigger Data in R using Tabplot

The amazing tabplot package creates the tableplot feature for visualizing huge chunks of data. This is a great example of creative data visualization that is resource lite and extremely fast in a first look at the data. (note- The tabplot package is being used and table plot function is being used . The TABLEPLOT package is different and is NOT being used here).

library(ggplot2)
data(diamonds)
library(tabplot)
tableplot(diamonds)
system.time(tableplot(diamonds))

visualizing a 50000 row by 10 variable dataset in 0.7 s is fast !!

click on screenshot to see it

and some say R is slow 😉

 

Note I used a free Windows Amazon EC2 Instance for it-

See screenshot for hardware configuration

 

the best thing is there is a handy GTK GUI for this package. You can check it out at

 

 

New RCommander with ggplot #rstats

 

My favorite GUI (or one of them) R Commander has a relatively new plugin called KMGGplot2. Until now Deducer was the only GUI with ggplot features , but the much lighter and more popular R Commander has been a long champion in people wanting to pick up R quickly.

 

http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RcmdrPlugin.KMggplot2/

RcmdrPlugin.KMggplot2: Rcmdr Plug-In for Kaplan-Meier Plot and Other Plots by Using the ggplot2 Package

 

As you can see by the screenshot- it makes ggplot even easier for people (like R  newbies and experienced folks alike)

 

This package is an R Commander plug-in for Kaplan-Meier plot and other plots by using the ggplot2 package.

Version: 0.1-0
Depends: R (≥ 2.15.0), stats, methods, grid, Rcmdr (≥ 1.8-4), ggplot2 (≥ 0.9.1)
Imports: tcltk2 (≥ 1.2-3), RColorBrewer (≥ 1.0-5), scales (≥ 0.2.1), survival (≥ 2.36-14)
Published: 2012-05-18
Author: Triad sou. and Kengo NAGASHIMA
Maintainer: Triad sou. <triadsou at gmail.com>
License: GPL-2
CRAN checks: RcmdrPlugin.KMggplot2 results

 

----------------------------------------------------------------
NEWS file for the RcmdrPlugin.KMggplot2 package
----------------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------------------

Changes in version 0.1-0 (2012-05-18)

 o Restructuring implementation approach for efficient
   maintenance.
 o Added options() for storing package specific options (e.g.,
   font size, font family, ...).
 o Added a theme: theme_simple().
 o Added a theme element: theme_rect2().
 o Added a list box for facet_xx() functions in some menus
   (Thanks to Professor Murtaza Haider).
 o Kaplan-Meier plot: added confidence intervals.
 o Box plot: added violin plots.
 o Bar chart for discrete variables: deleted dynamite plots.
 o Bar chart for discrete variables: added stacked bar charts.
 o Scatter plot matrix: added univariate plots at diagonal
   positions (ggplot2::plotmatrix).
 o Deleted the dummy data for histograms, which is large in
   size.

----------------------------------------------------------------

Changes in version 0.0-4 (2011-07-28)

 o Fixed "scale_y_continuous(formatter = "percent")" to
   "scale_y_continuous(labels = percent)" for ggplot2
   (>= 0.9.0).
 o Fixed "legend = FALSE" to "show_guide = FALSE" for
   ggplot2 (>= 0.9.0).
 o Fixed the DESCRIPTION file for ggplot2 (>= 0.9.0) dependency.

----------------------------------------------------------------

Changes in version 0.0-3 (2011-07-28; FIRST RELEASE VERSION)

