Blog Posts by Andrew B. Collier / @datawookie

In a previous post I described a recipe for setting up GitLab Runner using a Docker container. With that setup it was possible to register multiple runners on a single container. However, each runner needed to be registered manually. This setup makes complete sense if the container will be around for a while. But what if you’re spinning up a GitLab Runner container for only a short duration? In this case it might be preferable to have the container pre-configured (or at least easily configured) to provide a runner to a specific project or group. Setting that up is the goal of this post.

Materialised views are a great alternative to views if the underlying query takes a long time to run. However, the principle problem with materialised views is that their content gets stale… and if the database is active, then it gets out of date rather quickly. Sure you can manually refresh a materialised view, but who has the discipline or time to do that? Better to automate the process. Then you can safely forget about it, secure in the knowledge that the data in the materialised view will remain current.

I’ve just started collaborating on a new project, Votela, with Luke. We’re going to be using Firestore for stashing our data. I’ve never worked with Firestore before, so one of my first tasks was just figuring out how to get connected and how to shift some data to and from the database.

Drug pricing is complicated. In this post I take a look at reconciling ASP and WAC prices, focusing on normalising the WAC price per billing unit to achieve a price which is comparable to ASP. This post includes a number of case studies with the objective of laying out and testing a methodology for understanding and dealing with these data. There’s a fair amount of repetition, but I wanted to test the approach across a number of drugs.

A recent announcement from Google stated that from 30 May 2022 they will no longer support login via username and password (this is the “less secure” option). The change will have an impact for people using the {emayili} package to send email from R, but will also affect many others who use this form of authentication to access their emails via desktop email clients. In this short post I detail how to work around this by using an application password.

I use Continuous Integration (CI) extensively across almost all of my remote Git repositories. These are the typical jobs which it’s used for:

• running tests
• building documentation and
• acquiring data.

This post addresses the last item, acquiring data.

If you have database tables in which you are frequently adding or updating data, then it can be useful to have columns which indicates precisely when a specific record was created and updated.

I’ve been using the image registry on GitLab for quite a while now and loved the convenience of having my images living in the same place as my code. However, recently GitLab introduced a soft limit on transfers and that’s cramping my style. I’m moving a lot of my images onto Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR). In this post I look at how to get this set up.

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).