Publications by Tony Hirst

R HTMLWidgets in Jupyter Notebooks

26.04.2018

A quick note for displaying R htmlwidgets in Jupyter notebooks without requiring pandoc – there may be a more native way but this acts as a workaround in the meantime if not: library(htmlwidgets) library(IRdisplay) library(leaflet) m = leaflet() %>% addTiles() saveWidget(m, 'demo.html', selfcontained = FALSE) display_html('<iframe src="demo.h...

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Generative Assessment Creation

14.05.2018

It’s coming round to that time of year where we have to create the assessment material for courses with an October start date. In many cases, we reuse question forms from previous presentations but change the specific details. If a question is suitably defined, then large parts of this process could be automated. In the OU, automated question...

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First Class R Support in Binder / Binderhub – Shiny Apps As Well as R-Kernels and RStudio

05.07.2018

I notice from the binder-examples/r repo that Binderhub now appears to offer all sorts of R goodness out of the can, if you specify a particular R build. From the same repo root, you can get: Jupyter notebook+R: http://beta.mybinder.org/v2/gh/binder-examples/r/master?filepath=index.ipynb RStudio: http://beta.mybinder.org/v2/gh/binder-examples/r/...

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Embedded Audio Players in Jupyter Notebooks Running IRKernel

06.09.2018

For ref, when running IRkernel Jupyter R notebooks, media objects can be embedded by making use of the shiny::tags function, that can return HTML elements with appropriate MIME types, and are renderable using _repr_html machinery (h/t @flying-sheep): For example: PS By the by, I notice the existence of another R kernel for Jupyter notebooks, Ju...

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Fragment – Running Multiple Services, such as Jupyter Notebooks and a Postgres Database, in a Single Docker Container

12.09.2018

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been fettling the build scripts for the TM351 VM, which typically uses vagrant to build a VirtualBox VM from a set of shell scripts, so they can be used to build a single Docker container that runs all the TM351 services, specifically Jupyter notebooks, OpenRefine, PostgreSQL and MongoDB. Docker containers ar...

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Looking Up R / CRAN Package Maintainers With an ac.uk Affiliation

10.09.2019

Trying to find an examiner for a particular PhD thesis relating to a rather interesting datastructure for wrangling messy datatables, I wondered whether we might find a likely suspect amongst the R package maintainer community. We can get a list of R package maintainers here and a list of package name / short descriptions here. FWIW, here’s th...

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Running R Projects in MyBinder – Dockerfile Creation With Holepunch

11.09.2019

For those who don’t know it, MyBinder is a reproducible research automation tool that will take the contents of a Github repository, build a Docker container based on requirements files found inside the repo, and then present the user with a temporary, running container that can serve a Jupyter notebook, JupyterLab or RStudio environment to the...

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Visualising Rally Route Stages (with help from rayshader and some ecologists…)

17.02.2021

Inspired by some 3D map views generated using the rayshader and rgl R packages, I wondered how easy it would be to render some 3D maps of rally stages. It didn’t take too long to get a quick example up and running but then I started wondering what else I could do with route and elevation data. And it turns out, quite a lot. The result of my tin...

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Personally Learning

17.02.2021

Notes and reflections on a curiosity driven personal learning journey into geo and rasters and animal movement trajectory categorisation and all sorts of things that weren’t the point when I started… Somewhen over the last month or so, I must have noticed a 3D map produced using the rayshader R package somewhere because I idly started wonderi...

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Automatically Detecting Corners on Rally Stage Routes Using R

19.02.2021

One of the things I’ve started pondering with my rally stage route metrics is the extent to which we might be able to generate stage descriptions of the sort you might find on the It Gets Faster Now blog. The idea wouldn’t necessarily be to create finished stage descriptions, more a set of notes that a journalist or fan could use as a prompt ...

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