R help - Apr 2010 - Oddity with internet access and R 11.0 with Sophos firewall and Windoze XP - solved

Just in case anyone else hits this.  I just installed R 11.0 alongside R
10.1.0 (off my D: drive in D:\R\... but I think that's irrelevent) and
all went well, I selected my nearest CRAN mirror (Bristol is the one I
like) and getting the selection list seemed to take ages though it did
come eventually.  However, I then got an error message saying that R
couldn't make contact on port 80.  I rechecked with R 10.1.0: fine.  I
reinstalled R 11.0.0 and selected "internet2" instead of
"standard" for
internet, no change.

I thought "Can't be the firewall as it wouldn't get the list of
mirrors"
but I went into Sophos firewall and manually added R 11.0.0 and
everything is now fine.

Very odd and I'd be interested to hear if some clever person can explain
why R 11.0.0 was making (very slow) access to the internet to get the
list of mirrors but then failing (I have the 10.1.0 location in the
windows path but not, yet, the 11.0.0 one, could it be that?)

However, ultimately this seems to me to be a problem with Sophos's
firewall not R and I'm just reporting it here in case anyone else sees
the same and finds this helpful.

Thanks to the R team, yet again, for an amazing product!

Chris


-- 
Chris Evans <chris at psyctc.org> Skype: chris-psyctc
Consultant Psychiatrist in Psychotherapy, Notts. PDD network;
Trust Research Governance Lead and Clinical Director, Psychological
  Therapies Directorate in Local Services, Nottinghamshire NHS Trust;
Professor, Psychotherapy, Nottingham University
*If I am writing from one of those roles, it will be clear. Otherwise*
*my views are my own and not representative of those institutions    *
If you have difficulty Emailing me on this address or getting a reply,
send again but cc to:       chris dot evans at nottshc dot nhs dot uk
and to:                     c dot evans at nottingham dot ac dot uk

Ah, Dr. Who's got nothing on me!

Beg pardon, I'm recuperating from an operation and clearly more than
usually disoriented.  I meant 2.10.1 and 2.11.0 of course.

Now that I'm here, courtesy of my time slip, what I'd really love to see
in R 10.0.0, or even 2.12.0, is the choice to have output either in the
current plain text or to some simple formatting primitives that would
have default tabs & tables for matrices etc. and allow embedded
graphics.  I'd love to be able to opt to save that as HTML, XML, TeX,
RTF, ODF wihthout the complexities of Sweave, ODFWeave, R2HTML etc.

I know the complexities of Sweave etc. are child's play to numerically
and computer gifted people such as yourself Professor, and the R core
team, but for those of us who proselytise for R to mere psychologists,
doctors, psychotherapists etc., that complexity is hard and the hassles
of reformatting text to nice tables etc. discourages people from coming
across from SPSS I know.

OK, back into my tardis and thanks for the correction!!

Chris

Prof Brian Ripley sent the following  at 24/04/2010 11:57:
> Could you please explain how you manage to travel to the future to get
> access to R 11.0[.0] and 10.1.0.  I'm sure the other R developers would
> also love to know what new features we are going to implement in the
> next several decades.
> 
> On Fri, 23 Apr 2010, Chris Evans wrote:
> 
>> Just in case anyone else hits this.  I just installed R 11.0 alongside
R
>> 10.1.0 (off my D: drive in D:\R\... but I think that's irrelevent)
and
>> all went well, I selected my nearest CRAN mirror (Bristol is the one I
>> like) and getting the selection list seemed to take ages though it did
>> come eventually.  However, I then got an error message saying that R
>> couldn't make contact on port 80.  I rechecked with R 10.1.0: fine.
I
>> reinstalled R 11.0.0 and selected "internet2" instead of
"standard" for
>> internet, no change.
>>
>> I thought "Can't be the firewall as it wouldn't get the
list of mirrors"
>> but I went into Sophos firewall and manually added R 11.0.0 and
>> everything is now fine.
>>
>> Very odd and I'd be interested to hear if some clever person can
explain
>> why R 11.0.0 was making (very slow) access to the internet to get the
>> list of mirrors but then failing (I have the 10.1.0 location in the
>> windows path but not, yet, the 11.0.0 one, could it be that?)
>>
>> However, ultimately this seems to me to be a problem with Sophos's
>> firewall not R and I'm just reporting it here in case anyone else
sees
>> the same and finds this helpful.
>>
>> Thanks to the R team, yet again, for an amazing product!
>>
>> Chris
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> Chris Evans <chris at psyctc.org> Skype: chris-psyctc
>> Consultant Psychiatrist in Psychotherapy, Notts. PDD network;
>> Trust Research Governance Lead and Clinical Director, Psychological
>>  Therapies Directorate in Local Services, Nottinghamshire NHS Trust;
>> Professor, Psychotherapy, Nottingham University
>> *If I am writing from one of those roles, it will be clear. Otherwise*
>> *my views are my own and not representative of those institutions    *
>> If you have difficulty Emailing me on this address or getting a reply,
>> send again but cc to:       chris dot evans at nottshc dot nhs dot uk
>> and to:                     c dot evans at nottingham dot ac dot uk
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
> 



-- 
Chris Evans <chris at psyctc.org> Skype: chris-psyctc
Consultant Psychiatrist in Psychotherapy, Notts. PDD network;
Trust Research Governance Lead and Clinical Director, Psychological
  Therapies Directorate in Local Services, Nottinghamshire NHS Trust;
Professor, Psychotherapy, Nottingham University
*If I am writing from one of those roles, it will be clear. Otherwise*
*my views are my own and not representative of those institutions    *
If you have difficulty Emailing me on this address or getting a reply,
send again but cc to:       chris dot evans at nottshc dot nhs dot uk
and to:                     c dot evans at nottingham dot ac dot uk