Was watching John Oliver talking about chiitan, so funny … I now follow @love2chiitan on twitter.
Uncategorized
A busy day
I have converted my blog back to a WordPress install from Hugo.
Why ?
I was talking to a PSO (Protective Services Officer) at Melbourne Central. He had recommended WordPress because he uses it to develop web sites for businesses.
He uses Woocommerce and Stripe to set up shopping carts for clients.
He said it was a very flexible solution. He cited examples where client’s sales had increased 5 or 10 fold because allowing credit card payments makes it very easy for people to buy your product.
So good bye Hugo, good bye static sites … hello WordPress.
I spent Most of Friday and the wee hours of Saturday morning getting my wordpress blog up and running on Zuver.
It now has an SSL certificate so the offical URL is https://www.stephenhucker.com
Since I got the Zuver wordpress hosting for less then $10 for a year it will be interesting to see the renewal price, as it seems to have gone up a lot since I purchased mine.
The full retail price was a little less the $50, but the website now talks of similar plans north of $100
Might be worth paying as the system works quite well.
Old Man’s War
Just finnished listening to the audio book of John Scalziâs Old Manâs War.
Itâs a really good military science fiction story, not as good as Forever War or Starship Troopers but an entertaining read. The narrator of the book was excellent.

From Wikipedia
Old Manâs War is a military science fiction novel by American writer John Scalzi, published in 2005.
His debut novel, it was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2006.

Old Manâs War is the first novel in Scalzi’s Old Manâs War_series. A sequel, The Ghost Brigades was published in 2006, followed by two other books, The Last Colony (2007) and Zoeâs Tale (2008).
Another book in the series, The Human Division, was published as a serial) and then collected in a novel (2013). The next book in the series, The End of All Things), was published in June 2015 as four novellas
First thing I did when I finnished it was start the second book (I have now finnished the fifth)
The Ghost Brigades
Old Manâs War, Book 2
Narrated By: William Dufris
Publisher: Pan MacmillanDate: March 2017
Duration: 10 hours 27 minutes

Who can you trust, if you canât trust yourself?
Three hostile alien races have united against humanity, determined to halt our expansion into space. The mastermind behind this lethal alliance is a traitor – Charles Boutin. He was a Colonial Defence Force scientist, with access to their biggest military secrets. Now the CDFâs only hope is to discover Boutinâs plan. Trouble is, Boutinâs dead.
As a super-soldier created from Boutinâs own DNA, Jared Dirac may have answers. However, when Dirac fails to access the scientistâs memories, heâs transferred to the Ghost Brigades for training. These elite troops are also cloned from the dead, so he might fit in. But will Diracâs memory return as the enemy plots the fate of humankind? And whose side is Dirac really on?
The Last Colony
Old Manâs War, Book 3
By: John Scalzi
Narrated by: William Dufris
Length: 9 hrs and 51 mins

