The splashr package [srht|GL|GH] — an alternative to Selenium for javascript-enabled/browser-emulated web scraping — is now at version 0.6.0 (still in dev-mode but on its way to CRAN in the next 14 days). The major change from version 0.5.x (which never made it to CRAN) is a swap out of the reticulated docker package with… Continue reading
Roll Your Own Federal Government Shutdown-caused SSL Certificate Expiration Monitor in R
By now, even remote villages on uncharted islands in the Pacific know that the U.S. is in the midst of a protracted partial government shutdown. It’s having real impacts on the lives of Federal government workers but they aren’t the only ones. Much of the interaction Federal agencies have with the populace takes place online… Continue reading
Waffle Geoms & Other Miscellaneous In-Development Package Updates
More than just sergeant has been hacked on recently, so here’s a run-down of various 📦 updates: waffle The square pie chart generating waffle🔗 package now contains a nascent geom_waffle() so you can do things like this: library(hrbrthemes) library(waffle) library(tidyverse) tibble( parts = factor(rep(month.abb[1:3], 3), levels=month.abb[1:3]), values = c(10, 20, 30, 6, 14, 40, 30,… Continue reading
On the Road to 0.8.0 — Some Additional New Features Coming in the sergeant Package
It was probably not difficult to discern from my previous Drill-themed post that I’m fairly excited about the Apache Drill 1.15.0 release. I’ve rounded out most of the existing corners for it in preparation for a long-overdue CRAN update and have been concentrating on two helper features: configuring & launching Drill embedded Docker containers and… Continue reading
‘data:’ Scraping & Chart Reproduction : Arrows of Environmental Destruction
Today’s RSS feeds picked up this article by Marianne Sullivan, Chris Sellers, Leif Fredrickson, and Sarah Lamdanon on the woeful state of enforcement actions by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). While there has definitely been overreach by the EPA in the past the vast majority of its regulatory corpus is quite sane and has… Continue reading
Apache Drill 1.15.0 + sergeant 0.8.0 = pcapng Support, Proper Column Types & Mounds of New Metadata
Apache Drill is an innovative distributed SQL engine designed to enable data exploration and analytics on non-relational datastores […] without having to create and manage schemas. […] It has a schema-free JSON document model similar to MongoDB and Elasticsearch; [a plethora of APIs, including] ANSI SQL, ODBC/JDBC, and HTTP[S] REST; [is] extremely user and developer… Continue reading
Exploring 2018 R-bloggers & R Weekly Posts with Feedly & the ‘seymour’ package
Well, 2018 has flown by and today seems like an appropriate time to take a look at the landscape of R bloggerdom as seen through the eyes of readers of R-bloggers and R Weekly. We’ll do this via a new package designed to make it easier to treat Feedly as a data source: seymour [GL… Continue reading
Certifiably Gone Phishing
Phishing is [still] the primary way attackers either commit a primary criminal act (i.e. phish a target to, say, install ransomware) or is the initial vehicle used to gain a foothold in an organization so they can perform other criminal operations to achieve some goal. As such, security teams, vendors and active members of the… Continue reading