Over at $DAYJOB’s blog I’ve queued up a post that shows how to use our new opendata???? package to work with our Open Data portal’s API. I’m not super-sure when it’s going to be posted so keep an RSS reader fixed on https://blog.rapid7....

We worked pretty hard over at $DAYJOB on helping to quantify and remediate a fairly significant configuration weakness in Ubiquiti network work gear attached to the internet. Ubiquiti network gear — routers, switches, wireless access points, etc. — are enterprise grade components and are a joy to work with. Our home network ...

The urlscan???? package (an interface to the urlscan.io API) is now at version 0.2.0 and supports urlscan.io’s authentication requirement when submitting a link for analysis. The service is handy if you want to learn about the details — all the gory technical details — for a website. For instance, say ...

A major new release of Homebrew has landed and now includes support for Linux as well as Windows! via the Windows Subsystem for Linux. There are overall stability and speed improvements baked in as well. The aforelinked notification has all the info you need to see the minutiae. Unless you’...

Luke Whyte posted an article (apologies for a Medium link) over on Towards Data Science showing how to use a command line workflow involving curl, node and various D3 libraries and javascript source files to build a series of SVG static maps. It’s well written and you should give ...

The seymour???? Feedly API package has been updated to support subscribing to RSS/Atom feeds. Previously the package was intended to just treat your Feedly as a data source, but there was a compelling use case for enabling subscription support: subscribing to code repository issues. Sure, there’s already email ...

As someone who measures all kinds of things on the internet as part of his $DAYJOB, I can say with some authority that huge swaths of organizations are using cloud-services such as Google Apps, Dropbox and Office 365 as part of their business process workflows. For me, one regular component that ...

Version 0.6.0 of the hrbrthemes???? package should be hitting a CRAN mirror near you soon. Apart from some general documentation and code cleanup this release includes the dark theme folks have been seeing in blog posts and tweets over the past few months. It’s called theme_ft_rc() since it ...

The splashr package [srht|GL|GH] — an alternative to Selenium for javascript-enabled/browser-emulated web scraping — is now at version 0.6.0 (still in dev-mode but on its way to CRAN in the next 14 days). The major change from version 0.5.x (which never made it to CRAN) is a swap out of the ...

By now, even remote villages on uncharted islands in the Pacific know that the U.S. is in the midst of a protracted partial government shutdown. It’s having real impacts on the lives of Federal government workers but they aren’t the only ones. Much of the interaction Federal ...

More than just sergeant has been hacked on recently, so here’s a run-down of various ???? updates: waffle The square pie chart generating waffle???? package now contains a nascent geom_waffle() so you can do things like this: library(hrbrthemes) library(waffle) library(tidyverse) tibble( parts = factor(rep(month.abb[1:3], 3), ...

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 ...

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 ...

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; [...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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....

If you’re an R/RStudio user who has migrated to Mojave (macOS 10.14) or are contemplating migrating to it, you will likely eventually run into an issue where you’re trying to access resources that are in Apple’s new hardened filesystem sandboxes. Rather than reinvent the wheel by blathering ...

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 ...