The libcurl library (the foundational library behind the RCurl and curl packages) has switched to using OpenSSL’s default ciphers since version 7.56.0 (October 4 2017). If you’re a regular updater of curl/httr you should be fairly current with these cipher suites, but if you’re not a keen updater or use RCurl for your web-content tasks,… Continue reading
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Use GitHub Vulnerability Alerts to Keep Users of Your R Packages Safe
Despite their now inherent evil status, GitHub has some tools other repository aggregators do not. One such tool is the free vulnerability alert service which will scan repositories for outdated+vulnerable dependencies. Now, “R” is nowhere near a first-class citizen in the internet writ large, including software development tooling (e.g. the Travis-CI and GitLab continuous integration… Continue reading
Escaping the macOS 10.14 (Mojave) Filesystem Sandbox with R / RStudio
If you’re an R/RStudio user who has migrated to Mojave (macOS 10.14) or are contemplating migrating to it, you will likely eventually run into an issue where you’re trying to access resources that are in Apple’s new hardened filesystem sandboxes. Rather than reinvent the wheel by blathering about what that means, give these links a… Continue reading
GeoJSON Version of CBC Quebec Ridings Hex Cartograms with Example Usage in R
The CBC covered the recent (as of the original post-time on this blog entry) Quebec elections and used a well-crafted hex grid map to display results: They have a great ‘splainer on why they use this type of map. Thinking that it may be useful for others, I used a browser Developer Tools inspector to… Continue reading
Quick Hit: Using the New Equal Earth Projection in R
In my semi-daily run of brew update I noticed that proj4 had been updated to 5.2. I kinda “squeee“‘d since (as the release notes show) the Equal Earth projection was added to it (+proj=eqearth). As the team who created the projection describes it: “The Equal Earth map projection is a new equal-area pseudocylindrical projection for… Continue reading
Taking a Tour of the Pirate Ship ‘GitHub DMCA’ with R
Despite having sailed through the core components of this year’s Talk Like A Pirate Day R post a few months ago, time has been an enemy of late so this will be a short post that others can build off of, especially since there’s lots more knife work ground to cover from the data. DMC-WhAt?… Continue reading
Access the Internet Archive Advanced Search/Scrape API with wayback (+ links to a new vignette & pkgdown site)
The wayback🔗 package has had an update to more efficiently retrieve mementos and added support for working with the Internet Archive’s advanced search+scrape API. Search/Scrape The search/scrape interface lets you examine the IA collections and download what you are after (programmatically). The main function is ia_scrape() but you can also paginate through results with the… Continue reading
The Evolution of Data Literacy at the U.S. Department of Energy + Finding Power Grid Cyber Attacks in a Data Haystack
I was chatting with some cyber-mates at a recent event and the topic of cyber attacks on the U.S. power-grid came up (as it often does these days). The conversation was brief, but the topic made its way into active memory and resurfaced when I saw today’s Data Is Plural newsletter which noted that “Utility… Continue reading