 o Kaplan-Meier plot: Show no. at risk table on outside.
 o Histogram: Color coding.
 o Histogram: Density estimation.
 o Q-Q plot: Create plots based on a maximum likelihood estimate
   for the parameters of the selected theoretical distribution.
 o Q-Q plot: Create plots based on a user-specified theoretical
   distribution.
 o Box plot / Errorbar plot: Box plot.
 o Box plot / Errorbar plot: Mean plus/minus S.D.
 o Box plot / Errorbar plot: Mean plus/minus S.D. (Bar plot).
 o Box plot / Errorbar plot: 95 percent Confidence interval
   (t distribution).
 o Box plot / Errorbar plot: 95 percent Confidence interval
   (bootstrap).
 o Scatter plot: Fitting a linear regression.
 o Scatter plot: Smoothing with LOESS for small datasets or GAM
   with a cubic regression basis for large data.
 o Scatter plot matrix: Fitting a linear regression.
 o Scatter plot matrix: Smoothing with LOESS for small datasets
   or GAM with a cubic regression basis for large data.
 o Line chart: Normal line chart.
 o Line chart: Line char with a step function.
 o Line chart: Area plot.
 o Pie chart: Pie chart.
 o Bar chart for discrete variables: Bar chart for discrete
   variables.
 o Contour plot: Color coding.
 o Contour plot: Heat map.
 o Distribution plot: Normal distribution.
 o Distribution plot: t distribution.
 o Distribution plot: Chi-square distribution.
 o Distribution plot: F distribution.
 o Distribution plot: Exponential distribution.
 o Distribution plot: Uniform distribution.
 o Distribution plot: Beta distribution.
 o Distribution plot: Cauchy distribution.
 o Distribution plot: Logistic distribution.
 o Distribution plot: Log-normal distribution.
 o Distribution plot: Gamma distribution.
 o Distribution plot: Weibull distribution.
 o Distribution plot: Binomial distribution.
 o Distribution plot: Poisson distribution.
 o Distribution plot: Geometric distribution.
 o Distribution plot: Hypergeometric distribution.
 o Distribution plot: Negative binomial distribution.

BigML meets R #rstats

I am just checking the nice new R package created by BigML.com co-founder Justin Donaldson. The name of the new package is bigml, which can confuse a bit since there do exist many big suffix named packages in R (including biglm)

The bigml package is available at CRAN http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/bigml/index.html

I just tweaked the code given at http://blog.bigml.com/2012/05/10/r-you-ready-for-bigml/ to include the ssl authentication code at http://www.brocktibert.com/blog/2012/01/19/358/

so it goes

> library(bigml)
Loading required package: RJSONIO
Loading required package: RCurl
Loading required package: bitops
Loading required package: plyr
> setCredentials(“bigml_username”,”API_key”)

# download the file needed for authentication
download.file(url="http://curl.haxx.se/ca/cacert.pem", destfile="cacert.pem")

# set the curl options
curl <- getCurlHandle()
options(RCurlOptions = list(capath = system.file("CurlSSL", "cacert.pem",
package = "RCurl"),
ssl.verifypeer = FALSE))
curlSetOpt(.opts = list(proxy = 'proxyserver:port'), curl = curl)
> iris.model = quickModel(iris, objective_field = ‘Species’)

Of course there are lots of goodies added here , so read the post yourself at http://blog.bigml.com/2012/05/10/r-you-ready-for-bigml/

Incidentally , the author of this R package (bigml) Justin Donalsdon who goes by name sudojudo at http://twitter.com/#!/sudojudo has also recently authored two other R packages including tsne at  http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/tsne/index.html (tsne: T-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding for R (t-SNE) -A “pure R” implementation of the t-SNE algorithm) and a GUI toolbar http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/sculpt3d/index.html (sculpt3d is a GTK+ toolbar that allows for more interactive control of a dataset inside the RGL plot window. Controls for simple brushing, highlighting, labeling, and mouseMode changes are provided by point-and-click rather than through the R terminal interface)

This along with the fact the their recently released python bindings for bigml.com was one of the top news at Hacker News- shows bigML.com is going for some traction in bringing cloud computing, better software interfaces and data mining together!

Interview JJ Allaire Founder, RStudio

Here is an interview with JJ Allaire, founder of RStudio. RStudio is the IDE that has overtaken other IDE within the R Community in terms of ease of usage. On the eve of their latest product launch, JJ talks to DecisionStats on RStudio and more.

Ajay-  So what is new in the latest version of RStudio and how exactly is it useful for people?

JJ- The initial release of RStudio as well as the two follow-up releases we did last year were focused on the core elements of using R: editing and running code, getting help, and managing files, history, workspaces, plots, and packages. In the meantime users have also been asking for some bigger features that would improve the overall work-flow of doing analysis with R. In this release (v0.95) we focused on three of these features:

Projects. R developers tend to have several (and often dozens) of working contexts associated with different clients, analyses, data sets, etc. RStudio projects make it easy to keep these contexts well separated (with distinct R sessions, working directories, environments, command histories, and active source documents), switch quickly between project contexts, and even work with multiple projects at once (using multiple running versions of RStudio).

