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 One such tool is the free vulnerability alert service which will scan repositories for outdated+vulnerable dependencies.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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The wayback???? package has had an update to more efficiently retrieve mementos and added support for working with the Internet Archive’s advanced search+scrape API. Search/Scrape The search/scrape interface lets you examine the IA collections and download what you are after (programmatically). The main function is ia_...

I was chatting with some cyber-mates at a recent event and the topic of cyber attacks on the U.S. power-grid came up (as it often does these days). The conversation was brief, but the topic made its way into active memory and resurfaced when I saw today’s Data ...

The sergeant???? package has a minor update that adds REST API coverage for two “new” storage endpoints that make it possible to add, update and remove storage configurations on-the-fly without using the GUI or manually updating a config file. This is an especially handy feature when paired with Drill’s ...

Nowadays (I’ve seen that word used so much in journal articles lately that I could not resist using it) I’m using world tile grids more frequently as the need arises to convey the state of exposure of various services at a global (country) scale. Given that necessity fosters ...

Apple has run the death bell on 32-bit macOS apps and, if you’re running a recent macOS version on your Mac (which you should so you can get security updates) you likely see this alert from time-to-time: If you’re like me, you click through that and keep working ...

It’s been over a year since Headless Chrome was introduced and it has matured greatly over that time and has acquired a pretty large user base. The TLDR on it is that you can now use Chrome as you would any command-line interface (CLI) program and generate PDFs, images ...

The development version of splashr now support authenticated connections to Splash API instances. Just specify user and pass on the initial splashr::splash() call to use your scraping setup a bit more safely. For those not familiar with splashr and/or Splash: the latter is a lightweight alternative to tools ...

✨ I had to processes a bunch of emails for a $DAYJOB task this week and my “default setting” is to use R for pretty much everything (this should come as no surprise). Treating mail as data is not an uncommon task and many R packages exist that can reach out ...