Blog Posts by Andrew B. Collier / @datawookie

At Fathom Data we tend to do quite a lot of web scraping. At the moment I’m working on a small project which requires assembling a large selection of RSS feeds. Aggregator sites (like Feedspot and Feedly) have extensive, carefully curated lists of RSS feeds. As we’ll see below, the underlying lists are not entirely trivial to access.

This is the recipe I use to upgrade R on a Linux box. It’s something that I do fairly frequently on fresh EC2 instances.

Services like Mailchimp and MailerLite make it easy to create stylish email campaigns. Their templating tools allow you to create elegant HTML messages which are personalised to the recipient.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could do something similar when sending emails from R? Well, with the latest version of {emayili}, that’s now possible (although this feature is definitely in its infancy!).

The {emayili} package for sending emails from R works well within a Shiny app. You just need to set it up right.

No two email clients are equal. Nowhere is this more true than in the way that they treat images in HTML messages.

I’m using the source for GPXSee to figure out some details of the QCT format. The build instructions in the README are somewhat terse. Here are more details.

I’ve got a stash of old (2004 vintage) UK Ordnance Survey maps. They are really works of art and the the folk at the Ordnance Survey should be commended on the level of detail embedded in these maps. There’s just one small snag: the maps are in a rather obscure format. The proprietary Quick Chart (.qct extension) format is intended for use with Memory Map navigation software. If you want to use these maps for other purposes then you are stuck.

In a previous post I documented what I had learned while trying to understand the structure of encrypted emails. I then took an informal Twitter poll to gauge how many people are using encrypted email messages.

I’m adding encrypted message support to the {emayili} package for sending emails from R.

At Fathom Data we have a number of workflows that require us to share various bits of data for a short time. The data are not sensitive, so we can freely share them. We have been doing this manually via platforms like Google Drive, Box or Dropbox. However we need to remember to go back and delete the file some time later. This is not ideal. What we needed was a simple “fire and forget” solution which would allow us to share the files and they would disappear automatically after some time. Well, this is precisely what Filebin does.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) cryptocurrency trades occur directly between two parties without a central authority (like an exchange) being involved.

The shared memory device, /dev/shm, provides a temporary file storage filesystem using RAM for storing files. It’s not mandatory to have /dev/shm, although it’s probably desirable since it facilitates inter-process communication (IPC).

In previous posts we looked at creating market orders and limit orders with {binance}. We saw a couple of successful trades. However, sometimes trades are not successful and the orders are not filled. Let’s try to understand why.

Memory is something I generally don’t worry about when working with Docker. It just works. This is great… but what happens when it doesn’t?

In the previous post we looked at creating market orders on Binance using the {binance} package. Today we’re going to dig into limit orders.

Functionality for working with spot trades is now available in {binance}. In this post we’ll establish some background on spot trading and then explore some related functions.

I started dabbling in crypto trading on Binance at the beginning of September 2021. I am really impressed with the interface, which is smooth and full featured (if perhaps a little complicated and confusing!). One of the things that has frustrated me though is not being able to get an idea of whether I’m making progress. There’s no view which shows me the overall status of my account and how this has evolved over time.

Being able to view related messages as threads is really useful. To make this possible, messages must use either the In-Reply-To or References header field to link to the Message-ID from another message.

This is now possible in {emayili}.