I was using dein package manager for some time happily. Till yesterday it started acting up during update and even messed up already installed plugins. After some messing around I admitted I will not be able to solve it easily so I tried to give the new builtin package manager a try. I followed this post. And it seems to work like a charm, also within nvim. I added all my packages using git submodule add in directories like pack/git/start and pack/helper/opt.

RAND corporation has released some of their classics freely at RAND Classics. I did already know The Compleat Strategyst which is a classic. There are some more game theory books that I don’t know yet. And lots of cold war strategy - all worth a look.

In many terminal programs readline is doing the editing of input. It is possible with M-v to quickly switch to vi mode and with M-e to the default emacs mode. In emacs mode one has a few commands like ^A to jump to the begin of line. Usually I prefer vi - but in command line it’s not that useful to switch modes. R in tmux got stuck in vi mode and was pasting ^A^K... all over the place.

There now is a Javascript recreation of Windows Paint: Paint.js. While Paint is easily the worst graphics program I used to work it is familiar to almost anyone. I still see way too many graphics in papers that were touched up by paint. This will make sure another generation of researchers can learn this dreaded tool.

Alex Pizzini got a paper with us published. It is a continuation of his thesis. Nice that there is still so much interest on cooperation. On my end the statistics was rather simple. Not much to do on the mathematical side.

There is an advent calendar for grown ups this year. advent of code gives every day a nice challenge. This year I try to remember what I learnt of Haskell. The leader board is a bit annoying as it is completely filled with people that manage to solve the problems in seconds (the problems are released at midnight EST). Still they are worth checking out.

I am quite confident using make to create complex reports. As I dig into R I see they have an interesting work flow creating packages. It addresses a few important issues - tracking dependent packages, documenting stuff and testing. Most important packaging and installing on other systems can be done automatically using a single command. I want that. I found Makefiles mentioned several times included in the documentation - but so far haven’t figured out how they are supposed to be used.

I have just released a simple package to read PTR-TOF h5 files. This used to be part of a larger project on developing a pipeline for working with PTR-TOF files, but stripped from all experimental functions. The other package should become a paper, so hold on for that. The package can be found at bdcaf/rawTof.

Finally have seen it. Impressive what they did on the stage. Not only a play, but they incorporated some stage magic as well. They suggest strongly to #keepthesecret. I can understand the show had more than one twist.

Finally got enough time to see Harry Potter and the cursed child. It’s quite the investment to have two plays on a day. Anyway finally seeing how it goes on.