(This is part 2 of n “quick hit” posts, each walking through some approaches to speeding up components of an iterative operation. Go here for part 1). Thanks to the aforementioned previous post, we now have a super fast way of reading individual text files containing HTTP headers from HEAD requests into a character vector:… Continue reading
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Quick Hit: Comparison of “Whole File Reading” Methods
(This is part 1 of n posts using this same data; n will likely be 2-3, and the posts are more around optimization than anything else.) I recently had to analyze HTTP response headers (generated by a HEAD request) from around 74,000 sites (each response stored in a text file). They look like this: HTTP/1.1… Continue reading
Aligning the Dots On COVID Prison Waffles
The Marshall Project has a solid story and set of visualizations on the impact of COVID-19 in U.S. prisons. They keep the data (and vis) regularly updated. They do great work and this is an important topic, but this visualization breaks my “ordered grid” OCD: To be fair, it’s not supposed to line up as… Continue reading
A Look at PAN-OS Versions with a Bit of R
The incredibly talented folks over at Bishop Fox were quite generous this week, providing a scanner for figuring out PAN-OS GlobalProtect versions. I’ve been using their decoding technique and date-based fingerprint table to keep an eye on patch status (over at $DAYJOB we help customers, organizations, and national cybersecurity centers get ahead of issues as… Continue reading
The Avatar Is Blue
I’ve changed my years-long avatar to the blue Cap’ shield because the colors of our flag have no business being displayed in any venue until Donald Trump is no longer President (one way or another). The red/white/blue triad has been coopted by an authoritarian, sociopathic puppet and is now a symbol of fear, greed, hate,… Continue reading
{sergeant} 0.9.0 Is On Its Way to CRAN Mirrors!
Tis been a long time coming, but a minor change to default S3 parameters in tibbles finally caused a push of {sergeant} — the R package that lets you use the Apache Drill REST API via {DBI}, {dplyr}, or directly — to CRAN. The CRAN automatic processing system approved the release just under 19 minutes from… Continue reading
RSwitch 1.7.0 Has Been Released
I (and, apparently, Gandalf O_o) are pleased to announce that RSwitch version 1.7.0 has been released. (Direct Download) RSwitch is a macOS menubar utility that: makes it dead simple to manage multiple macOS R versions use the latest RStudio daily builds access remote RStudio Server sessions using in a purpose-built browser that lets you use… Continue reading
Mining R 4.0.0 Changelog for Nuggets of Gold: #1 stopifnot()
R 4.0.0 has been out for a while, now, and — apart from a case where merge() was slower than dirt — it’s been really stable for at least me (I use it daily on macOS, Linux, and Windows). Sure, it came with some headline-grabbing features/upgrades, but I’ve started looking at what other useful nuggets… Continue reading