Irregularly Scheduled Programming

I just finished ‘Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software’ by Charles Petzold which was a really well-written (in my opinion) guided journey from flashing a light in morse code through to building a whole computer, and everything needed along the way.

The section on encoding instructions for the processor (built up from logic gates) - assembly instructions as a human readable version of the machine code - was particularly interesting to me, and as I was describing this to a colleague I remembered that it’s not the first time I’ve played with assembly…

x86 assembly instructions

I saw this post on Reddit’s r/dataisbeautiful showing this plot of streaming services market share, comparing 2020 to 2021

US Streaming Services Market Share, 2020 vs 2021

and thought it looked like a good candidate for trying out some plot improvement techniques.

You may have seen the memes going around about fun ways to program the straightforward function isEven() which returns TRUE if the input is even, and FALSE otherwise. I had a play with this and it turned into enough for a blog post, and a nice walk through some features of R.

As soon as the R-Foundation posted that they’re inviting cleanup of old bugs, I knew it would be an opportunity to learn more about the way R works on the inside.

I’ve written a few times about using an image as an x-axis label, and the solutions have been slowly improving. This one blows all of them out of the water.

This journey started almost exactly a year ago, but it’s finally been sufficiently worked through and merged! Yay, I’ve officially contributed to the tidyverse (minor as it may be).

I’m at least as useful as Zoidberg

This is the last update to this strange saga… I hope.

[Read More]

This started out as a “hey, I wonder…” sort of thing, but as usual, they tend to end up as interesting voyages into the deepest depths of code, so I thought I’d write it up and share. Shoutout to [@coolbutuseless](https://twitter.com/coolbutuseless) for proving that a little curiosity can go a long way and inspiring me to keep digging into interesting topics.

This is what you get if you “glue” “strings”. Photo: https://craftwhack.com/cool-craft-string-easter-eggs/

I’ve been using the reticulate package occasionally for a while now, so I was surprised to see that it had only just been officially released.

reticulate: R interface to Python https://t.co/qVWmwoMQAP. Comprehensive set of interoperability tools including R Markdown Python engine #rstats #pydata pic.twitter.com/SuWM6Y3Pk0

— RStudio (@rstudio) March 26, 2018

If that’s not a great 1960’s band name then I don’t know what is (hint: I don’t know what is).