Byte-size: An Ode to Web Scraping with R
Last week I needed to pull some data from a website. I was building out a data pipeline to generate the end-of-season awards for Little Athletics, but I ran into a problem.
Read more…A Day in the Life: The Global BGP Table
Update: This article was discussed on Hackernews Much has been written and a lot of analysis performed on the global BGP table over the years, a significant portion by the inimitable Geoff Huston.
Read more…Cracking Open SCEP
Most of the posts on this site tend to be long form, a result of me finding it hard to leave stones unturned. This leads to big gaps between posts; in fact the the radio silence over the past nine months is because I’ve had two in draft form and haven’t been able to get them over the line.
Read more…Keeping Them Honest
Last month my car, a Toyota Kluger, was hit while parked in front of my house. Luckily no one was injured and while annoying, the person had insurance.
Read more…Telling a Spatial Story
My friend Jen is writing a thesis and recently reached out to me to see if I could help. She had an upcoming presentation up wanted to add some visualisation to it to better tell the story.
Read more…A Brief Tour of Lebesgue Curves
Before we start a note: this post is a sidebar for another article I’m currently writing. There aren’t any grand conclusions or deep insights, it’s more exploratory. Whilst writing an article on memory allocations, I needed a way to map a one-dimensional number (the memory location) on to two-dimensional space.
Read more…Free WiFi with Randomness
There’s a few different pictures making their way around social media showing a complicated definite integral, and asking guests to evaluate it to get the password for free WiFi. Here’s an example:
Read more…Git Under the Hood
While I’m not a programmer per se, I do use git almost daily and find it a great tool for source control and versioning of plain text files. But I don’t think there can be any doubt that it is not the easiest tool to use.
Read more…A Noisy Wind Tunnel
I raced bikes as a junior and came back to it after a twenty year hiatus. One of the biggest contrasts I’ve seen in the sport is the proliferation of bike sensors.
Read more…A Tale Of Two Optimisations
A couple of months ago I wrote a toy program called whitespacer. Ever since, I’ve had this gnawing feeling that I could have done it better; that it could have been written in a more performant manner.
Read more…Bandwidth Seasonal Decomposition
Over the past few months I’ve been studying time series data and modelling using Rob Hyndman’s fantastic Forecasting: Principles and Practice textbook. My area of expertise is in networking, and a significant amount of operational the data that we deal with fits into the category of time series data.
Read more…Whitespacer
A few weeks ago I was analysing some packet captures and thanking the RFC gods that HTTP - and many other protocols - use ASCII/UTF-8 rather than packing everything into binary.
Read more…What the #!
Working with computers you take a lot for granted. You assume your press of the keyboard will bubble up through the kernel to your terminal, your HTTP request will remain intact after travelling halfway across the globe, and that your stream of a cat video will be decoded and rendered on your screen.
Read more…A Bit on the Nose
I’ve never been particularly interested in horse racing, but I married into a family that loves it. Each in-law has their own ideas and combinations of factors that lead them to bet on a particular horse.
Read more…AFL Bets - Analysing the Halftime Payout
If you’ve watched AFL over the past few years, you would have noticed betting companies spruiking a cornucopia of betting options. In fact it would be hard for you not to notice, given the way they yell at you down the television screen.
Read more…Simulating Snakes and Ladders
For the past couple of months my family and I - like the rest of the world - have been in isolation due to the coronavirus. My eldest son Ned is 5 years old and is interested in games and puzzles at moment, so these have been a key tool in reducing the boredom of lockdown.
Read more…Packet Analysis with R (Part 1)
As a network security consultant I’ve spent a my fair share of time trawling through packet captures, looking for that clue or piece of evidence I hope will lead me to the root cause of a problem.
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