Help with installing RQDA

The RQDA User Interface

RQDA is software for computer-aided qualitative data analysis (CAQDAS) and is specifically tailored for use with the R programming language and statistical computing environment. Last year I was privileged to use RQDA in carrying out the data analysis for an assessment involving 4 Nigerian States. It’s a great package, and very user-friendly. I was able to engage a team of non-programmers and after a 2-hour training, they were good to go, giving me great results.

A few months ago, somebody raised an alarm on the package’s GitHub repository. RQDA was gone!

You need to see the comments that followed after!

What followed was a long discussion – many researchers were adversely affected by this development. Fortunately, my project was properly isolated using package management powered by renv and I really had no problems at all. But others were not so fortunate, and some didn’t even know how to start solving the problem. I participated somewhat on the thread to see how I could help out a few people.

You see, what had happened was that some of the dependencies of RQDA on CRAN, the Comprehensive R Archive Network, had been upgraded and the maintainer of RQDA, Prof. Ronggi Huang of Fudan University, China, was yet to upgrade the project accordingly. With the upgrading of R to version 4.0, these packages were all archived on CRAN and could not be installed the regular way i.e. with install.package(). On a good day, installing RQDA already presents some challenges, because of the graphical user interface (GUI) libraries it uses. Now it was impossible, except for advanced R users.

One of the developers on the thread took it upon himself to work on a fork of the project and came up with a good solution. And it worked. RQDA could be downloaded and installed with little or no pain. However, when colleagues asked whether he was going to commit to maintaining the fork or even pushing to CRAN, he declined, and rightly so. Instructions for using his branch can be found here.

Given this scenario, I decided that it would be good to also develop a solution based on the last available CRAN version, even though it was archived. I therefore came up with an R script that can be used both in the shell and within an R session. With this solution, RQDA can be successfully installed from CRAN on the current version of R (v4.0.2), I tried to provide informative messages to guide would-be users in carrying out the required steps – in some cases, there might be a need to stop the script and carry out an intermediary step at the R console. This script has been uploaded here as a GitHub Gist.

To use this script, follow these steps:

1. Download the script and save it to disk–its name is gwdg-arch.R. Note the location where it is saved.
2. Navigate to the directory/folder where the file in the shell or in an R session.
3. Run the script:
   • If in the shell, use Rscript gwdg-arch.R.
   • If in the R console, use source("gwdg-arch.R")
4. If RGtk2 was successfully installed by the script, it will terminate. You should now go to the R console and run library(RGtk2); this will bring up a dialog, asking you to install Gtk+. Accept it.
5. After installing Gtk+, run the script again to download and install the other packages, including RQDA.
6. If the above steps fail, perhaps your system is lacking some extraneous dependency. Run the script in the shell, only this time add the flag --verbose. This will print out more messages to help identify the possible cause of the problem.

Feel free to give me a shout.

Easily Replace Characters In A String

https://wp.me/p94K5G-mF

Reasons Why You Should Keep Learning C/C++

I found this post interesting. C++ is hard and vast, but the payoff is immense.

How Not To Code

Many beginners and students find C/C++ language hard to master because it requires them to think a lot. There are many language-specific quirks, especially in C++, that give students and programmers a hard time. It also has a steep learning curve and is rarely used in modern application development, which prompts many people to give up learning C/C++. However, even with these challenges, it is important for students to continue learning this programming language. This article highlights reasons why one should keep learning C/C++.

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Using Your Browser From the Command Line

Howdy!

I know it’s been a while since I posted – being selfish with all the new things I’ve been learning. I’m sorry. Today I was reminded in strong terms that sharing and giving are crucial, and without all the good stuff other people are posting on the internet, I wouldn’t know most of what I know today.

I want to talk about starting your browser from the command line, in this case I’m using Firefox on Windows. The terminal I’m using is Powershell.

For a long time, I got into the habit of starting my browser like this:

start firefox

I can open my favourite social media site from the shell like this:

start firefox twitter.com

Note that I didn’t even have to prepend the URL with http(s):// or www! Neat, eh?

