1. APSA auto-suggest. A tool to help you find conference panels that you'll like without reading through all 200 pages of the APSA 2011 program.

2. A quick example of web-scraping using python that I wrote up for someone: .zip. Also, check out these (free) resources for starting from scratch, web-scraping, and running R and Python together, and this python testimonial.

3. Some tricks for type-setting Arabic in latex. The elegent, flexible way is through XeTeX, a Latex-like program that comes free with most distributions of Tex. An example is here: .zip or .txt. The less elegent way is the Arabtex package: .zip. You can also use unicode to place Arabic text in R figures: .txt.

4. A script to make it less annoying to re-install all my packages after updating R. Steps: (1) Before installing the new update, open your current version of R; (2) Open a new R Editor window and paste in the code; (3) Change the directory in line 3 to your preferred directory for saving a txt file; (4) run the script. This will produce a file called myRpacks.txt that contains R code for re-installing your packages; (5) close the old R and install the new R; (6) Open new R and paste the contents of myRpacks.txt into the command line to install your packages.