Blog Posts by Andrew B. Collier / @datawookie

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}.

The {emayili} package supports configuring a generic SMTP server via the server() function. In the most recent version, v0.6.5, we add three new functions, gmail(), sendgrid() and mailgun(), which provide specific support for Gmail, SendGrid and Mailgun.

If you pull back the curtain and take a look at what a naked email looks like, then you might be astonished.

How can you be sure that the contents of an email haven’t been tampered with? The best approach would probably be to have a digital signature on each component of the message. Perhaps I’ll look at integrating that into {emayili} some time in the future. However, today I’m writing about the first step in that direction: MD5 checksums.

The concept of “wide data” is relative. In some domains 100 columns is considered “wide”, while in others that’s perfectly normal and you’d need to have thousands (or tens of thousands!) of columns for it to be considered even remotely “wide”. The data that we work with at Fathom Data generally lies in the first domain, but from time to time we do work on data that is considerably wider.

Yoav Raskin suggested that it would be useful to support right-to-left (RTL) text in {emayili}, so that languages like Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic would render properly. I’ll be honest, this was not something that I had previously considered. But agreed, it would be a cool feature.

By default <img> tags are wrapped in a tight <p></p> embrace by {knitr}. In general this works really well. However, I want to have more control over image formatting for {emayili}.