Greg Foletta - Bits and Blobs

A melange of networking, data science and programming.

  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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:

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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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