Design, photography and ramblings

Month: May 2015

Set client task label in SAS Enterprise Guide 6.1 using code

Looking at my SAS code the other day I was trying to find a way to set the label of the program I was running.  I wanted to do this from within the code.  The ‘logic’ tab of the executed program had ‘%LET _CLIENTTASKLABEL=’ set to the running program name, but I wanted to actually set that value.  By default the program name is ‘Program’.  It would be nice if there were some code such as:

%SET CLIENTTASKLABEL='myProgramName';

…but alas, there is none that I am aware of, except to use VBscripting for automation (which for me seems a bit too much work for little benefit).  So I will keep setting the program names by hand.

Text message error sending to an international number

If a friend sends you a text message from an international number, and you have an incorrect number for them in your contacts list you may receive an error when trying to reply to their message.  If the error message say ‘15555… number is incorrect (or something to that effect)’ you should create a new contact entry on your phone with the correct phone number.  Recently I encountered this issue on an Android device and no matter how many times I tried to correct the phone number for the original contact entry, it would not save correctly.

So what caused the text message error in the first place when I was simply replying to a text message from an international contact?  Maybe it is an encoding issue with the phone number coming from an Apple device to an Android device or due to either the phone carrier simplifying the phone number.  In short, when you receive an international text message, the ‘reply-to’ phone number sent to your phone may be incorrect.

To fix the issue I create a new contact entry for the friend on my phone and entered the correct phone number (ensuring it has the correct phone prefix characters, such as ‘+’ where required).  I then sent a text message to the new contact entry and was able to get the text message to go through.  From there I was able to reply to text messages from the contact without issue.

 

Something to think about when looking for a camera

Just because a camera or webcam says it is 15MP (mega pixels), does not mean that is the ‘true’ resolution of the camera.  Take the Logitech C920 webcam that says on the marketing material that it can take 15MP* (software enhanced) photos.  That is as close to lying as you can get.  The true resolution of that webcam is  2MP and all they are doing is making the file size larger to give you 15MP.  What a load of …

Anyway, before you buy, be sure you read the article below (or something similar) and make sure you know the ‘true’ resolution before buying the camera:

http://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/49230/what-is-snapsorts-true-resolution

Query SQL Server table with bit field

The syntax for this query always trips me up.  I am always under the impression I can select rows from the ‘bit’ column of my tables, where [myBitColumn] DOES NOT CONTAIN A VALUE OF 1 (in other words a value of FALSE or NULL), by using the following WHERE clause in my SQL query:

[myBitColumn] != 1

If you have ever tried you know this does not work.  Instead, your WHERE clause needs to check if the value is either FALSE or NULL, like so:

[myBitColumn] = 'False' OR [myBitColumn] IS NULL