The Internet Archive recently announced a new service they’ve dubbed ‘Third Eye’. This service scrapes the chyrons that annoyingly scroll across the bottom-third of TV news broadcasts. IA has a vast historical archive of TV news that they’ll eventually process, but — for now — the more recent broadcasts from four channels are readily available…. Continue reading
Modern websites are complex beasts. They house photo galleries, interactive visualizations, web fonts, analytics code and other diverse types of content. Despite the potential for diversity, many web sites share similar “tech stacks” — the components that come together to make them what they are. These stacks consist of web servers (often with special capabilities),… Continue reading
I occasionally hang out on StackOverflow and often use an answer as an opportunity to fill a package void for a particular need. docxtractr and qrencoder are two (of many) packages that were birthed from SO answers. I usually try to answer with inline code first then expand the functionality into a package (if warranted)…. Continue reading
spiderbar, spiderbar Reads robots rules from afar. Crawls the web, any size; Fetches with respect, never lies. Look Out! Here comes the spiderbar. Is it fast? Listen bud, It’s got C++ under the hood. Can you scrape, from a site? Test with can_fetch(), TRUE == alright Hey, there There goes the spiderbar. (Check the end… Continue reading
International Code Talk Like A Pirate Day almost slipped by without me noticing (September has been a crazy busy month), but it popped up in the calendar notifications today and I was glad that I had prepped the meat of a post a few weeks back. There will be no ‘rrrrrr’ abuse in this post,… Continue reading
I was socially engineered by @yoniceedee into creating today’s post due to being prodded with this tweet: Where to see the best fall foliage, based on your location: https://t.co/12pQU29ksB pic.twitter.com/JiywYVpmno — Vox (@voxdotcom) September 18, 2017 Since there aren’t nearly enough sf and geom_sf examples out on the wild, wild #rstats web, here’s a short… Continue reading
insert(post, “{ ‘standard_disclaimer’ : ‘My opinion, not my employer\’s’ }”) This is a post about the fictional company FredCo. If the context or details presented by the post seem familiar, it’s purely coincidental. This is, again, a fictional story. Let’s say FredCo had a pretty big breach that (fictionally) garnered media, Twitterverse, tech-world and Government-level… Continue reading
I’ve blathered about trust before 1 2, but said blatherings were in a “what if” context. Unfortunately, the if has turned into a when, which begged for further blathering on a recent FOSS ecosystem cybersecurity incident. The gg_spiffy @thomasp85 linked to a post by the SK-CSIRT detailing the discovery and take-down of a series of… Continue reading