Retired from his fighting days, John Perry is now village ombudsman for a human colony on distant Huckleberry. With his wife, former Special Forces warrior Jane Sagan, he farms several acres, adjudicates local disputes, and enjoys watching his adopted daughter grow up.
That is, until his and Janeâs past reaches out to bring them back into the game – as leaders of a new human colony, to be peopled by settlers from all the major human worlds, for a deep political purpose that will put Perry and Sagan back in the thick of interstellar politics, betrayal, and war.
Zoeâs Tale
Old Manâs War, Book 4
By: John Scalzi
Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
Length: 10 hrs
Zoeâs Tale is a parallel retelling of Scalziâs third Old Manâs War novel, The Last Colony*, written as a first-person narrative from the viewpoint of ZoĂ« Boutin Perry. It follows up on several plot points that were underrepresented in the original novel.
âHow do you tell your part in the biggest tale in history?
âI ask because itâs what I have to do. Iâm Zoe Boutin Perry: A colonist stranded on a deadly pioneer world. Holy icon to a race of aliens. A player (and a pawn) in a interstellar chess match to save humanity, or to see it fall. Witness to history. Friend. Daughter. Human. Seventeen years old.
âEveryone on Earth knows the tale I am part of. But you donât know my tale: How I did what I did – how I did what I had to do – not just to stay alive but to keep you alive, too. All of you. Iâm going to tell it to you now, the only way I know how: not straight but true, the whole thing, to try make you feel what I felt: the joy and terror and uncertainty, panic and wonder, despair and hope. Everything that happened, bringing us to Earth, and Earth out of its captivity. All through my eyes.
âItâs a story you know. But you donât know it all.â
Web Excursions for March 2019
R for Blogging
- officer: Manipulation of Microsoft Word and PowerPoint Documents
Access and manipulate âMicrosoft Wordâ and âMicrosoft PowerPointâ documents from R. The package focuses on tabular and graphical reporting from R; it also provides two functions that let users get document content into data objects. A set of functions lets add and remove images, tables and paragraphs of text in new or existing documents. When working with âPowerPointâ presentations, slides can be added or removed; shapes inside slides can also be added or removed. When working with âWordâ documents, a cursor can be used to help insert or delete content at a specific location in the document. The package does not require any installation of Microsoft products to be able to write Microsoft files. - the ggplot flipbook
- ggplot2 extensions – gallery
- R for Journalists
- Inserting âEdit on GitHubâ Buttons in a Single R Markdown Document
- Excel Email Address Cleaner & Aggregator
- Create and integrate maps in your R workflow!
- Teaching data science with puzzles
- Create R Markdown reports and presentations even better with these 3 practical tips
- {remedy} – A package for easier Markdown writing
- The official Hugo documentation.
- The official Hugo forums â a great place to find answers to your questions or debug your code.
- Giraffe Academy Hugo tutorial course on YouTube â 23 videos!
- A Hugo âLearnâ theme â Good for playing around with.
- More Hugo themes â so you donât have to start from scratch.
- One of many blog posts on migrating from WordPress to Hugo.
- Getting Started with Static Sites â my previous post on this blog about static sites.
- How to Turn Your ggplot2 Visualization into an Interactive Tweet
- Tutorial: Poisson Regression in R
The Best Free Books for Learning Data Science
Lecturer who uses Academic hugo theme for her website on github
Article written in Blogdown:
Article written in Radix:
My web site
IÂ have converted my website to a static website.
Previously I had used the Nikola static website tool which is written in python.
Itâs a great tool, but I wanted something more.
I chose Hugo because
- it is very fast
- Since this is a technical blog, I needed to be able to embed rmarkdown documents easily. Hugo is great for this.
- It has a large collection of templates. There are so many I actually spent over eight hours before I settled on casper-two
I chose casper-two because of the website codewithhugo.com
- [Switching the lights on: Hugo vs Hugo config files] (https://codewithhugo.com/switching-the-lights-on-hugo-vs-hugo-config-files/)
- A tiny case study about migrating to Netlify when disaster strikes at GitHub, featuring Cloudflare
estebanmoro.org has a very detailed setup guide for hugo, Rstudio and markdown
- Part I about to setup the blog using Hugo, RStudio and blogdown
- Part II explains my workflow of creating new posts.
- Part III how to modify the theme
A good reference for using R and Hugo together is blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown, specifically section 2.1 Static sites and Hugo
The other themes I looked at were:
- https://themes.gohugo.io/keepit/
- https://themes.gohugo.io/hyde/
- an example hyde site
- https://themes.gohugo.io/beautifulhugo/
- https://themes.gohugo.io/future-imperfect/
- https://themes.gohugo.io/hugo-tranquilpeak-theme/
- https://themes.gohugo.io/allinone/
- https://themes.gohugo.io/hugo-theme-massively/
- https://themes.gohugo.io/pristine/
- https://github.com/sakibccr/pristine
In the long run I might choose the Academic theme
A good Academic sample site is https://lbusett.netlify.com
- https://themes.gohugo.io/academic/
- Getting started with the Academic framework for Hugo
- Tips for using the Hugo academic theme
A full list of themes can be seen at https://themes.gohugo.io/tags/blog/
Web Excursions for February 2019
Mac OS X links
- dark mode utility
- windows management
- A floating browser window for OS X, good for videos
- Plug, a app to listen to music from https://hypem.com/popular
- encrypto – Protect files with AES-256 encryption on Mac and windows
- The Ultimate List of Data Science Podcasts
R Links:
- Rweekly:Â A greet list of R resources updated daily.
- Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction
- Working with ABS data in R
- Working with iCal files in R
- A Tidy Text Analysis of My Google Search History
- Extracting data from news articles: Australian pollution by postcode
- Summarizing rstudio::conf 2019 Summaries with Tidy Text Techniques
- Tidylog provides feedback about basic dplyr operations. It provides simple wrapper functions for the most common functions, such as filter, mutate, select, and group_by.
Books on R, Stats, and Graphics
- R for Data Science and the R for Data Science: Exercise Solutions are very useful.
- R Markdown: The Definitive Guide
- blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown
- Text Mining with R
- 21 Recipes for Mining Twitter Data with rtweet
- Efficient R programming
- Practical R for Mass Communication and Journalism
- ModernDive: Statistical Inference via Data Science
- Advanced R
- R packages
- Hands-On Programming with R
- The tidyverse style guide
Data Visualization
- Dr Drang put me onto this:
âIâm ⊠interested in learning R and ggplot (to that end, Kieran Healyâs Data Visualization a Practical Introduction was recent Christmas gift to myself).â So I purchased it from amazon for AUD $60 The book can be found online at Data Visualization: A practical introduction - Fundamentals of Data Visualization
- R Graphics Cookbook
- How the BBC Visual and Data Journalism team works with graphics in R
- BBC Visual and Data Journalism cookbook for R graphics
R Courses
Started learning R
I am studying data science. I have chosen to learn R first (before Python) because of its excellent visualisation capabilities.
I have just finished the first unit
– Introduction to the Tidyverse Course

https://www.datacamp.com/statement-of-accomplishment/course/3ddf2e74ed840487f86ad22457af0ed00f20d956
DataCamp .. R you learning?
This week I noticed Datacamp had a half price special, only$200 AUD for a years subscription. So I have cut down on playing games (sorry Battlefield V) and used that time to learn the tidyverse on datacamp.

According to Datacamp’s website it is “the smartest way to learn Data Science Online. The skills people and businesses need to succeed are changing. No matter where you are in your career or what field you work in, you will need to understand the language of data. With DataCamp, you learn data science today and apply it tomorrow.“