Data management issues The ‘Word Processing’ software is a legacy item of software, but it is still perceived as the foundation of legal software tools. It’s the engine for pumping out correspondence and legal documents. Software vendors still base their software around the ability to integrate, or leverage word-processing software. As a result, we...
Category: Computing
Computational legal document content and data management
This note explains why I think that management of the specific content in legal documents is going to pave the way for the next big shift in legal tools, for both lawyers and customers/clients. It requires acknowledging that Word Processors are ill-suited to anything more than basic data management of legal content and that...
Starting a small software business
Starting a small business in the software industry, perhaps as a software developer, involves many considerations like any other business. You will need to think about whether you want to be a sole trader, or become incorporated. You will need to think about what tools and hardware, licences, hosting, cloud services, and working spaces...
ggplot and python with conda
Update: ggplot in python is not regularly being maintained, so best to work with the R version in RStudio. SUMMARY – ggplot (python) within conda This is a guide to setting up the ggplot package for use with python in a conda virtual environment. This description uses the ‘conda’ application. Conda is not Anaconda,...
The need for clear information for NSW Land Rights and Native Title Claims
A recent news report highlighted the potential for conflict and administration work in NSW indigenous land areas. The work required is to determine the extent of overlap between native title claims and historical dispossession in NSW indigenous land areas, the latter being a possible basis for compensation. The Land Rights regime created by...
R Studio and data import
In R, data importing can be done in several ways, including using the ‘readr’ function. R Studio provides an interface for these common functions. You can import as text (readr). R Studio will then allow you to preview the data, and to skip rows that are unnecessary, in order to ensure that the data...
R extensions and the tidyverse
The basic features of R are incredibly useful for someone coming from a non-R background, but experienced R users have sought faster and more effective data manipulation and improved plotting abilities, as well as multimedia options. Hadley Wickham’s contribution to the R universe includes his ‘ tidyverse‘ concept, and the associated set of packages. ...
R extensions and the data.table
One alternative to R’s native data frames is the data.table package first released to CRAN in 2006. data table extends base R’s data.frame. data.table was authored principally by Arun Srinivasan and Matt Dowle. One of the central features of the data.table was that it replaced the focus on data.frame rownames with the concept of...
Python’s adoption of R’s ‘data frame’
Due to the influence of R on python, some of the terminology is similar and could become confusing, but this is avoided by understanding that many of the concepts originated with R and have since been incrementally picked up in the python universe or elsewhere. Here are some examples A ‘data frame’ was introduced...
Live Coding Overview
Live Coding is a topic raised when software developers talk about the tools they like to use, or might like to use in the future. The main idea behind live coding is to allow a software developer to illustrate the state of variables and other data in the code as coding is carried...