Publications by hrbrmstr
The Waffle House Index
Waffle House announced it was closing hundreds of stores this week due to SARS-Cov-2 (a.k.a COVID-19). This move garnered quite a bit of media attention since former FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate used the restaurant chain as both an indicator of the immediate and overall severity of a natural disaster. [He’s not the only one](https://www.ehst...
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{uaparserjs} Updated on CRAN & Using webpack to Make {V8} Application Bundles
Just a quick note that thanks to a gentle nudge an updated version of {uaparser} — a package that processes User Agent strings web clients send to servers — is making its way to all the CRAN mirrors and is also available on CINC. The most significant change is a much overdue update to the user agent regex dictionary. It takes something like t...
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New Package — {cdccovidview} — To Work with the U.S. CDC’s New COVID-19 Trackers: COVIDView and COVID-NET
The United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC from now on) has setup two new public surveillance resources for COVID-19. Together, COVIDView and COVID-NET provide similar weekly surveillance data as FluView does for influenza-like illnesses (ILI). The COVIDView resources are HTML tables (O_O) and, while the COVID-NET interface provides a “...
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Attach Your R Code To Charts You Tweet For Reproducible R Tweets!
I caught this tweet by Terence Eden about using Twitter image alt-text to “PGP sign” tweet and my mind immediately went to “how can I abuse this for covert communications, malicious command-and-control, and embedding R code in tweets?”. When you paste or upload an image to tweet (web interface, at least) you have an opportunity to add “...
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Mining R 4.0.0 Changelog for Nuggets of Gold: #1 stopifnot()
R 4.0.0 has been out for a while, now, and — apart from a case where merge() was slower than dirt — it’s been really stable for at least me (I use it daily on macOS, Linux, and Windows). Sure, it came with some headline-grabbing features/upgrades, but I’ve started looking at what other useful nuggets might be in the changelog and decided ...
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RSwitch 1.7.0 Has Been Released
I (and, apparently, Gandalf O_o) are pleased to announce that RSwitch version 1.7.0 has been released. (Direct Download) RSwitch is a macOS menubar utility that: makes it dead simple to manage multiple macOS R versions use the latest RStudio daily builds access remote RStudio Server sessions using in a purpose-built browser that lets you use key...
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{sergeant} 0.9.0 Is On Its Way to CRAN Mirrors!
Tis been a long time coming, but a minor change to default S3 parameters in tibbles finally caused a push of {sergeant} — the R package that lets you use the Apache Drill REST API via {DBI}, {dplyr}, or directly — to CRAN. The CRAN automatic processing system approved the release just under 19 minutes from submission. What’s in version 0.9...
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A Look at PAN-OS Versions with a Bit of R
The incredibly talented folks over at Bishop Fox were quite generous this week, providing a scanner for figuring out PAN-OS GlobalProtect versions. I’ve been using their decoding technique and date-based fingerprint table to keep an eye on patch status (over at $DAYJOB we help customers, organizations, and national cybersecurity centers get ahe...
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Aligning the Dots On COVID Prison Waffles
The Marshall Project has a solid story and set of visualizations on the impact of COVID-19 in U.S. prisons. They keep the data (and vis) regularly updated. They do great work and this is an important topic, but this visualization breaks my “ordered grid” OCD: To be fair, it’s not supposed to line up as the dots are part of an animation pro...
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Quick Hit: Comparison of “Whole File Reading” Methods
(This is part 1 of n posts using this same data; n will likely be 2-3, and the posts are more around optimization than anything else.) I recently had to analyze HTTP response headers (generated by a HEAD request) from around 74,000 sites (each response stored in a text file). They look like this: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Mon, 08 Jun 2020 14:40:45 GM...
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