Sometimes, when I’m really being lazy and I quickly want to jump to Google and conduct a search on “firefox command line options” from there, I just type

start firefox www.google.com/search?q=firefox+command+line+options

I know that this example is rather contrived, but if you understand the basics of HTTP/HTTPS and query strings, this should be easy to grasp.

Having done this for a while, today I decided to look at the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) reference to see what Firefox had to offer by way of command line options.

And BOOM I hit a mother lode! So far I have only skimmed over it, but I’m astounded at the possibilities I see – this should really make for good browser automation. I wonder why I never thought of it before now.

If I find anything really useful I promise to share (this time). If you’re interested, have a look at MDN’s Firefox Command Line Options page.

I’m out!

Quick Tip on Deleting Directories in R

When trying to delete a directory, one can encounter some unexpected problems. The function for carrying out this operation is unlink, which accepts the director name as its first argument; other arguments are recursive (a logical vector or length 1 indicating whether we want to delete subdirectories, and force, also logical, which tries to override file permissions in most cases. It returns 0 when successful and 1 when not.

But there is a gotcha to using the function. First let’s list the contents of the HOME directory

> list.files()
 [1] "3D Objects"
 [2] "AppData"
 [3] "Contacts"
 [4] "Desktop"
 [5] "Documents"
 [6] "Downloads"
 [7] "Favorites"
 [8] "IntelGraphicsProfiles"
 [9] "Links"
[10] "MicrosoftEdgeBackups"
[11] "Music"
[12] "New folder"
[13] "NTUSER.DAT"
[14] "ntuser.dat.LOG1"
[15] "ntuser.dat.LOG2"
[16] "NTUSER.DAT{a70b1724-6bc8-11e8-a408-d0bf9c58c5d2}.TM.blf"
[17] "NTUSER.DAT{a70b1724-6bc8-11e8-a408-d0bf9c58c5d2}.TMContainer00000000000000000001.regtrans-ms"
[18] "NTUSER.DAT{a70b1724-6bc8-11e8-a408-d0bf9c58c5d2}.TMContainer00000000000000000002.regtrans-ms"
[19] "ntuser.ini"
[20] "OneDrive"
[21] "Pictures"
[22] "R"
[23] "Saved Games"
[24] "Searches"
[25] "source"
[26] "Videos"

Let’s say we want to delete the ‘New folder’ directory

> (unlink('New folder/', recursive = TRUE, force = TRUE))
[1]

It fails!

Even when you study the help file, the source of this failure is not apparent.

Well, it turns out that the function does not recognize the trailing slash that indicates that we are dealing with a directory. This is always added when you use tab completion for the directory name.

So, when we type

# Remove trailing slash in directory name
> (unlink('New folder', recursive = TRUE, force = TRUE))
[0]

The function succeeds, as evidenced by listing the directory contents

> dir()
[1] "3D Objects"
[2] "AppData"
[3] "Contacts"
[4] "Desktop"
[5] "Documents"
[6] "Downloads"
[7] "Favorites"
[8] "IntelGraphicsProfiles"
[9] "Links"
[10] "MicrosoftEdgeBackups"
[11] "Music"
[12] "NTUSER.DAT"
[13] "ntuser.dat.LOG1"
[14] "ntuser.dat.LOG2"
[15] "NTUSER.DAT{a70b1724-6bc8-11e8-a408-d0bf9c58c5d2}.TM.blf"
[16] "NTUSER.DAT{a70b1724-6bc8-11e8-a408-d0bf9c58c5d2}.TMContainer00000000000000000001.regtrans-ms"
[17] "NTUSER.DAT{a70b1724-6bc8-11e8-a408-d0bf9c58c5d2}.TMContainer00000000000000000002.regtrans-ms"
[18] "ntuser.ini"
[19] "OneDrive"
[20] "Pictures"
[21] "R"
[22] "Saved Games"
[23] "Searches"
[24] "source"
[25] "Videos"

Watch out for this!