New sex ed game

This sex ed game Privates is supposed to be fun. I don't use a PC, so I will never know, but it definitely looks better than the web game that they gave as an example of a terrible sex ed game: parts were funny and parts just strange, like their character names: Captain Condom, Power Pap, Willy the Kid (phallic-shaped but short), and Wonder Vag. Really, Wonder Vag. I played for 30 seconds before I had 4th grade flashbacks. Looking forward to hearing how Privates works out.

R Statistics flash mob for Tuesday

Wow, this is too funny.

> From: The R Flashmob Project
>Subject: R Flashmob #2
>
>You are invited to take part in R Flashmob, the project that makes the
>world a better place by posting helpful questions and answers about the
>R statistical language to the programmer’s Q & A site stackoverflow.com
>
>Please forward this to other people you know who might like to join.
>
>FAQ
>
>Q. Why would I want to join an inexplicable R mob?
>
>A. Tons of other people are doing it.
>
>Q. Why else?
>
>A. Stackoverflow was built specifically for handling programming questions.
>It’s a better mousetrap. It offers search (and is well indexed by search engines),
>tagging, voting, the ability to choose the “best” answer to a question, and the ability to
>edit questions and answers as technology progresses. It has a karma system to
>reward people who are happy to help and discourage MLJs (mailing list jerks).
>
>Q. Do the organizers of this MOB have any commercial interest in stackoverflow?
>
A. None at all. We’re just convinced it is the best way to help and promote R. All
>the content submitted to stackoverflow is protected by a Creative Commons
>CC-Wiki License, meaning anyone is free to copy, distribute, transmit, and
>remix the information on stackoverflow. All the content on stackoverflow is
>regularly made available for download by the public.
>
>INSTRUCTIONS – R MOB #2
>Location: stackoverflow.com
>Start Date: Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
>Start Time:
>10:04 AM – US Pacific
>11:04 AM – US Mountiain
>12:04 PM – US Central
>1:04 PM – US Eastern
>6:04 PM – UK
>7:04 PM – Continental W. Europe
>5:04 AM (Weds) – New Zealand (birthplace of R)
>Duration: 50 minutes
>
>(1) At some point during the day on September 8th, synchronize your watch to
>http://timeanddate.com/worldclock/personal.html?cities=137,75,64,179,136,37,22
>
>(2) The mob should form at precisely 4 minutes past the hour and not beforehand.
>
>(3) At 4 minutes past the hour, you should arrive at stackoverflow.com, log in,
>and post 3 R questions. Be sure to tag the questions “R”. See the posting
>guidelines at http://stackoverflow.com/faq to understand what makes a good
>question.
>
>(4) Follow R Flashmob updates at http://twitter.com/rstatsmob
>
>(5) Post twitter messages tagged #rstats and #rstatsmob during the mob,
>providing links to your questions.
>
>(6) During the R MOB, you can chat with other participants on the #R channel
>on IRC (freenode). To do this, install the Chatzilla extension on Firefox.
>Click “freenode” on the main screen. Then type /join #R in the field at the
>bottom of the screen. Then chat.
>
>(7) If you finish posting your three questions within the 50 minutes, stick
> around to answer questions and give “up votes” to good questions and answers.
>
>(8) IMPORTANT: After posting, sign the R Flashmob guestbook at
>http://bit.ly/6F8B2
>
>(9) Return to what you would otherwise have been doing. Await
>instructions for R MOB #3.

Virtual virginity pledge

There's an ivirginity pledge application for the iphone catering towards the British virginity pledge audience. The bloggers have already had a field day speculating on what kind of activity this virtual purity ring will prevent. Interesting that it's a British group. Wonder if American groups will follow.

Installing WinBUGS under Mac

I'm reviewing a book on Bayesian models, and the very first thing the book says to do is install WinBUGS. I always coded by hand my Bayesian models, and maybe that's why I've only published one paper using them. So install WinBUGS on my Mac.

There's a lot out there. Three versions of BUGS: WinBUGS, OpenBUGS, and JAGS. And several windows emulators: wine, Crossover, etc.

All options require installing Xcode tools which has the following steps:
1. Put original OS X CD in, and install Xcode.
2. Go to apple developer connection website, register, download updated version of Xcode (so maybe first step wasn't necessary?) which is 1 G and took 3 hours to download, and install everything including X11 and X11SDK

Here's what I've tried so far.

1. Darwine: Theoretically easy because it comes precompiled. People claim that this works and a statistics class at Duke even had all their students do this, but I couldn't get it to work.

Nothing happens. Just get an error in the console:
err:module:DelayLoadFailureHook failed to delay load setupapi.dll.InstallHinfSectionW
wine: Call from 0x7b831fd5 to unimplemented function setupapi.dll.InstallHinfSectionW, aborting
wine: Unimplemented function setupapi.dll.InstallHinfSectionW called at address 0x7b831fd5 (thread 000b), starting debugger...
couldn't load main module (2)
Unhandled exception: unimplemented function setupapi.dll.InstallHinfSectionW called in 32-bit code (0x7b832077).
Register dump:
....
err:module:attach_process_dlls "gdi32.dll" failed to initialize, aborting
err:module:LdrInitializeThunk Main exe initialization for L"Z:\\Applications\\WinBUGS14\\WinBUGS14.exe" failed, status c0000005

2. Wine installed under fink. Something that looks Windows-like launches, but it's just an error box. I didn't save the message.

3. Wine installed under MacPorts had 56 dependencies and required a lot of hand intervention. I did many of the dependencies in parallel or else it would have taken even longer.

And whoo, WinBUGS actually launches, but as soon as I clicked on new to input the license key, it crashed with this error:

[Macintosh:~] janet% wine /Applications/WinBUGS14/WinBUGS14.exe
fixme:keyboard:RegisterHotKey (0x10026,13,0x00000002,3): stub
fixme:ole:GetHGlobalFromILockBytes cbSize is 13824
err:ole:CoGetClassObject class {0003000a-0000-0000-c000-000000000046} not registered
err:ole:CoGetClassObject class {0003000a-0000-0000-c000-000000000046} not registered
err:ole:CoGetClassObject no class object {0003000a-0000-0000-c000-000000000046} could be created for context 0x3
X Error of failed request: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
Major opcode of failed request: 152 (RENDER)
Minor opcode of failed request: 4 (RenderCreatePicture)
Serial number of failed request: 7133
Current serial number in output stream: 8517

3b. Then within the MacPort wine I tried running OpenBUGS rather than WinBUGS, and the same thing happened.

[Macintosh:~] janet% wine /Applications/OpenBUGS/winbugs.exe
X Error of failed request: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
Major opcode of failed request: 152 (RENDER)
Minor opcode of failed request: 4 (RenderCreatePicture)
Serial number of failed request: 1812
Current serial number in output stream: 2302

5. JAGS (Just Another Gibbs Sampler) installs perfectly in less than 5 minutes and even has a manual. But it says that it doesn't do everything that WinBUGS does, though it really wishes it did.

6. Crossover allows downloads of trial copies that work for 30 days but cost $50 to educational users after that. As with Darwine and Wine, people claim to have gotten it working with BUGS, but the company itself doesn't guarantee that it will work. And so far it does after I followed this hint.

The remaining problem is how to integrate WinBUGS with R now that the famous BRugs package has disappeared.