Publications by hrbrmstr
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? Since this is TLAPD, I’ll pilfer some of the explana...
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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 world m...
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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 yank out the javascript-created SVG and wra...
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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 One such tool is the free vulnerability alert service which will scan repositories for outdated+vulnerable dependencies.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 ...
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Tis the Season to Check your SSL/TLS Cipher List Thrice (RCurl/curl/openssl)
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, yo...
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Certifiably Gone Phishing
Phishing is [still] the primary way attackers either commit a primary criminal act (i.e. phish a target to, say, install ransomware) or is the initial vehicle used to gain a foothold in an organization so they can perform other criminal operations to achieve some goal. As such, security teams, vendors and active members of the cybersecurity commu...
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Exploring 2018 R-bloggers & R Weekly Posts with Feedly & the ‘seymour’ package
Well, 2018 has flown by and today seems like an appropriate time to take a look at the landscape of R bloggerdom as seen through the eyes of readers of R-bloggers and R Weekly. We’ll do this via a new package designed to make it easier to treat Feedly as a data source: seymour [GL | GH] (which is a pun-ified name based on a well-known phrase fr...
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Apache Drill 1.15.0 + sergeant 0.8.0 = pcapng Support, Proper Column Types & Mounds of New Metadata
Apache Drill is an innovative distributed SQL engine designed to enable data exploration and analytics on non-relational datastores […] without having to create and manage schemas. […] It has a schema-free JSON document model similar to MongoDB and Elasticsearch; [a plethora of APIs, including] ANSI SQL, ODBC/JDBC, and HTTP[S] REST; [is] extr...
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‘data:’ Scraping & Chart Reproduction : Arrows of Environmental Destruction
Today’s RSS feeds picked up this article by Marianne Sullivan, Chris Sellers, Leif Fredrickson, and Sarah Lamdanon on the woeful state of enforcement actions by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). While there has definitely been overreach by the EPA in the past the vast majority of its regulatory corpus is quite sane and has made Am...
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On the Road to 0.8.0 — Some Additional New Features Coming in the sergeant Package
It was probably not difficult to discern from my previous Drill-themed post that I’m fairly excited about the Apache Drill 1.15.0 release. I’ve rounded out most of the existing corners for it in preparation for a long-overdue CRAN update and have been concentrating on two helper features: configuring & launching Drill embedded Docker containe...
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