Andrew B. Collier / @datawookie

Just like an old fashioned grandfather clock, time on your computer’s clock can slowly drift. You can quickly verify the accuracy of your clock by comparing it to https://time.is/. It’s not unusual for it to be anything from a few seconds to a couple of minutes out. For most purposes this is not a major issue, but there are some applications which are very time sensitive.

NTP (Network Time Protocol) is a tool which will synchronise your computer’s clock with a network of accurate time servers, ensuring that it’s always accurate.

There’s a lot to be said about NTP, but this is a quick guide to getting it up and running on an Ubuntu machine.

Bitcoin has become synonymous with “cryptocurrency”. Ethereum is another cryptocurrency which, although not as hyped at Bitcoin, presents some attractive characteristics. The foremost of these is the ability to create sophisticated smart contracts.

This post introduces the new ether package for interacting with the Ethereum network from R.

I am not sure how many times this has happened to me, but it’s not infrequent. I’m working on a remote session and I start a long running job. Then some time later I want to disconnect from the session but realise that if I do then the job will be killed.

I should have started job in screen or tmux!

Is it possible to transfer the running process to screen? (Or, equally, to tmux?) Well it turns out that it is using the reptyr utility. I discovered this thanks to a LinkedIn post by Bruce Werdschinski. A slightly refinement of his process is documented below.

Creating an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) makes it quick and simple to rebuild a specific EC2 setup. This post illustrates the process by creating an AMI with ethminer and NVIDIA GPU drivers. Of course you’d never use this for mining Ether because the hardware costs are still too high!

How to deal with large data sets in OSRM? Some quick notes on processing monster PBF files and getting them ready to serve with OSRM.

Something to consider up front: if you are RAM limited then this process is going to take a very long time due to swapping. It might make sense to spin up a big cloud instance (like a r4.8xlarge) for a couple of hours. You’ll get the job done much more quickly and it’ll definitely be worth it.

This morning I created a r3.xlarge spot instance on EC2. The job I’m planning on running requires a good wad of data to be uploaded, which is why I chose the r3.xlarge instance: it’s cost effective and, according to AWS, has 80 Gb of SSD storage.

I was a little surprised when I connected to the running instance and found that the root partition was only around 8 Gb. This is what I did to claim that missing disk space.

A project I’m working on has a bunch of different data sources. Some of them have column names in Camel Case. Others are underscore delimited. My OCD rebels at this disarray and demands either one or the other.

If it were just a few columns and I was only going to have to do this once, then I’d probably just quickly do it by hand. But there are many columns and it’s very likely that there will be more data in the future and the process will need to be repeated.

Seems like something that should be easy to automate.

We recently announced the second satRday (Cape Town) conference scheduled to take place on 17 March 2018. Obviously we want this to be bigger and better than this year’s event, so we are paying careful attention to the feedback that we received from the first event.

This is a quick analysis of the feedback. We sold 192 tickets and gave out 11 complimentary tickets to the event. There were 107 responses to the feedback survey, which means that we heard back from more than half of the people who attended, which is hopefully a representative sample.

I was invited to give a talk at Digifest (Durban University of Technology) on 10 November 2017. Looking at the other speakers and talks on the programme I realised that my normal range of topics would not be suitable.

Recipe for installing the NVIDIA binary drivers on Ubuntu.

I’ve now been through the process of setting up OSRM a few times. While it’s not exactly taxing, it seemed like a prime candidate for automation.

Building a presentation with reveal.js is such a pleasure. And the results looks so good. Seriously doubt that I will ever use anything like PowerPoint again. Although it’s possible to export a presentation directly to PDF using a style sheet, this doesn’t always work perfectly (IMHO).

Fortunately there’s another way: decktape. It works with reveal.js and a bunch of other HTML5 presentation frameworks.

I’ve just put together a WordPress site for my older daughter. It’s hosted on DigitalOcean and all of the infrastructure is handled with Docker. This post describes the steps in the (easy) install process.

I’ve got a long running optimisation problem on a EC2 instance. Yesterday it was mysteriously killed. I shrugged it off as an anomaly and restarted the job. However, this morning it was killed again. Definitely not a coincidence! I investigated. This is what I found and how I am resolving the problem.

There are many good reasons to use S3 (Simple Storage Service) storage. This is a quick overview of how to create a S3 bucket.

This procedure works on both my laptop and a fresh EC2 instance.

I’ve been putting together a small proof-of-concept API using R and {plumber}. It works flawlessly on my local machine and I was planning on deploying it on an EC2 instance to demo it for a client. However, I ran into a snag: despite opening the required port in my Security Group I was not able to access the API. This is what I needed to do to get it working.

EC2 Spot Instances can provide very affordable computing on EC2 by allowing access to unused capacity at significant discounts.

The Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM) is a library for calculating routes, distances and travel times between spatial locations. It can be accessed via either an HTTP or C++ API. Since it’s open source you can also install locally, download appropriate map data and start making efficient travel calculations.

These are the instructions for getting OSRM installed on a Ubuntu machine and hooking up the osrm R package.