This is another one of those “I kept googling the same thing over and over again” things that needed a post, except this time I made an issue to make a post and then started to repeatedly refer to that. TL;DR When you want to spin up an experimental environment and get it tied in to your Jupyter environment of choice (I actually quite like JupyterLab Desktop these days…), you need two steps. ...

Messing around with Elections NI data Sources: Live Data (for 2023) 2022 Assembly Elections Creating your own Google Sheet and referencing the crowdsourced data The above linked spreadsheets are naturally not editable by everyone; this is great for reliable data but isn’t so great when you want to make pretty graphs. Google Sheets supports the live referencing of external sheets in your own sheets, so you can ‘import’ the data from the read-only sheets as they evolve over the count, and then reference those data in your own visualisations. ...

TL;DR I’m taking 2 weeks off my Synopsys work to work on all those side projects I promised I would, either to myself or to others. We’ve all got a box somewhere of either AliExpress / PiMoroni / PiHut boards and a number of repos and half started projects that you promised that you’d be able to work in playing with in evenings or weekends, but you keep finding yourself doing stupid things like “spending time with family/friends”, “working out”, “spending time with / trying to find your significant other”, or “eating” or “sleeping” or other ridiculous indulgences. ...

Data Wrangling NI House Price Index Data This is a ‘messy’ ‘blog post’ that’s just a braindump of a notebook to step through NI House Price Index datasets I was playing around with. It’s mostly code, so if you were here from some ‘insight’, feck aff. There is no analysis here, this is just data wrangling. TLDR As always, Government Open Data has over the years gone from ’non-existent’ to ‘garbeled’ to ‘inconsistent’ and I feel is now in the stage of ‘consistently inconsistent’, which is progress in my eyes. ...

This talk was originally prepared for my 2021 Guest Lecture at UU Magee for the MSc Data Science course. And if it looks familiar, yes, the first bit is almost entirely lifted from A Stranger in a Strange Land from last year. Intro Data Science is the current hotness. While those of us in these virtual rooms may make fun of the likes of Dominic Cummings for extolling a ‘Data Driven Approach’ to policy, the reality is that Data Science as a buzzword bingo term has survived and indeed thrived in a climate where ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is increasingly derided as being something that’s written more in PowerPoint than Python, ‘Machine Learning’ still gives people images of liquid metal exoskeletons crushing powdery puny human skulls, and those in management with long memories remember what kind of mess “Quantitative Analysis” got us into in 2008… ...

TL:DR “Don’t worry about being a procrastinator, just make sure that your procrastinations are worthwhile.” There’s an implicit irony in this post that I’ve been thinking / talking about writing it for at least 6 months, and it finally came down to a tweet to force me to do it. Fun fact, in the time it took for me to write this procrastination post, the twitter poll changed, so I guess I gotta delete it all and play Satisfactory now? ...

The guts of this document was originally created as part of my work at NTT Application Security stripped of its specificity and retained for my own reference. Background Entities need to be identifiable, but the existence of entities should not be predictible, and it should not be easy for an external user/attacker to infer anything about the number of or presence of entities. Conventional auto-increment integer ID’s were historically de-rigeur for (now largely spurious) database performance optimisation reasons, however, they are succeptible to both presence estimation, and scale estimation. ...

This was going to be a really quick post yesterday, but I’ve spent the guts of a day (between actual work) just getting the simplest bit of this working. The intent I was silly enough to say this to someone recently in work: It’s a good day when I end up with fewer firefox tabs open than when I started And a plan was hatched; Find API to query Firefox for current number of open Tabs across all window instances Send that value to my internal MQTT node (that has telegraf, influx, home assistant and grafana integrations too) Repeat Spoiler alert, number 3 was the bastard ...

This is a condensed version of a twitter thread in response to @silverSpoon asking about how Farset Labs would comment on recent news of Dublins hackerspace (TOG) being uncerimoniously turfed out of their third home thanks to developers just wanting to flip sites Agreed, and it shouldn't be down to companies to fill up the gap. https://t.co/Np46Znn3xH — Andrea (@silverSpoon) June 8, 2021 I wonder if @FarsetLabs has comments on how that works on NI? — Andrea (@silverSpoon) June 8, 2021 It’s similar up here, but that’s more challenging (and lines up with @jeffrey_roe’s comments in the piece) that hackerspaces fall between a crack in local development support between ’entrepeneurship/startups support’ (aka subsidised professional services and office space), the classical arts sector individual and studio support (which has its own significant issues, often a lot more bureaucracy than it’s worth, and stifling community revenue generation by arcane entertainments licensing that I’m sure if you start @adamtucks he’ll chip in) and last, the classical community centre/sports groups (such as the GAA clubs discussed in the original article). ...

The below was presented as part of the Belfast Linux Users Groups’ May Technical Meetup. I’m also maintaining this ‘short’ as part of my gradually accumulating ‘python_data_workshop’, so that may be the best place to see updates if you’re reading this any later than 2021. Conditions Theme: ‘Universal Screwdrivers’ Event: BLUG Time: ‘5-10mins’ (take the 10) Slides Transcript Evening folks, and I’m happy to be appearing in what we hope is the last virtual BLUG! We’ve all spent a long time toiling in our own little worlds in relative isolation over the course of this sequence of lockdowns, and its appropriate that now as we begin coming back together, that we’re talking about projects that operate and complement across ecosystems. ...