Ademcan's blog

Installing RStudio Server on Mac OS X Lion

    RStudio is a great IDE for the R programming language. Two versions of RStudio are available, the desktop and the server edition. The desktop edition is a full version running locally and the server edition is running on a server with the graphical RStudio interface accessible from your web browser. At work I am using a Mac Pro as a personal server with all my data and my running scripts. To preserve my memory (RAM) on my laptop I wanted to run R from my server. Until now, I used the command line with ssh, but after testing RStudio I couldn’t go back anymore 🙂
    You can install RStudio Server in any machine and access its graphical interface from any web browser. You will then access your normal IDE running R (on the server-side) with your Rhistory and R plots remaining there.
    Recently, I found the following tutorial about how to install RStudio server on Mac OS X Lion. It works very well, but I got an error at some point. After running the following command

sudo ./install-boost

    I got an error claiming that bootstrap.sh was not found. To continue the installation, you need to run bootstrap.sh by yourself. To do so, run the following commands from your terminal

cd $YOUR_RSTUDIO_INSTALLATION_FOLDER/dependencies/common/boost-build/boost_1_50_0
sudo ./bootstrap.sh
sudo ./bjam --prefix=/opt/rstudio-tools/boost/boost_1_50_0 toolset=clang variant=release threading=multi link=static install

    Of course, change the version of boost if your are using a more recent one. Don’t forget to modify $YOUR_RSTUDIO_INSTALLATION_FOLDER by your Rstudio installation folder path.
Then, continue with the normal installation process, everything should go well.
    Browse to http://localhost:8787 login with your username and password you use for the computer where you installed RStudio server and enjoy 😉

image: rstudio.org

UPDATE: Opera is not supported by RStudio BUT works with IE if you install the Google Chrome Frame plugin. OMG 🙂

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HyperSwitch, an interesting app switcher alternative for Mac

    The default app switcher on Mac (cmd+tab) doesn’t show the different opened windows for a given application. For example if you have multiple LibreOffice windows opened, you will only see one LibreOffice icon on the app switcher. I think this is a great productivity-killer 🙂
    When I was looking for an alternative, I first found Witch. Witch looks promising but it was too complicated for me. I also didn’t like the vertical presentation of the app switcher.
    I then managed (I don’t know how) to find Senebier 🙂 I just don’t understand what’s written and didn’t read any positive or negative comment about this app. I didn’t installed it yet, but I contacted the author to ask if the source code will be available at any time or not.
    Finally, when following my feeds from LifeHacker, I stumbled upon an article about HyperSwitch. This app switcher is still in Beta but it actually works pretty well. Once you started the app switcher and moved to an app icon, you can:

• press the down arrow to you see all the open windows and switch to one of them
• press the up arrow to open a new window for that app or see the most recent files

    I am actually giving a try to HyperSwitch. It is a promising project, still in beta, but I am sure it will improve a lot very soon.

Source : HyperSwitch website
LifeHacker’s article about HyperSwitch
Image : RoaringApps

Source: New feed

Leed: web-based open source RSS reader

    As you can see from my older posts, I am becoming more and more self-hosted every day 🙂 I already have some interesting services running on my own server, don’t worry I will write about all of them. Last time I wrote about Shaarli, a great and open source links managing tool. Today, I will introduce you to Leed (for Light Feed). Leed is an open source RSS reader alternative to Tiny Tiny RSS or RSS Lounge for example (and the almost dead Google Reader). I never tried any RSS readers before, I was mainly reading my feeds in Thunderbird, thus I cannot compare Leed to its existing alternatives. I can only say that Leed is great.

    I wanted a web-based RSS reader to access my feeds from any devices everywhere. I recently discovered Idleman’s blog (in French) when he started his tutorials about the Raspberry Pi. Then I found his project’s page and Leed.
Leed is an open source and light RSS feed reader. The installation is very easy.
The “only” requirements are:
– Apache server
– PHP 5.3
– MySQL

    Once installed, you can use crontab to automatically update your feeds, or you can do it manually if you don’t want to deal with crontab. You can use keyboard shortcuts and personalize the interface using themes. You can easily implement your own themes. The default theme is responsive, thus you have an easy access and user-friendly interface in any of your devices (tablet, smartphone…).
One other great option is the link between Leed and Shaarli. If you are using Shaarli, you can automatically add any articles from your feeds to your Shaarli.
Leed is very simple and Leed works 🙂

When I was writing this post, I realized that Leed was only available in French. After asking the permission to the author (Idleman), I translated Leed and the installation process to English.

How to install Leed:
1 – Download the archive LeedEnglish.zip (Licence : CC by nc sa)
2 – Unzip and send the content to your server. Do a chmod 777 to the leed folder
3 – Go to the installation page http://mydomain.com/leed/install.php and follow the instructions
4 – Once the installation is finished, remove the install.php file for your security
5 – If you want to update automatically your feeds, put the following line into your crontab
Open crontab

sudo crontab -e

and add the following line for an hourly update :

0 * * * * wget -q -O /var/www/leed/logsCron "http://mydomain.com/leed/action.php?action=synchronize&code=your_synchronisation_code"

(adjust the link and your synchronisation code)
Be warn that too frequent updates can slow down the server.

Don’t hesitate to ask if you have any question or remark 😉

A demo of Leed is available online here

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Dynamic IP address with OVH

When I was configuring my server, I realized that I only had a dynamic IP address. At the time I had two options:

• ask for a fixed IP address
• deal with my dynamic IP address to get it updated when it changes

The first option was too expensive for me. Thus, I decided to go for the second one.

    Some tools exist to allow you to use a dynamic IP address with a specific domain name, such as DynDns or no.ip for example. Those tools provide scripts to update your IP address as soon as it changes. I could’t find the free option for DynDns anymore, but there is a free option for no.ip with some limitations, but it should be find for a personal use.
    Before using one of the available general tools, I did some research about OVH (my registrar) and dynamic IP address. I then realized that OVH was providing some specific tools to update your IP information directly on your OVH manager. You can find more information in the DynHOST page.
    I am actually using the Ipcheck.py script available from the previous link. I just had to adapt the script for my own usage. I modified the dynhost script and changed the line

IP=`/sbin/ifconfig $IFACE | fgrep "inet ad" | cut -f2 -d":" | cut -f1 -d" "` 

(which was returning my local IP address)
to

IP=`/usr/bin/wget -qO- ipecho.net/plain`

to get the correct IP address used by OVH.
It actually works pretty well for me, Enjoy

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