On the other hand

When I wrote my first for loop ever (in R), it was a pretty exciting moment in my life. There was definitely some happy dancing. Some of my for loops were really fast, but others that seemed pretty similar to my eyes took a really long time. I had a hard time figuring out why. If you are in the same boat, I recommend reading this section of Thomas Girke‘s Programming in R manual. It’s much faster than the “trial-and-error with occasional advice from other R users” approach I took.

I wanted to play around with the Floyd-Warshall algorithm today. Lucky for me, it’s included as part of the e1071 package. When I tried to install it – from the CRAN repository and from source – I got

ERROR: 'configure' exists but is not executable

The solution (from a recent post on Jonathan Callahan’s blog) is to “set the TMPDIR environment variable which R will use as the compilation directory.” For me, this meant

$ mkdir ~/tmp
$ export TMPDIR=~/tmp