[nzlug] Time Calculator

[Patrick Connolly]

Somewhere about Sat, 13-Jan-2007 at 10:49AM +1300 (give or take), N Dempsey wrote:

|> Hi Marvin,
|> 
|>   Below is the classic unix/awk hack to generate a table of averages.
|> It uses regular expressions to detect which columns have data.
|> 
|>   You will have to do a bit of fine tuning to correctly identify the
|> columns and automatically look "nice".
|> 
|>  If you are doing a lot of statistics, the there is a choice of stats
|> tools you can use:  Check out
|> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Statistical_programming_languages
|> 
|> In particular try:
|> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_%28programming_language%29 this has tools
|> for doing calculations of statistical errors etc. And "R" is open-
|> source.
|> I believe that "R" can handle HH:MM:SS.SS formats, after all that is
|> what statisticians do all the time.  (My caveat is that I don't really
|> know R that well as I live in a shell/awk/C/python world, and would
|> normally use python for this [unless I needed C's 100x faster speed] )

R (which began life at Auckland uni) can do oodles of stuff and could
handle that with ease, and, of course, it can do pretty-well any stats
calculation -- and is the best graphing software I've seen.  There is
a fair bit to know about using it, so it's probably not worth learning
its idiosyncrasies for such a small task if you have awk type skills
already.  

But if you're interested, I've had quite a lot of experience with R
and would be happy to help make a little script -- particularly if you
want to make graphs as your output.

best


-- 
   ___     Patrick Connolly      
 {~._.~}   
 _( Y )_          Good judgment comes from experience 
(:_~*~_:)         Experience comes from bad judgment    
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