The Durban EDGE (Economic Development and Growth in eThekwini) DataQuest was held at UKZN (Westville Campus) on 13 November 2019. Participants were tasked with creating something interesting and useful with the civic data on the new Durban EDGE Open Data Portal developed by Open Data Durban. These datasets were available: EThekwini Water ...

The Durban EDGE (Economic Development and Growth in eThekwini) DataQuest was held at UKZN (Westville Campus) on 13 November 2019. Participants were tasked with creating something interesting and useful with the civic data on the new Durban EDGE Open Da...

@racently is a side project that I have been nursing along for a couple of years. It addresses a problem that I have as a runner: my race results are distributed across a variety of web sites. This makes it difficult to create a single view on my runni...

@racently is a side project that I have been nursing along for a couple of years. It addresses a problem that I have as a runner: my race results are distributed across a variety of web sites. This makes it difficult to create a single view on my running performance (...

I’ve been exploring the feasibility of aggregating data on prices of replacement parts for heavy machinery. There are a number of websites which list this sort of data. I’m focusing on the static sites for the moment. I’m using are R with {rvest} (and a few other ...

I’ve been exploring the feasibility of aggregating data on prices of replacement parts for heavy machinery. There are a number of websites which list this sort of data. I’m focusing on the static sites for the moment. I’m using are R ...

I’ve been struggling to get the {prophet} package to install on two RHEL 7 systems. Since I only have intermittent access to those systems I opted to use a local install of CentOS as a proxy environment. These instructions work for CentOS and sho...

Private Security is a big industry in South Africa. Most Private Security companies promise to provide a rapid response to every callout generated by any of their customers. There is a delicate balance between the number of response vehicles and the nu...

I need to deploy Shiny on a Windows machine. I also need to use {checkpoint} for package management. Using Docker seems to be the only reasonable approach to Shiny on Windows. But how easy would it be to also factor {checkpoint} into this setup? Only o...

I was inspired by this visualisation, showing the optimal routes (by car) from the geographic centre of the USA to all counties. The proverb “All Roads Lead to Rome” immediately came to mind and I set out to hack together something along t...

For some time I’ve wanted to recreate the cover art from Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album. The visualisation depicts successive pulses from the pulsar PSR B1919+21, discovered by Jocelyn Bell in 1967. Album art. Data The first obstacle ...

I’m looking at ways to effectively visualise the splits data for the 2019 edition of the Comrades Marathon. My objectives are to provide: an overall view of the splits across the entire field and a detailed view for individual runners (relative ...

A quick breakdown of the medal distribution at the 2019 edition of the Comrades Marathon. This is what the medal categories correspond to: Gold — first 10 men and women Wally Hayward (men) — 11th position to sub-6:00 Isavel Roche-Kelly (women) — 11th...

How long does it take to cross the start line at the Comrades Marathon? If you’re lucky enough to be starting in one of the batches which is close to the front then this might be a matter of seconds to a couple of minutes. But if you’re ...

The Comrades Marathon is an epic ultramarathon run each year between Durban and Pietermaritzburg (South Africa). A few years ago I put together a simple spreadsheet for generating a Comrades Marathon pacing strategy. But the spreadsheet was clunky to u...

At Exegetic we do a lot of automated reporting with R. Being able to easily and reliably send emails is a high priority. There is already a selection of packages for sending email from R: {mailR} {gmailr} {blastula} {blatr} (Windows) {mail} and {send...