By Bob Rudis (@hrbrmstr)
Tue 14 July 2015 | tags: blog, r, rstats, time series, r101, -- (permalink)

We were asked a question on how to (in R) aggregate quarterly data from what I believe was a daily time series. This is a pretty common task and there are many ways to do this in R, but we’ll focus on one method using the zoo and dplyr ...

By Bob Rudis (@hrbrmstr)
Thu 09 July 2015 | tags: blog, r, rstats, xml, xslt, webscraping, -- (permalink)

Sometimes you just need the salient text from a web site, often as a first step towards natural language processing (NLP) or classification. There are many ways to achieve this, but XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language) was purpose-built for slicing, dicing and transforming XML (and, hence, HTML) so, it can make ...

By Jay Jacobs (@jayjacobs)
Tue 07 July 2015 | tags: blog, -- (permalink)

I was recently asked for advice on hiring someone for a data science role. I gave some quick answers but thought the topic deserved more thought because I’ve not only had the experience of hiring for data science but also interviewing (I have recently changed jobs - hello BitSight!). So ...

By Bob Rudis (@hrbrmstr)
Thu 02 July 2015 | tags: blog, r, rstats, survey, vis, datavis, -- (permalink)

It seems that not a day goes by without some information security vendor releasing a report based on a survey. Thankfully, this post is not about the efficacy of survey-based reports or their findings. Today, we’re doing a makeover for Unisys, who just released their Findings from the 2015 ...

By Bob Rudis (@hrbrmstr)
Wed 01 July 2015 | tags: blog, r, rstats, ip, -- (permalink)

We are happy to announce that the iptools package is now on CRAN. Formerly only available on GitHub, iptools now compiles under Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora/CentOS/RedHat and Mac OS X (we’re still working on that other operating system).

Oliver (the package co-author and on-CRAN instigator) wrote some ...

By Bob Rudis (@hrbrmstr)
Tue 23 June 2015 | tags: blog, r, rstats, ropensec, -- (permalink)

Necessity is the mother of invention and I had the opportunity today to take an R package from development to CRAN in less than the span of 24 hours.

Despite being on vacation, I answered an R question on StackOverflow pertaining to the use of decode_short_url from the twitteR package ...

By Bob Rudis (@hrbrmstr)
Sun 21 June 2015 | tags: blog, -- (permalink)

Antonio Augusto, an MS student researcher in Brazil, is conducting a survey to find out what security analysts find to be the more troublesome area where machine learning can help. He asked if we could get the word out, so please take the time to read his request (below) and ...

By Bob Rudis (@hrbrmstr)
Sun 14 June 2015 | tags: blog, r, rstats, -- (permalink)

As a precursor to releasing Episode 18 of DDSec Podcast, we’re releasing a really basic R package to interface with the PassiveTotal API. We asked Brandon Dixon to be on the podcast to talk about his new visualization for users of PassiveTotal, which is a “threat research platform created ...

By Bob Rudis (@hrbrmstr)
Mon 08 June 2015 | tags: blog, r, rstats, -- (permalink)

After seeing IPython Markdown Opportunities in IPython Notebooks and Rstudio in the feeds today I wondered how easy/hard it would be to write a handler for something like go code. After taking a look at Yihui Xie‘s knitr source it seemed like it would be fairly easy to ...

By Bob Rudis (@hrbrmstr)
Wed 03 June 2015 | tags: blog, r, rstats, -- (permalink)

When fighting the good cyber-fight, one often has to process domain names. Our good friend @alexcpsec was in need of Punycode/IDNA processing in R which begat the newly-minted punycode R package. Much of the following has been culled from open documentation, so if you are already “in the know ...