Monday, November 27, 2006

Feed for News from the Danish Institute of Agricultural sciences

The home page of our Institute Danish Institute of Agricultural Sciences links to a News page. I have now made a feed for these News item.

It happens that I forget to visit the page. With other news services I simply check my netvibes home page that indicates if any new items has arrived. Unfortunately the DIAS news page does not have a feed. During the weekend I discovered the PonyFish service and generated this feed for the news. If you use Firefox 2.0 or Internet Explorer 7.0 you should simply click on the link to get started. If not, copy the link location and paste it into your favourite feed reader.

Friday, November 24, 2006

odfWeave package in R

I finally got time to read the October number of RNews. One interesting article concerned the new package odfWeave. This package gives the same functionality for using R within OpenOffice, as the package Sweave gives with LaTeX.

SWeave is used to combine text and program code for statistical analysis in a single document. It is then possible to produce a new document automatically with the results of the statistical analysis included. In our research group we use this approach more and more.

One problem with this approach (the only ?) is how to interact with people that do not use LaTeX, but Word. It seems that a large part of this problem is now solved.

I have tried it out very briefly, and it seems to be working seamlessly. The resulting document can easily be saved in Word format in OpenOffice. However, I have not tried it with the formula editor in OpenOffice

By the way, the (Danish) OpenOffice add-on Writer2LaTeX that converts OpenOffice documents to LaTeX is now (version 2.0.4) integrated in OpenOffice.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Links added to home page

I have now added some links to the right panel in my DIAS home-pages.

The first part is a search box for searches within the different domains relevant for our research group based on the Google co-op platform. This has revealed some surprising results. Some outdated pages on our old server have a high page rank and show up in the top rankings after a google search. I am now trying to update links etc.

The second part are links to different projects. The first one is a link to the Nordic-Baltic Biometric Conference 2007 to be held 6-8 June 2007, at Research Centre Foulum. I think I have discussed the other links on this blog.