Have You Checked Your Software is Up to Date?

I had a frustrating day yesterday, don't get me wrong, I got quite a bit of work done but there were a lot of glitches in doing so. I was working on two very different projects and both ran into problems because I had not done one thing. That thing was to check that I was using the latest version of the software.

Let me start with the first one. I spent sometime on Tuesday working on R. In particular I wanted to use the CAR  (Companion to Applied Regression) package which does some pretty basic things like automatically calculate Type II and Type III sums of squares which are pretty important if you do not want your ANOVA results to vary according to the way you specify the model. Although the previous week I had managed to load it, it was refusing to do so. To be more exact I had installed it earlier but because I was writing a script for others to use I had to make sure I had the code in it to install and load it. I was wondering whether it was a funny factor of R Studio which I like to work in rather than the basic R package. It does sensible things like not overwriting graphs that I have created!

Well slept on it, and the error message I kept getting started to float to the surface. It seemed to say that what it did not like was that the R I was using was an earlier version than that which CAR had most recently been compiled for. So I decided to get the latest version of both it and RStudio. The result was suddenly the code I was struggling with yesterday was working. Now this seems to me a problematic to me as it looks as if R packages are reliant on versions of R. The only way to be safe therefore is to download the latest R and all the packages you want to use apart from the core ones every time you work in R.

The second equally annoying. I was drawing graphs for a publication, and using Sigmaplot. Let me be clear Sigmaplot is not the best graphics package in the world, I have even on occasions used Excel in preference but in this case the graphs were straightforward, and I wanted beyond anything the ability to be able to put them into a wide range of export forms. I have run into so much hassle recently with getting graphs ready for publication that I wanted something that at least did eps and different graphics files. I exported the graphs once and thought that was it.

Later I came back to tidy them up, aligning them and getting them evenly spaced. This takes time and is fussy. It is not the thing that I like to do. I then noticed that whereas I had more then the page length exported it was not exporting the full width. So I went and tried to change the export parameters. I could change the size but if I altered the width it altered the length proportionately and visa versa. In the end I fell back on the computer technicians old stand by and Googled it. It immediately led me to the fact that the software has bugs in it which had been fixed by a later release. So I uninstalled the old version and reinstalled the newer one. Then exported the graphs again which this time went out correctly.

So the moral is, if you are doing a major piece of work and relying on software please check that it is a version that is up to date! Do not rely on software producers to tell you when to. Most of them do not (QSR are the one exception I know).