Seth's Blog

8 Responses to “Percentile Feedback R Workspace Updated”

1. Hamish Barney Says:
   May 21st, 2011 at 10:56 pm

   I’m interested in trying your program. I’ve downloaded the workspace and installed R (ver 2.13.0). When I load the workspace into R though it doesn’t seem to do anything. Sorry for the ignorance but could you please give me some tips on how to get started with the software? Thanks a lot!
   Hamish

2. Seth Roberts Says:
   May 22nd, 2011 at 12:08 am

   You have to know a little bit of R to use it. R workspaces don’t “do something” when loaded. You need to run the functions they contain. I’m afraid my advice to you is to study R.

3. Hamish Barney Says:
   May 22nd, 2011 at 4:25 am

   I was just confused about the way a workspace would work given the way workspaces work with other IDEs that I have used. I assumed it would show the set of files with the source code for the percentile feedback software.

   I work as a software developer so I’m not adverse to getting my hands dirty. That also means that I know how hard it is to understand other peoples code and how they intended it to be used no matter how well written it is.

   For those interested in using this software I’ve done a little bit of fiddling and reading about R.

   Running “c(lsf.str())” from the R prompt will give you a list of the functions that were loaded as part of the workspace.

   You can view the source for a given function by typing its name at the prompt (e.g. “work.start”). This will also give you a clue about the parameters the function expects.

   The software expects a file (‘C:/percentilefeedback.RDataTmp’) to exist in order for most of the functions to work. I created an empty file but that didn’t placate it. I’ll keep fiddling. If anyone gets it to work let me know what steps you followed.

   Seth, have you considered putting the source code into a version control system like bitbucket.org or github.com?

4. Seth Roberts Says:
   May 22nd, 2011 at 8:06 am

   Thanks for the suggestions and info. I didn’t know about bitbucket.org and github.com.

   To see the workspace contents, type

   ls()

   To see the program in action, type

   work.plot()

5. Joseph Dantes Says:
   May 26th, 2011 at 11:46 am

   I didn’t have much luck with installing this in Ubuntu and it doesn’t look like I will.

   For total noobs, .rdata’s are autoloaded when R is started in that directory.

   I’m gonna try it in Wine.

6. Joseph Dantes Says:
   May 26th, 2011 at 12:10 pm

   I got it semi working in Wine.

   The first time I ran work.plot(), no result.

   Then I tried fix(save.ws). Didn’t edit anything, just closed the editor.

   Ran work.plot() again. This time it appears I have all Seth’s work data, except my trend line doubles back and terminates in the upper left hand corner.

   Pretty screwy. No idea where to go from here. Maybe releasing it to Github will build a community that can troubleshoot/document.

   I went through the functions, trying them all, didn’t wind up much the wiser, got a number of different errors.

   A basic instruction set would include:
   1. How to clear seth’s data
   2. How to enter new data

7. Seth Roberts Says:
   May 27th, 2011 at 7:32 am

   It works with Windows XP and Mac. Haven’t tried Ubuntu.

8. Zans Says:
   June 19th, 2011 at 9:38 am

   Great script, Seth. Could you upload your arithmetic one as a downloadable workspace as well? Somehow i is not displayed properly on my browser so when I try to run it I get many error messages.