Recently I had to upgrade my R installation because I needed to install a library that required a higher version of R than what I had installed. I used to live life on the edge and upgrade R as soon as a new version was available, but as my third-party libs started to grow I started to upgrade R less and less.
Spark INFO logging
Spark is great, and the more I work with it on my PhD thesis the more changes I make to my local installation on my rMBP. One of the modifications I came across the other day is how to dial down logging messages in one of the Spark shells. Specifically, how to dial dow the messages in PySpark when programming in Python.
Backup R Package List
It's the fall holidays, so its time to upgrade my main machine to the latest version of OS X. I should mention that I'm not doing an upgrade, but a clean install of El Capitan. Its a pain in the neck to have to do a clean install, but past upgrade experiences with Lion, Mountan Lion, and Mavericks, have pretty much soured me on "upgrades". No señor. No upgrades.
R & TextMate
I love R, and I'm a real ggplot2 nut ... but writing complex programs in the R console, or the built-in editor, has never been my thing. Enter TextMate — its a great editor for writing R scripts in OS X. By using TextMate as your R editor you get a lot of niceties such as syntax highlighting, multiple carets, jump bars for navigating the workspace, code completion, code folding, and much more.