A
few bits and bobs this evening. The structure of putting out a post each
night is good practice, but a bit exhausting. With just a bit of luck I
should be able to devote some time this weekend to get back to more
developed topics. For now, some links and thoughts that have been
tumbling through my head.
- I’m a bit late to the YubiKey party. For similar late-adopters YubiKeys are the snazzy little key fobs that have been all the range for two factor authentication. Despite having a couple of YubiKeys through the special Github offer, I’ve not gotten around to deploying them and have instead used Google Authenticator, though the combination of YubiKey support for Windows logins plus their use with a current client gives me plenty of motivation to get better acquainted with these useful little devices. My previous employer was a heavy Citrix shop, where connecting a physical device, even a minimal keyboard-like USB device such as a Yubi, wasn’t an option. Additionally, I’m almost exclusively a user of Firefox, which hasn’t had U2F support, though that has changed with the U2F addon. Speaking of Google and Firefox…
Google Hangouts - This is a bit of a rant. It seems like only yesterday when I was an unabashed Google fan. Somewhere along the way (probably around the time of Google Reader being killed off) that adoration wore off and has given way to grudging acceptance. The latest annoyance has been with the Google Hangouts product. The Google Talk plugin required for Google Hangouts and Google Voice (which serves as my primary contact number, and is therefore a wee bit important to me) does not function on 64-bit Firefox and there’s no indication that this will be fixed anytime in the near future. Firefox 64-bit has been mainstream for over a year now. Lacking support for a major browser such as this is unconscionable. Even Windows Edge is not supported, forcing me to fire up IE of all things to use Hangouts. Of late, IE has been acting up as well, so I now have to install, maintain, and login to Chrome for the sole purpose of using Hangouts. It makes me want to grab a few people by the ears over at the Fremont Google office and force them to hit the darned cross-compile button already.
Tableau Python Integration - Tableau 10.2 is now in beta and among the new features is Python integration. This looks to be similar SCRIPT_REAL integration much like the R integration rolled out some time ago. For a variety of reasons, I’ve moved on from using Tableau for my visualization needs, yet it’s still nifty to see other integration options for the product. I hope to see continued move to finally getting proper APIs for programmatic interaction with workbooks.