A fair bit of time ago the {gdns} package made its way to CRAN to give R users the ability to use Google’s (at that time) nascent support for DNS over HTTPS (DoH). A bit later on Cloudflare also provided a global DoH endpoint and that begat the (not-on-CRAN) {dnsflare} package. There are actually two… Continue reading
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Add Dressbarn to the Continued Retailpocalypse
I’ve talked about the retailpocalypse before and this morning I was greeted with the news about Dressbarn closing all 650 stores as I fired up a browser. I tweeted some pix and data but not everyone is on Twitter so I’m just posting a blog-blurb here with the code and data links. Code is below… Continue reading
Mapping Tornado Alley with R
I caught a re-tweet of this tweet by @harry_stevens: THREAD: I wrote a post on @observablehq about a map I made today. It shows a typical day in the life of a graphics journalist: You never know what problems you'll have to solve on deadline! https://t.co/yRhW1wbLxN #d3js #dataviz 1/7 pic.twitter.com/7N6mmK0nz3 — Harry Stevens (@Harry_Stevens) May… Continue reading
Quick Hit: Updates to QuickLookR and {rdatainfo}
I’m using GitUgh links here b/c the issue was submitted there. Those not wishing to be surveilled by Microsoft can find the macOS QuickLook plugin project and {rdatainfo} project in SourceHut and GitLab (~hrbrmstr and hrbrmstr accounts respectively). I hadn’t touched QuickLookR🔗 or {rdatainfo}🔗 at all since 2016 since it was really just an example… Continue reading
Quick Hit: Scraping javascript-“enabled” Sites with {htmlunit}
I’ve mentioned {htmlunit} in passing before, but did not put any code in the blog post. Since I just updated {htmlunitjars} to the latest and greatest version, now might be a good time to do a quick demo of it. The {htmlunit}/{htmunitjars} packages make the functionality of the HtmlUnit Java libray available to R. The… Continue reading
A Note to Our Community On How To Hide Your Content From Search Engines
UPDATE 2019-04-17 — The example at the bottom which shows that the, er, randomly chosen site has the offending <meta> tag present is an old result. As of this update timestamp, that robots noindex tag is not on the site. Since the presence status of that tag is in flux, it will continue to be… Continue reading
Lost In [SQL] Translation: Charting d[b]plyr Mapped SQL Function Support Across All Backends
Like more posts than I care to admit, this one starts innocently enough with a tweet by @gshotwell: Is there a reference document somewhere of which dplyr commands work on various database backends? #rstats — Gordon Shotwell (@gshotwell) April 9, 2019 Since I use at least 4 different d[b]plyr backends every week, this same question… Continue reading
A Limited-but-Functional Couchbase Free Text Search & Retrieval Un-package; or, “How I Abused Couchbase & R to Perform Bulk IP Whois Full-text Searches” (a Cobbler’s Tale)
Researching “the internet” (i.e. $DAYJOB) means having to deal with a ton of “unique” (I’m being kind) data formats. This is ultimately a tale of how I performed full-text searches across one of them. It all started off innocently enough. This past week I need to be able to do full-text searches across metadata about… Continue reading