As well as offering digital application shelves, should libraries offer, or act as instituional sponsors of, digital workbenches? I’ve previously blogged about things like SageMathCloud, and application based learning environment, and the IBM Data Scientist Workbench, and today came across another example: DHBox, CUNY’s digital humanities lab in the cloud (wiki), which looks like it 
With its focus on enterprise use, it’s probably with good reason that the Docker folk aren’t that interested in exploring the role that Docker may have to play as a technology that supports the execution of desktop applications, or at least, applications for desktop users. (The lack of significant love for Kitematic seems to be 
Prompted by Markku Hänninen, I thought I’d have a quick look at estimating motorsport safety car laps from a set of laptime data. For the uninitiated, if there is a dangerous hazard on track, the race-cars are kept out while the hazard is cleared, but led around by a safety car that limits the pace. No 
Although not necessarily the best way of publishing data, data tables in PDF documents can often be extracted quite easily, particularly if the tables are regular and the cell contents reasonably space. For example, official timing sheets for F1 races are published by the FIA as event and timing information in a set of PDF 
In a course team accessibility briefing last week, Richard Walker briefly mentioned a tool for automatically generating text descriptions of Statistics Canada charts to support accessibility. On further probing, the tool, created by Leo Ferres, turned out to be called iGraph-Lite: … an extensible system that generates natural language descriptions of statistical graphs, particularly those 
In Getting Started With the Neo4j Graph Database – Linking Neo4j and Jupyter SciPy Docker Containers Using Docker Compose I posted a recipe demonstrating how to link a Jupyter notebook container with a neo4j container to provide a quick way to get up an running with neo4j from a Python environment. It struck me that 
With the new F1 season upon us, I’ve started tinkering with bits of code from the Wrangling F1 Data With R book and looking at the data in some new ways. For example, I started wondering whether we might be able to learn something interesting about the race strategies by looking at laptimes on a 
In much the same way that the IBM DataScientist Workbench seeks to provide some level of integration between analysis tools such as Jupyter notebooks and data access and storage, Azure Machine Learning studio also provides a suite of tools for accessing and working with data in one location. Microsoft’s offering is new to me, but 
So I finally got round to pushing a revised (and typo corrected!) version of Wrangling F1 Data With R: A Data Junkie’s Guide, that also includes a handful of new section and chapters, including descriptions of how to detect undercuts, the new style race history chart that shows the on-track position of each driver for 
Part of the vision behind the Jupyter notebook ecosystem seems to be the desire to create a literate computing infrastructure that supports “the weaving of a narrative directly into a live computation, interleaving text with code and results to construct a complete piece that relies equally on the textual explanations and the computational components” (Fernando 
Jobs for R users