Version Control. The benefits of using version control for collaboration are well known, but we also believe that solo data analysis can achieve significant productivity gains by using version control (this discussion on Stack Overflow talks about why). In this release we introduced integrated support for the two most popular open-source version control systems: Git and Subversion. This includes changelist management, file diffing, and browsing of project history, all right from within RStudio.

Code Navigation. When you look at how programmers work a surprisingly large amount of time is spent simply navigating from one context to another. Modern programming environments for general purpose languages like C++ and Java solve this problem using various forms of code navigation, and in this release we’ve brought these capabilities to R. The two main features here are the ability to type the name of any file or function in your project and go immediately to it; and the ability to navigate to the definition of any function under your cursor (including the definition of functions within packages) using a keystroke (F2) or mouse gesture (Ctrl+Click).

Ajay- What’s the product road map for RStudio? When can we expect the IDE to turn into a full fledged GUI?

JJ- Linus Torvalds has said that “Linux is evolution, not intelligent design.” RStudio tries to operate on a similar principle—the world of statistical computing is too deep, diverse, and ever-changing for any one person or vendor to map out in advance what is most important. So, our internal process is to ship a new release every few months, listen to what people are doing with the product (and hope to do with it), and then start from scratch again making the improvements that are considered most important.

Right now some of the things which seem to be top of mind for users are improved support for authoring and reproducible research, various editor enhancements including code folding, and debugging tools.

What you’ll see is us do in a given release is to work on a combination of frequently requested features, smaller improvements to usability and work-flow, bug fixes, and finally architectural changes required to support current or future feature requirements.

While we do try to base what we work on as closely as possible on direct user-feedback, we also adhere to some core principles concerning the overall philosophy and direction of the product. So for example the answer to the question about the IDE turning into a full-fledged GUI is: never. We believe that textual representations of computations provide fundamental advantages in transparency, reproducibility, collaboration, and re-usability. We believe that writing code is simply the right way to do complex technical work, so we’ll always look for ways to make coding better, faster, and easier rather than try to eliminate coding altogether.

Ajay -Describe your journey in science from a high school student to your present work in R. I noticed you have been very successful in making software products that have been mostly proprietary products or sold to companies.

Why did you get into open source products with RStudio? What are your plans for monetizing RStudio further down the line?

JJ- In high school and college my principal areas of study were Political Science and Economics. I also had a very strong parallel interest in both computing and quantitative analysis. My first job out of college was as a financial analyst at a government agency. The tools I used in that job were SAS and Excel. I had a dim notion that there must be a better way to marry computation and data analysis than those tools, but of course no concept of what this would look like.

From there I went more in the direction of general purpose computing, starting a couple of companies where I worked principally on programming languages and authoring tools for the Web. These companies produced proprietary software, which at the time (between 1995 and 2005) was a workable model because it allowed us to build the revenue required to fund development and to promote and distribute the software to a wider audience.

By 2005 it was however becoming clear that proprietary software would ultimately be overtaken by open source software in nearly all domains. The cost of development had shrunken dramatically thanks to both the availability of high-quality open source languages and tools as well as the scale of global collaboration possible on open source projects. The cost of promoting and distributing software had also collapsed thanks to efficiency of both distribution and information diffusion on the Web.

When I heard about R and learned more about it, I become very excited and inspired by what the project had accomplished. A group of extremely talented and dedicated users had created the software they needed for their work and then shared the fruits of that work with everyone. R was a platform that everyone could rally around because it worked so well, was extensible in all the right ways, and most importantly was free (as in speech) so users could depend upon it as a long-term foundation for their work.

So I started RStudio with the aim of making useful contributions to the R community. We started with building an IDE because it seemed like a first-rate development environment for R that was both powerful and easy to use was an unmet need. Being aware that many other companies had built successful businesses around open-source software, we were also convinced that we could make RStudio available under a free and open-source license (the AGPLv3) while still creating a viable business. At this point RStudio is exclusively focused on creating the best IDE for R that we can. As the core product gets where it needs to be over the next couple of years we’ll then also begin to sell other products and services related to R and RStudio.

