Little things that make life easier #9: Using data.entry in r

With data.entry(), it's easy to visually fill (small) matrices in r.

Let's see it in action. First, I create a 4x3 matrix:

mx <- matrix(nrow=4, ncol=3) show(mx)

[,1] [,2] [,3] [1,] NA NA NA [2,] NA NA NA [3,] NA NA NA [4,] NA NA NA

The matrix is created with the cells' values being NA Now, in order to assign values to these cells, I use

data.entry(mx)

This opens a small window where I can enter the data.
This is how the cells were filled before my editing them:

And here's how they looked after my editing them just before I used File > Close:

Back in the shell, the matrix has indeed changed its values:

show(mx)

var1 var2 var3 [1,] 2 4 2 [2,] 12345 8 42 [3,] 5 6 489 [4,] 9 22 11

Pretty cool, imho.

Little things that make live easier #7: set relativenumber in vim

Today, I stumbled upon an option in vim that I think will make my life easier: :set relativefilenumber

With this option enabled, vim will show how many lines a line is apart from the line with the cursor:

So, if I need to quickly jump to the select statement, I can type 9j (9 because I see that it is 9 lines down, and j because that moves the cursor down).

Little things that make live easier #6: Using clip.exe in cmd.exe to copy somehting into the clipboard

Windows comes with a handy little program, named clip.exe, that can be used to quickly copy something into the clipboard from cmd.exe.

For example, if I wanted to copy the current working directory into the clipboard, I'd go

C:\some\long\and\complicated\path>echo %CD% | clip

Similarly, if I needed to copy all files within the current directory, I'd do

C:\some\path>dir /b | clip

Also, I can copy the content of a file into the clipboard like so:

C:\some\path>clip < someFile.txt

Little things that make live easier #3: javascripts' Number.toFixed() for a fixed number of digits after the decimal point.

Javascript's Number object has the toFixed method that allows display a number with a fixed amount of digits after the decimal point. Unfortunately, it doesn't round the number.

function tf(n) { out.innerHTML += n.toFixed(3) + '<br>'; } tf(4 ); // 4.000 tf(4.2 ); // 4.200 tf(4.1004); // 4.100 tf(4.1009); // 4.100

Links

Source code on github

Little things that make live easier #2: sys.ora_mining_number_nt

With Oracle, sys.ora_mining_number can be used to turn a set of numbers to a result set:

SQL> select * from table(sys.ora_mining_number_nt(4, 20, 15)); COLUMN_VALUE ------------ 4 20 15

Little things that make live easier #1: convert an svg file to a png on the command line with inkscape

Inkscape can be used to create pngs (or other image formats) on the command line:

c:\foo\bar> inkscape -f input.svg -e output.png

Of course, this works with inkscape files, too...