SAS Orphaned Workspace

Sometimes SAS doesn't shut down correctly and you get stuck with orphaned workspace. These orphaned workspace directories should be cleaned out now and again. You can run this code in SAS to find out where your workspace is and then go to the directory and delete any old ones.

data _null_;
w = getoption('work');
put w=;
run;


On my windows machine this gets me something like:

w=C:\DOCUME~1\STEPHE~1\LOCALS~1\Temp\SAS Temporary Files\_TD3516


Now I can go to C:\DOCUME~1\STEPHE~1\LOCALS~1\Temp\SAS Temporary Files\ and delete all the old ones.

Note, this is straightforward on a single user machine like my windows laptop, but you have to be more careful in multi-user environments where you don't want to delete active workspaces that others are using.

For multi-user environments like unix there is a utility that SAS provides called cleanwork.

Hooray For Vmware!

I am excited for computers again! Every once in a while something comes along that really changes the way you interact with computers. You know the feeling, it stops you in your tracks and makes you say, wow.

I remember when I was a kid and I first played a game called "Beach Head" on my Commodore 64. There was a level where you controlled a machine gun and the little computer guys would run at you from behind walls and throw grenades at you.
Every once in a while if you would shoot one of the little men he would yell "Medic!" or "I'm hit!". It was such a strain for that little computer to create the digitized speech that the whole game would slow down for a second or two. But my brother and I were seriously impressed. Wow!

I recently installed Vmware's Player on my little Dell laptop. If you are not familiar with Vmware and their virtualition technology then stop reading this and go to their web site. It is easily the most impressive software I have used in quite a while.

You see, I am going on vacation for two weeks (woohoo!) and will have some time to work on some coding projects during flights. I have been working on a perl/web/mySql project for my website for a while now and am getting close to finishing it. To work on it, I usually log into my remote server using ssh and work away. Works great until you aren't connected to the internet. So I thought, why not create a local server to work on while I am away from the internet?

Usually that would entail downloading a linux distro, partitioning part of my hard drive, making sure the distro has all the drivers it needs for my laptop, setting up and configuring all the tools I need, etc etc. Essentially a lot of wasted, unproductive time.

Last night I downloaded Vmware Player for free. Then I downloaded an appliance called Grandma's LAMP for free. An appliance is a full-blown pre-configured virtual server that is hosted on your machine through the player. Within minutes it was up and running.

All I had to do was go to my web server, tarball all the files for my application and download them to my laptop. Then I just copied them to my virtual
Ubuntu server using the pre-configured samba share and Voila! A completely useable local copy of my entire development environment in two hours! I am seriously impressed. And all without doing any reconfiguring on my little windows xp laptop.

And to top it off, I can take the whole virtual server and the player and copy them to a 2 gig thumb drive. Any computer I stick my USB drive into can host my development server. Wow, indeed.

Saving Time

When I was a kid my brother, sister and I spent a lot of time in my Father's dental lab. This gave us a unique opportunity to learn how to get things done in a time-sensitive production environment. The more business he got and the more successful his practice became, the more demanding his labwork. He spent a lot of time working in the lab perfecting techniques and efficiency. We kids would hang out in his dental lab looking for things to do and he would hand out miscellaneous tasks to us (sadly he locked away the NO2 from us). As we got older and more profecient working the lathe, drill, sand blaster, oven, etc we would get more critical tasks. Spending time with Dad meant spending time learning how to get things done in a fast-paced hands-on environment.

One thing Dad would always repeat to us is how important it is to get things done "quickly and correctly."

Just getting things done quickly won't cut it. And believe it or not, just getting things done correctly doesn't cut it either. Not if you have other steps in the process or customers waiting on you to complete your task. In order to have time in this life for things other than work, it helps to learn how to get things done both quickly and correctly.

Generally, most people think of working quickly as producing sloppy work. But actually, you can get things done quickly with FEWER mistakes. The trick is to seperate tasks into two categories: things that should be done very quickly, and things that should be done very correctly. When you get good at cutting down the time it takes for you to do the miscellaneous tasks you can spend more time getting the critical tasks done correctly. This type of thinking translates very well to programming. It has probably helped my career more than any other single piece of advice I have received.

So as you spend your day programming, think to yourself, "what are the non-critical tasks that I am having to do and how can I minimize them?" Believe it or not, with just a few small changes you can find yourself getting a lot more done.

Here is an example of a change that I have recently incorporated. If you are like me, you probably have a few folders on your hard drive that you are constantly having to access. Throughout my day I am constantly typing something like "c:\my data\reports\ad hoc\" into Save As and Open dialog boxes, Windows Explorer, etc. In Windows you can create a PATH variable to substitute. So in my example I might create a Windows path variable name R (stands for reports) that has the value "c:\my data\reports\ad hoc\". Now I can just type %R% to navigate to that folder. Saves time and frees my mind to focus on the more critical tasks than navigating Windows Explorer.

I believe I got that tip from http://www.lifehack.org/. It's a great site full of useful tips for minimizing the clutter so you can focus on getting things done quickly and correctly.

LRECL

Here is a SAS trick that is especially useful for Windows users. By default, Windows creates files with a logical record length of 256. This means if you are creating a flat file with records (lines) longer than 256, the lines are going to wrap. You can tell Windows exactly how long to make the record length on the filename statement in SAS. The option is lrecl= (logical record length) and it looks like this:

filename myFile "c:\some directory\some file.txt" LRECL= 400;

Then you can write lines to that file that are up to 400 characters long without fear of the line wrapping.

Windows XP Tweak

If you use Windows XP, go here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx

And definetly download CmdHere.exe.

It allows you to open up a DOS command prompt from windows explorer and the command prompt automatically points to the selected folder.

Quite possibly the most useful thing you will do with XP the whole day.