7:00 – 7:00pm VISIBILITY

• Walked through the new version of PPM with Christie, she thinks it’s fine, and will check with Trish. I’ll follow up at 3:00, when I have my meeting with Kris U.
• Working from home this morning, waiting for my microwave.
• Looks like the reason for the slowness of the RServe response was that the HashMap that I had the RConnection object wasn’t static. Odd, since the remote object appears to be persistent…
• I have a new microwave!
• R really hates windows paths – you have to make sure to replace all the instances of ” with ‘/’ or you kill R.
• Got all the pieces working. Calculations, plots, the works. Need to do some clean up and commenting, and then make widgets!

7:00 –  5:00 VISIBILITY

• Somehow I lost last Friday’s entry.
  • Walked through the PPM app with Trich, Christie and Leah. There were some problems with how the spreadsheet was getting assembled, but they liked the message organizer.
  • Went over the changes with Dong. He finished up on Friday, and we’re testing today
  • Having very slow response from R when the remote object is running in the server. Odd, because response was immediate when the app was running in java directly. Have to poke at that.
• Testing Dong’s update
• Install this morning?
• I may or may not be leaving this morning. I’m getting a range installed, but the delivery of the range may have been canceled.
• Added RFlexServer and RFlexClient to SVN
• Deployed the new PPM but items that had dollar figures did not post while items that did not have dollar figured *did* post. Talked to Dong about this,  and added the bug to the PPM list.
• Got RFlexServer and RFlexClient running on my home box. Started working on why responses are so slow. THey are not, if R is not being called. Going to try making the reference static.
• Got a new version of PPM from Dong and deployed it. It seems to be working, in that spreadsheets seem to have the appropriate numbers in them :-). I’m going to talk to Christine and Trish tomorrow.
• Set up a meeting with Kris U. tomorrow at 3:00

7:30 – 5:30 VISIBILITY

• Had a thought about getting data out of R. In the same way that I’m writing pix out to files that will then  be read.
  • Tried it, but no luck. It appears that the output from RServe is not considered redirectable
• Went looking for more hints and found this in the RServe FAQ:
  • String s=c.eval(“paste(capture.output(print(summary(mymodel))),collapse=’\n’)”).asString();
  • And that seems to work nicely. The moral of the story seems to be “Find a way to get R to do the work”
• Starting on the RemoteObject – should be mostly finished
• Started RFlexClient
• Accessing the setupModel.xml file
• Having some problems getting the message broker. Found a redundant entry in the remoting-config.xml file. That, plus a recompile, redeploy seems to have fixed it.
• Connected to the RemoteObject! Time to make some fancy widgets 🙂

7:30 – 3:30 VISIBILITY (3.4.11)

• Hoping to deploy new PPM today, and that there will be no mysterious 502 error message…
• Starting on some test statistical widgets to try out the remote object methods
• Deploy went well. Nearly there
• The queries are SLOW. Wondering if it has something to do with getting the RConnection. Going to try bouncing back the request on Monday (Depending on the stove delivery…)

7:30 – 4:30 VISIBILITY

• Went over the latest version of PPM with Dong. We have a bit of a problem saving out multiple files without having a dialog pop up for each file. It’s possible that an Applet might be a workaround
• Working on figuring out how to properly traverse a REXP object
  • Attr
    • Parse the debug string?
      • Split on commas
      • Stuff to the left of ‘=’ is an attribute
      • use getAttribute()
      • Recurse to parser?
  • Payload
    • Object o = rl.elementAt(i);
• Attempted to install PPM on site, and had the following bugs:
  • When running on Trish’s machine, I got a remote object error 502 when trying to save a report for the first time. This did not happen on my box, but it has a static IP address and a hole in the firewall just for it. Will try on another machine today
  • When bringing up a report request, the fields were blank until some event (i.e. show all) was clicked
  • XLS files did not contain dollar figures

9:30 – 7:00 VISIBILITY

• Dentist this morning
• Testing Dong’s code. It looks good as far as it goes. We need some kind of excel export for the financial info.
• Added a page for PPM req’s (for 2011) : http://www.fgmdev.com/blogs/?page_id=4987
• Somewhat useful tutorial for RServe: http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/Conferences/DSC-2003/Drafts/Urbanek.pdf
• Here’s another: http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~iase/publications/17/C340.pdf
• Building a more robust data.frame reader. Done
  • It turns out lists can be recursive. I temporarily have the DataFrameReader calling itself, which kind of works but could be better. Fix tomorrow.
• Working my way through getting some basic calculations. There are some issues where if a string is assigned it is not considered a factor (whatever that is…). Unlike in the R interpreter, a factor must be explicitly set (i.e. “menuType <- as.factor(menuType)”)
• Went to the customer site and sat around for two hours.

7:30 – 4:30 VISIBILITY

• It’s starting to feel more Spring-like than wintry. Got 107 miles in on the bike this weekend. My legs are very, very tired.
• Going to try to do some compound actions with RServe, including running a query and generating a plot into a particular directory. If that works, I’m going to put that code in a remote object and try to trigger it from Flex.
  • Making progress, but getting data out of Rserve data frames is very goofy
• Cloud-based IDE? – http://www.cloud9ide.com/. Some more stuff here: http://query7.com/cloud9-ide-review
• Worked with Dong on getting the PPM requests organized in a by-month fashion.

