~/bala.sh – Page 2 – An intersection of Urban Planning, Geography, Computer Science and Data Science

Running Windows inside Arch Linux with VirtualBox

Dr Balamurugan Soundararaj · January 23, 2018June 3, 2020

Even though I have moved over to Linux completely for quite sometime, every now and then I’ll encounter situations in which I really have to use windows. Last time I had to do it is because of a form which was a Word document set up in a way that I had to use ms …

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Tunnelling internet through ssh server in MacOSX

Dr Balamurugan Soundararaj · January 21, 2018June 3, 2020

This is a neat trick I use to tunnel my internet traffic on my mac book through a ssh server. It involves setting up a socks proxy and connecting that to a ssh connection. It involves two steps. Which you can make aliases in your .bashrc (.zshrc) file and use them from terminal. alias mac_sst_start=’ssh …

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Books compiled from StackOverflow documentation!

Dr Balamurugan Soundararaj · January 19, 2018June 3, 2020

This is an absolutely brilliant collection of books made from Q&A of stack overflow. The experiment has been shutdown but the outcome is a collection of books available here. I quickly looked through the algorithms and R books and they seem really good! The books are available at http://goalkicker.com/ the stackoverflow archive to download is available …

Sending mail from command line using mutt

Dr Balamurugan Soundararaj · January 18, 2018June 2, 2020

Sometimes you just don’t have the patience to open a GUI. Imagine you are working on a terminal remotely through a very feeble internet connection and after hours of data wrangling you got your results in one small package. Now all you want is to email this 200kb document (average size of a 20k word …

Running a simple static HTTP server

Dr Balamurugan Soundararaj · January 18, 2018June 2, 2020

I have been really busy the past 3 days so there were no posts. So there is going to be 3 unrelated small posts on small utilities I use. First thing is a http-server. Since web browsers are locked down these days, it is not easy to read files off local machine when you are …

Extracting multiple linear sequences out of two dimensional data

Dr Balamurugan Soundararaj · January 15, 2018June 8, 2020

This is current problem I am working on. I don’t know how to explain it properly but I’ll try. There is single linear time series of data collected in which there are multiple increasing sequences are present. For example consider this series of numbers (y) collected at time (x) generated with three linear equations. When …

Importance of transitions in interactive visualisations.

Dr Balamurugan Soundararaj · January 14, 2018June 2, 2020

I am a very big fan of transitions when presenting complex data with interactive visualisations. I believe that transitions play an important role in building a continuous narrative in audience’s mind when they are trying to understand connected series of information. To be clear, I am talking specifically about transition of data between the stages …

Installing Arch Linux (and R) on an Android device

Dr Balamurugan Soundararaj · January 13, 2018June 2, 2020

This is a really recent development and I am very excited about this. I finally found a way to have a somewhat proper Linux installation on my phone. Though it might not be the best place to have a CLI, it is really promising and I can rely on this to do some small stuff …

Mapping distribution of National Institutions of Higher Education in India [R + tidyverse + tmap]

Dr Balamurugan Soundararaj · January 13, 2018June 2, 2020

Since I started learning R and moved away from proprietary data analysis and GIS packages, I have been amazed by the availability of free data-sets and tools enabling people to make awesome analysis and visualisations. Today we’ll look into a simple exercise of taking open data from different sources and combining them using opensource and …

Visualising flows as Sankey diagrams with R

Dr Balamurugan Soundararaj · January 11, 2018June 2, 2020

This one is on making quick and easy Sankey diagrams with R (and networkD3 package) for exploring data. All we need to do is to understand how to convert data into a network and rest is really easy. We’ll create a random sample data-set which shows the room at which people were at three instances …