Updated Apache Drill R JDBC Interface Package {sergeant.caffeinated} With {dbplyr} 2.x Compatibility
While the future of the Apache Drill ecosystem is somewhat in-play (MapR — a major sponsoring org for the project — is kinda dead), I still use it almost daily (on my local home office cluster) to avoid handing over any more money to Amazon than I/we already do. The ... Read More
Apple Silicon + Big Sur + RStudio + R Field Report
It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything R-related and, while this one will be brief, it may be of use to some R folks who have taken the leap into Big Sur and/or Apple Silicon. Stay to the end for an early Christmas 🎁! Big Sur Report As #rstats ... Read More
It’s [Almost] Over; Much Damage Has Been Done; But I [We] Have A Call To Unexpected Action
NOTE: There’s a unique feed URL for R/tech stuff — https://rud.is/b/category/r/feed/. If you hit the generic “subscribe” button b/c the vast majority of posts have been on that, this isn’t one of those posts and you should probably delete it and move on with more important things than the rantings ... Read More
Quick Hit: Speeding Up Data Frame Creation
(This is part 2 of n “quick hit” posts, each walking through some approaches to speeding up components of an iterative operation. Go here for part 1). Thanks to the aforementioned previous post, we now have a super fast way of reading individual text files containing HTTP headers from HEAD ... Read More
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) ... Read More
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 ... Read More
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 ... Read More
{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 ... Read More
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 ... Read More
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 ... Read More

