Publications by Tony Hirst

Running RStudio on Digital Ocean, AWS etc Using Tutum and Docker Containers

24.06.2015

Via RBloggers I noticed a tutorial today on Setting Rstudio server using Amazon Web Services (AWS). In the post Getting Started With Personal App Containers in the Cloud I described how I linked my tutum account to a Digital Ocean hosting account and then launched a Digital Ocean server. (How to link tutum to Amazon AWS is described here: tutum ...

2334 sym 20 img

Sports Data and R – Scope for a Thematic (Rather than Task) View? (Living Post)

07.07.2015

Via my feeds, I noticed a package announcement today for cricketR!, a new package for analysing cricket performance data. This got me wondering (again!) about what other sports related packages there might be out there, either in terms of functional thematic packages (to do with sport in general, or one sport in particular), or particular data pa...

4914 sym 4 img

Detecting Undercuts in F1 Races Using R

11.07.2015

One of the things that’s been on my to do list for some time has been the identification of tactical or strategic events within a race that might be detected automatically. One such event is an undercut described by F1 journalist James Allen in the following terms (The secret of undercut and offset): An undercut is where Driver A leads Driver B...

3921 sym R (2191 sym/2 pcs) 4 img

Doodling With 3d Animated Charts in R

22.07.2015

Doodling with some Gapminder data on child mortality and GDP per capita in PPP$, I wondered whether a 3d plot of the data over the time would show different trajectories over time for different countries, perhaps showing different development pathways over time. Here are a couple of quick sketches, generated using R (this is the first time I’ve...

1699 sym R (2445 sym/6 pcs) 10 img

Course Management and Collaborative Jupyter Notebooks via SageMathCloud

24.11.2015

Prompted by a joint coursemodule team to look at options surrounding a “virtual computing lab” to support a couple of new level 1 (first year equivalent) IT and computing courses (they should know better?!;-), I had another scout around and came across SageMathCloud, which looks at first glance to be just magical:-) An open source, cloud host...

5944 sym 36 img

How to Run A Shiny App in the Cloud Using Tutum, Digital Ocean and Docker Containers

10.12.2015

Via RBloggers, I spotted this post on Deploying Your Very Own Shiny Server. I’ve been toying with the idea of running some of my own Shiny apps, so that post provided a useful prompt, though way too involved for me;-) So here’s what seems to me to be an easier, rather more pointy-clicky, wiring stuff together way using Docker containers (thou...

5978 sym R (156 sym/2 pcs) 26 img

RStudio Clone for Python – Rodeo

17.12.2015

So have you been looking for something like RStudio, but for Python? It’s been out for some time, but a recently updated release of Rodeo gives an increasingly workable RStudio-like environment for Python users. The layout resembles the RStudio layout – file editor top left, interactive console bottom left, variable inspector  and history to...

2660 sym 10 img

IBM DataScientistWorkBench = OpenRefine + RStudio + Jupyter Notebooks in the Cloud, Via Your Browser

18.12.2015

One of the many things on my “to do” list is to put together a blogged script that wires together RStudio, Jupyter notebook server, Shiny server, OpenRefine, PostgreSQL and MongDB containers, and perhaps data extraction services like Apache Tika or Tabula and a few OpenRefine style reconciliation services, along with a common shared data cont...

2661 sym 8 img

The Rise of Transparent Data Journalism – The BuzzFeed Tennis Match Fixing Data Analysis Notebook

18.01.2016

The news today was lead in part by a story broken by the BBC and BuzzFeed News – The Tennis Racket – about match fixing in Grand Slam tennis tournaments. (The BBC contribution seems to have been done under the ever listenable File on Four: Tennis: Game, Set and Fix?) One interesting feature of this story was that “BuzzFeed News began its in...

6413 sym 8 img

Using Jupyter Notebooks to Define Literate APIs

02.02.2016

Part of the vision behind the Jupyter notebook ecosystem seems to be the desire to create a literate computing infrastructure that supports “the weaving of a narrative directly into a live computation, interleaving text with code and results to construct a complete piece that relies equally on the textual explanations and the computational comp...

3137 sym 4 img