8:00 – 5:00 VISIBILITY

• Now that I’ve got rJava/RMI working, I’m going to try building a few composite commands and parsing the results.
• And now I’m wondering if rServe makes more sense. It appears to create a separate workspace for each connection. That would work much better for a webapp. The only thing to watch out for is that the server goes down now and then, so it will have to be restarted under control of the Remote Object.
• Spent the afternoon with the customer drawing diagrams of how our data will be packaged and migrated between platforms.

7:30 -5:30 VISIBILITY

• Server Meeting today at 11:15. Don’t see how I can make that
• Over at site starting at 1:30
• Setting up rJava: http://www.mumuen.com/2010/10/running-r-in-java-with-jrirjava.html
• Got the rtest code in the rJava examples directory compiling. It turns out that the CRAN directory has an old version. Sheesh. Updated the maven repo with the version 9 jars. Added R_HOME to the path. Restarting all to register changes… No joy.
• Following the directions here: http://mithil-tech.blogspot.com/2009/11/r-and-java-jri-via-eclipse.html
  • That worked!
• Next will be to get R to run in Tomcat: Here’s where I’ll start: http://wiki.cvrgrid.org/index.php/RJava/jri_Setup
• Useful r packages so far (google “CRAN xx’ for detailed info on the package):
  • sqldf – allows SQL manipulation of tables
  • reshape – for manipulation of data types
  • gwidgets – support for interactive graphics
  • HH
  • rJava – java interaction
  • RServe – R as a webserver

9:00 – 6:00VISIBILITY

• Had a talk with John W last Friday about the increase in hours charged 4 hrs/week to 10 hrs week for catwalk. Told him that I basically couldn’t do the level of support that I had been doing for 45min/day and that I wouldn’t be coming by unless he tells me that there is a problem.
• Going to try to talk to R through Java today.
• Found a cool audio synthsizer library for the next hand – https://ccrma.stanford.edu/software/stk/
• So that I can find this the next time: Webstart, Servlet, IDE, findme!
• Interviews!
• Got RServe installed. Going to take a look at interfacing that way.

7:30 – 4:00 VISIBILITY

• Meeting with Trish Christie and Leia(?).
  • add “… for the monthly status report deliverable which is due (month) 10th”  to the generated email.
  • Add the ability to sort and filter”Create New Request” panel and “Saved Requests” (project, status, personnel roles. etc)
  • Time that a project should be included in a report request is from the first budget year to the last budget year plus the appropriation period
  • For creating (or adding to?) a request, it may be necessary to look at projects that will become active up to some period in the future, so that as projects become active, they will be included in requests
• Went over meeting action items with Dong.
• Based on a conversation with April, I’m looking at developing a Flex GUI interface to R, running on the server and accessed through rJava.
• Talked to Brian about moving my client schedule from morning to afternoon

7:30 – 5:30 VISIBILITY

• Working on setting up a meeting with Christie and Trish to go over Dong’s proposal
• Showed Dong how to set up the Web Application with server in Eclipse. He thinks that he might be able to make it work with Maven
• Endless ANOVA
• Worked a bit on the hand with Tom. Everything seems to be working. Yipee!

7:30 – 4:30 VISIBILITY

• Deployed Dong’s code. All works well, and we *can* save out excel from Flex!
• Filed out as much as I could of Brian’s SSP
• Downloaded the Apache Commons Math library source for conversion to Actionscript
• Tried the easy way and found a Java to Actionscript converter (J2AS3). It needs some wotk for handling the FastMath class. Before I go in and change it by hand, I may try to improve the parser.
• More ANOVA

7:30 – 5:30 VISIBILITY

• Found a problem with Flash Player dealing with debug statements. It’s covered here, but the gist of it is that the non-debug version of Flash Player seems to choke on debug statements – at least Error.getStackTrace() (not sure about trace().
• Adding Randomized ANOVA to stats package. It turns out that CMM is trying to have a measure of confidence in their presentation of data but they don’t have a good statistical basis for making the call. How convenient 🙂
• Testing Dong’s new PPM and hopefully burning a disk.
• Had a grand time figuring out what’s up with flash debuggering.
• Added the following to the FGMUtils pom file to get our compiler flags in. It looks like this:

<plugin>
<groupId>org.sonatype.flexmojos</groupId>
<artifactId>flexmojos-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<version>3.8</version>
<extensions>true</extensions>
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>com.adobe.flex</groupId>
<artifactId>compiler</artifactId>
<version>4.0.0.14159</version>
<scope>compile</scope>
<type>pom</type>
</dependency>
</dependencies>
<configuration>
<definesDeclaration>
<!–  this is the command line: define=CONFIG::debugging,true -define=CONFIG::release,false –>
<property>
<name>CONFIG::debugging</name>
<value>true</value>
</property>
<property>
<name>CONFIG::release</name>
<value>false</value>
</property>
</definesDeclaration>

</configuration>
</plugin>

7:30 – 3:00 VISIBILITY

• It looks like the customer uses Flash 10. Not sure about the exact version.
• Interview with Phillip Tomlin.
• Sank into a Friday stupor and was unable to get anything substantial working.