I am convinced that passwords are contagious. Despite all advice, passwords are routinely shared in documents and emails. Once there, passwords are easily propogated in backups, file syncing software, email forwarding, etc.

Another pet peeve of mine is committing passwords into software repositories like Git, Mercurial or Subversion (to name …

For a while I have used a variety of relational SQL databases with R, such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQLite. A recent project introduced MongoDB, a popular NoSQL database that stores and indexes JSON-style documents. The data is semi-structured with a rapidly changing collection of fields in the documents.

In …

Below are three simple things I like to do when starting a programming project, no matter how big or small.

1. Initiate source code management (SCM) for your project. These days, it is incredibly easy to use a distributed SCM like Git or Mercurial and create a repository with a simple …

Histogram of earthquake magnitudes using NVD3 and Google App Engine.

A demonstration of using HTML5 canvas and D3.js to plot the Mandelbrot set.