About-

http://rstudio.org/docs/about

Jjallaire

JJ Allaire

JJ Allaire is a software engineer and entrepreneur who has created a wide variety of products including ColdFusion,Windows Live Writer, Lose It!, and RStudio.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_J._Allaire
In 1995 Joseph J. (JJ) Allaire co-founded Allaire Corporation with his brother Jeremy Allaire, creating the web development tool ColdFusion.[1] In March 2001, Allaire was sold to Macromedia where ColdFusion was integrated into the Macromedia MX product line. Macromedia was subsequently acquired by Adobe Systems, which continues to develop and market ColdFusion.
After the sale of his company, Allaire became frustrated at the difficulty of keeping track of research he was doing using Google. To address this problem, he co-founded Onfolio in 2004 with Adam Berrey, former Allaire co-founder and VP of Marketing at Macromedia.
On March 8, 2006, Onfolio was acquired by Microsoft where many of the features of the original product are being incorporated into the Windows Live Toolbar. On August 13, 2006, Microsoft released the public beta of a new desktop blogging client called Windows Live Writer that was created by Allaire’s team at Microsoft.
Starting in 2009, Allaire has been developing a web-based interface to the widely used R technical computing environment. A beta version of RStudio was publicly released on February 28, 2011.
JJ Allaire received his B.A. from Macalester College (St. Paul, MN) in 1991.
RStudio-

RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for R which works with the standard version of R available from CRAN. Like R, RStudio is available under a free software license. RStudio is designed to be as straightforward and intuitive as possible to provide a friendly environment for new and experienced R users alike. RStudio is also a company, and they plan to sell services (support, training, consulting, hosting) related to the open-source software they distribute.

2011 Analytics Recap

Events in the field of data that impacted us in 2011

1) Oracle unveiled plans for R Enterprise. This is one of the strongest statements of its focus on in-database analytics. Oracle also unveiled plans for a Public Cloud

2) SAS Institute released version 9.3 , a major analytics software in industry use.

3) IBM acquired many companies in analytics and high tech. Again.However the expected benefits from Cognos-SPSS integration are yet to show a spectacular change in market share.

2011 Selected acquisitions

Emptoris Inc. December 2011

Cúram Software Ltd. December 2011

DemandTec December 2011

Platform Computing October 2011

 Q1 Labs October 2011

Algorithmics September 2011

 i2 August 2011

Tririga March 2011

 

4) SAP promised a lot with SAP HANA- again no major oohs and ahs in terms of market share fluctuations within analytics.

http://www.sap.com/india/news-reader/index.epx?articleID=17619

5) Amazon continued to lower prices of cloud computing and offer more options.

http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2011/12/21/amazon-elastic-mapreduce-announces-support-for-cc2-8xlarge-instances/

6) Google continues to dilly -dally with its analytics and cloud based APIs. I do not expect all the APIs in the Google APIs suit to survive and be viable in the enterprise software space.  This includes Google Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Prediction API at https://code.google.com/apis/console/b/0/ Some of the location based , translation based APIs may have interesting spin offs that may be very very commercially lucrative.

7) Microsoft -did- hmm- I forgot. Except for its investment in Revolution Analytics round 1 many seasons ago- very little excitement has come from MS plans in data mining- The plugins for cloud based data mining from Excel remain promising yet , while Azure remains a stealth mode starter.

8) Revolution Analytics promised us a GUI and didnt deliver (till yet 🙂 ) . But it did reveal a much better Enterprise software Revolution R 5.0 is one of the strongest enterprise software in the R /Stat Computing space and R’s memory handling problem is now an issue of perception than actual stuff thanks to newer advances in how it is used.

9) More conferences, more books and more news on analytics startups in 2011. Big Data analytics remained a strong buzzword. Expect more from this space including creative uses of Hadoop based infrastructure.

10) Data privacy issues continue to hamper and impede effective analytics usage. So does rational and balanced regulation in some of the most advanced economies. We expect more regulation and better guidelines in 2012.