Clean Code (and R-fun)

If you believe some people, everything is getting worse1. More so in infosec. For the past few years I listened to many many hours of podcasts, many hours where spent on the weekly show Security Now!. The hosts Steven Gibson and Leo Laporte have been talking about security related news every week over 13 years. Although the content has changed over time, there used to be more explanations but the majority of time is now filled with news, we could use the sentiment in the episodes to see if ‘everything is getting worse’. [Read More]

tldr: I created an open dataset for the explicit practice of data munging. Feel free to use it in assignments, but do mention where you got it from (CC-by-4.0). Also unicorns are awesome. Find the dataset at: https://github.com/RMHogervorst/unicorns_on_unicycles Data munging / cleaning / engineering At work I was working with a two excel files that were slightly different but could be combined into 1 dataset. This is very typical for day to day cleaning operations that analysts and data scientists do (statisticians too). [Read More]

This is a very short post with example code Over time when you move your shiny app from your computer to a server, you want to add some logging. Generally logging is defined in levels : INFO (everything you want to print), WARNING (it does not stop the application, but it could be a problem), and ERROR (fatal things). Shiny server does already log all it’s actions to a file on the server, but that file can be hard to access. [Read More]

Last week I set up a shiny server, it was relatively easy! But I wanted something more, a way to make changes on my local computer and push it to the server. Shiny server (I used the open source version) has multiple installers provided by RStudio. The installers for shiny-server create a user shiny and installs all the services needed. I used a guide specific for my version of linux to install shiny-server and combined it with two other guides to make it version controlled. [Read More]

I love making maps, I also love making gifs. In this short post I make an animated gif of parts of a map moving. In this case the parts of the map only move in the xy direction, but you can also turn them, and make them bigger or smaller. Today I show you how I made a part of the Netherlands ‘float away’. It is part of a larger nonsense project (I have many silly projects), and mostly just to document my path to learning about spatial analytics. [Read More]

Today a small tip for when you write rmarkdown documents. Add a chunk on top with abbreviations. in the first chunks you set the options and load the packages. Next create abbreviations, you don’t have to care about the ordering, just put them down as you realize you are creating them. The first step makes a dataframe (a tibble, rowwise), and the second step orders them. tribble( ~Abbreviation, ~ Explanation, "CIA", "Central Intelligence Agency", "dplyr", "data. [Read More]

Sometimes you just want to add bananas from the commandline. Previously I created a small script that takes an image and adds a dancing banana to the bottom left of the image. I wanted to make an API too, but that will have to wait till next year. Today we will create a commandline script that will do the same thing. With the excellent explanation in Mark Sellors’ guide I have now created a cmdline thingy in very few steps. [Read More]

A month ago I posted a short piece inspired by a post by Maële Salmon She actually reached out to me in 10 minutes, telling me I made a weird spelling error (no excuses, I really make those a lot). Then a day or two later Jon Spring walked through the code and realized that I switched two outcomes in the code. Just about 10 days ago I posted about downloading multiple files and Mara Avarick noticed a weird ‘<<<<<<’ sign on my website. [Read More]

Recently I wanted to download all the transcripts of a podcast (600+ episodes). The transcripts are simple txt files so in a way I am not even ‘web’-scraping but just reading in 600 or so text files which is not really a big deal. I thought. This post shows you where I went wrong Also here is a picture I found of scraping. Webscraping general For every download you ask the server for a file and it returns the file (this is also how you normally browse the web btw, your browser requests the pages). [Read More]

Today I will show you a quick hack (OK it took me like 4 hours during my travels today yesterday and today), on how to add a dancing banana to any picture. Now, you might be thinking… Really, why would you add a dancing banana to a picture, but I don’t have time for that kind of negativity in my life. Why oomsifier? Jeroen Ooms is one of those crazy productive people in the R world. [Read More]