In R, my go to package for creating maps is ggmap. Using this, one can create maps using a variety of services, including Google maps. I just recently discovered the ability to create a styled version of a Google map. Let's go through this process to create a black and ... [Read more...]

Fitbit is a device that tracks your daily activity. It's basically a pedometer, but it does a little more. It has an altimeter, so it can count flight of stairs climbed. It can detect your sleeping activity and give you a read on how often you are tossing and turning. ... [Read more...]

I recently had the need to scrape a table from wikipedia. Normally, I'd probably cut and paste it into a spreadsheet, but I figured I'd give Hadley's rvest package a go. The first thing I needed to do was browse to the desired page and locate the table. In this ... [Read more...]

In my previous blog post, I detailed how I created my first R package called geocodeHERE. This package is a convenient wrapper for Nokia's HERE geocoding API. The cool thing about this API is that it allows for bulk geocoding. So, instead of doing n API calls to geocode n ... [Read more...]

HERE is a product by Nokia, formerly called Nokia maps and before that, Ovi maps. It's the result of the acquisition of NAVTEQ in 2007 combined with Plazes and Metacarta, among others. It has a geocoding API, mapping tiles, routing services, and other things. I'm focused on the geocoding service. Under ... [Read more...]

I wanted to create a quick visualization of Bloomington IL bus stops. This data is in pdf file format spread across multiple files. The first step, before any mapping can occur, is downloading those files, parsing them to get the bus stop locations and... [Read more...]

Occasionally, I'll need to pick out names (first name, last name) from text. These days, the text I'm working with is usually tweets. Any how, I didn't see any solution out there (that worked for me) when I developed this, so hopefully it can be a star... [Read more...]

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A quick update on the last blog post...Mr Hadley Wickham has made the authentication for this much easier...Then you can use the curl script like in my last blog post. [Read more...]

Google's prediction API offers a blackbox way of doing some prediction. They had advertised an R package, but it doesn't seem to work with the new version of the prediction API or their OAuth2 authentication mechanism. So, in an effort to check out the... [Read more...]

Occasionally, the need arises to communicate with R via another process. There are packages available to facilitate this communication, but for simple problems, a socket connection may be the answer. Nearly all software languages have a socket communic... [Read more...]

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Well, of course, this tip comes out one week after I needed it. The author uses the RCurl package to request the header of the shortened URL and then parse the "location" parameter on the return. This sort of operation tends to be needed frequently, es... [Read more...]

I've been doing some work with Twitter data. In much of this work, my life would be so much easier if we could geographically locate the origin of the tweets. There are some ways to do this using the twitter APIs. For example, if a user has geo-locatio... [Read more...]