Having an unusual name can be a blessing and a curse. Fortunately, the "curse" part is mostly behind me now because I'm not in high school ("Hem-Ding! Dinger! Heme-lemma-ding-dong!" ). To borrow from Tigger, the most wonderful thing about "Chris Hemedinger"s is that I'm the only one. (Ha! I'm sure
Since last year, Facebook has opened up the "user profile" to advertisers so that companies can target you with ads that are based on information that you share. One example I've seen of this: a sidebar ad with the headline "Calling all CS majors" -- an ad for some IT
Now that we have support for Vista in SAS Enterprise Guide 4.1, this question has bubbled up to the most frequently asked: "Can I use SAS Enterprise Guide 4.1 with my new SAS 9.2?" The answer is Yes. You can use SAS Enterprise Guide 4.1 with SAS 9.2 for Windows,
You've been asking for it, and now it's here. We have just released a revision to SAS Enterprise Guide 4.1 that supports Microsoft Vista. We released SAS Enterprise Guide 4.1 originally in March 2006. Microsoft Vista was on the horizon then, but was not available to the general public until
At SAS Global Forum last week, a customer approached me with a very specific request. The conversation went something like this: Customer: My client demands a bar chart that uses a bar for one response, and a symbol for other responses, all on the same chart. We know it's possible
Alan and Brendan (of Inside SAS Global Forum fame) weren't the only folks with a camera in San Antonio. Featured scenes include: out and about in San Antonio, the technical opening session, the demo room, the Inside SAS Global Forum crew, the kickback party, and student ambassador video blogging.
With the release of SAS 9.2, the SAS documentation that accompanies the software has never been more accessible. See for yourself: check out the product documentation for SAS 9.2. Type in a few keywords in the search pane. I just tried "filename http" -- the top link, describing the FILENAME
Even though it's not a military site these days, apparently the Alamo still sees some action. A colleague and I noticed the helicopters hovering overhead during our lunch break yesterday. Advice to conference attendees: don't leave your pleather conference satchel unattended in a public place, lest the local authorities detonate
Tell an experienced SUGI/SAS Global Forum presenter that you are presenting at SAS Global Forum. One of the first questions he or she will ask you is: "What time is your talk?" Because scheduling matters. Certain time slots have a notoriety of their own. For example, "10:30 Monday" means you
I’ve never found a great user guide, not to say that one doesn’t exist. You should be able to schedule any type of executable/job like a batch file from using the Platform LSF client tools (packaged with the server tools). You can also use command line executables like bsub and
The data table creation date is sometimes necessary, say in the footnote of your stored process. Included below is a sample to retrieve this date from the file system. /*Open the dataset*/ %let dsid=%sysfunc(open(sashelp.shoes)); data _null_; /*grab the CRDTE function*/ ddate=%sysfunc(attrn(&dsid;,CRDTE )); /*Format in DDMONYY*/ call symput('ddate', put(ddate, dtdate9.)); run;
Are you a SAS programmer who does not yet use SAS Enterprise Guide? If so, what are you missing? That's the topic of my SAS Presents paper at SAS Global Forum: Find Out What You're Missing: Programming with SAS Enterprise Guide. From the introduction: More and more SAS programmers are
If you think that baby names and data analysis have nothing to do with one another, then you haven’t read Freakonomics. When my wife and I were expecting our third daughter, we had specific criteria in mind for her name. I used SAS Enterprise Guide and data from the Social
It's only January, and SAS Global Forum 2008 isn't until March, but folks around here have already been preparing for months. For my part, I'm on the hook for two papers: one "invited" (submitted and accepted by the SAS Global Forum committee) and one as a "SAS Presents" (topics that
Information Week released its list of 15 Innovators & Influencers Who Will Make A Difference In 2008. From the article: Meet 15 people who will help shape the business technology world in the coming year. They're not the usual suspects -- the names everyone knows. Several are industry and tech
Even if you don't use Microsoft Office 2007, you might have noticed more ".xlsx" files floating around lately. Perhaps you've been sent one or two that you can't open. XLSX is one of the new Microsoft Excel 2007 file formats. (Others include XLSB and XLSM.) Like many software applications, SAS
Hot off the reel, the SAS for Dummies podcast is now available. Tune in now and hear the juicy tidbits of the story behind the book. Okay, it's no E! True Hollywood Story, but it's as exciting as I get without being on fire. P.S. Shelly Goodin from SAS Press
In a recent Dr. Dobb's Journal piece, Jim Starkey (senior architect for MySQL ) acknowledges that it's time to embed the power of applications within databases, instead of the other way around. Jim says (italics added by me): I think we can agree that context switches or network round trips
Our SAS usage notes usually do a great job of matching symptoms to solutions. But good old SAS note 10751 really stretches the limits of logic. The symptom: a message during the SAS 8.2 setup process that says "string variable is not large enough for string". The solution: "To circumvent
SAS tip-meister Phil Mason shares a veritable cornucopia of tips at the CMG 2007 conference. Check it out, and learn how a healthy diet of flexible DATE formats can keep your Perl expressions regular.
Today was "career day" in my daughter's 3rd grade classroom. A few privileged parents were invited to attend and answer questions about their professions, press-conference style. Among those on a panel of nine parents, the panelists that saw the most action included the Dog Trainer, the Duke Life Flight Nurse,
Congratulations to the support.sas.com team for a successful update to the SAS customer support center. I hope you'll agree with me that the new look is clean and attractive, and I think you'll find the site is easier to use now. I have the privilege of participating on the committee
During his bettermanagement.com seminar on Monday, Super Crunchers author Ian Ayres suggested that high school students would be better served by acquiring a modest knowledge of statistics rather than learning more abstract math topics, such as calculus. (Then again, if we don't favor calculus how will we ever arrive at
I've recently read Super Crunchers, the book by Ian Ayres that I blogged about a few weeks ago. Even though no propers are paid to SAS (I mean, why should the world's largest privately held software company and a leader in analytics get a mention in a book about the
In his blog, Jared details the hoops one must jump through to convince SAS to run system shell commands (such as the X command and SYSTASK) from SAS Enterprise Guide. Here is the explanation: SAS Enterprise Guide is a client application, and SAS runs as a server application. When launched
"Cut him in half and count the number of rings?" Some folks on the discussion forum share a better method to calculate someone's age from SAS Enterprise Guide.
If you deploy the SAS 9 environment on Windows, you may have multiple SAS processes running on a single box (metadata process, OLAP server, multiple workspace servers). Windows Task Manager doesn't provide a great way to distinguish one sas.exe process from another, but Process Explorer does. Process Explorer lets you
For the third year running, SAS spellers have prevailed at the Corporate Spelling Bee, held for the benefit of the Literacy Council of Wake County. In addition to showing their spelling skills, team members are encouraged to wear costumes to convey their team spirit. I've never seen a SAS for
My new favorite typeface for programming is Consolas, a font designed for use with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. I use it there, but I now also use it for SAS programming. It uses ClearType technology, so the "crisp and clean" benefits kick in only when you have ClearType smoothing enabled.
A colleague asked me to run a certain SAS program and then try to view the output in SAS Enterprise Guide. The output contained an SQL VIEW, and darn it, the application refused to open it, reporting only that the data "could not be opened." There was nothing wrong with
