What’s new January and a bit of February 2025

I didn’t make this a 2025 resolution or anything, but after writing the quick SRA post last month and reviving my site I realized it doesn’t take all that much effort for me to put things together as I’m basically writing notes all the time anyway to document. Why not a summary document of my week/month?

I tackled Advent of Code again last December, which I first tried in 2022 and then skipped in 2023. I didn’t get very far, only to Day 5, but used it as an opportunity to learn Rust which did take a good amount of time. I took tons of notes in each day’s READMEs. I think when it rolls around again in December I may either try R and time myself for how long it takes me to actually program each day’s solutions as well as hopefully get further than Day 7 with my daily driver language. Or, maybe I’ll work on my Rust proficiency more with a goal of getting further than Day 5 and also timing myself in terms of how long each solution takes me to have a reference for future years. This will probably be more useful to me than benchmarking my code runtimes, although benchmarking is always a fun exercise.

Work is kicking off quickly with various grant submissions that I am helping with. And I hope to publish a few first-author papers soon.

Some R-related irritations I seem to keep needing to remind myself of:

• The root node of an ape phylogenetic tree object phylo is Ntip(phylo)+1.
• To get the LaTeX code out of a kable table, it seems the only way to do so is to actually render the document into a pdf and have the keep_tex: true option. However, I am now using Quarto and these instructions while similar are not actually the same for Quarto. It turns out you have to do:

format:
  pdf:
    documentclass: report
    keep-tex: true

WHY CAN I NOT JUST GET THE LATEX OUTPUT DIRECTLY IN THE CONSOLE?

Some other irritations I also keep needing reminders of:

• Turning on and off wordwrap with VSCode is ⌥+Z