Technology

Using Gradle from behind a proxy

By default Android Studio uses Gradle to build Android projects. This means Android Studio always needs a connection to the internet to check for and retrieve dependencies. If you’re developing from behind a proxy (as I am) then you’ll have to explicitly tell Gradle the proxy details to allow it to connect to its servers. Steps to fix Navigate to the “.gradle” folder in your user directory (e.g. C:\Users\bob\.gradle) Create a “gradle.properties” file… Read More »Using Gradle from behind a proxy

Google Glass, Eye Love You

Having done a bit of research on what apps people are starting to develop for Google Glass, I stumbled on word of a recent Glass Hackathon where, among other things, an app was built to measure attraction: It uses an eye tracker, mounted on the Glass frame, to measure the pupil dilation of the wearer. The idea is to measure someone’s arousal, giving an instant measure of how attracted they are to… Read More »Google Glass, Eye Love You

How to remove security from a PDF

I recently sat through an eLearning course which involved reading through a 1300-page PDF file. Instead of deforesting the Glasgow area to provide the requisite amount of paper for printing, I thought I’d read and annotate it on-screen (something I wouldn’t recommend unless it’s to save the environment) Annoyingly, annotation is prevented on PDFs with security applied, so I had to find a way around it. Firstly note that if… Read More »How to remove security from a PDF

SAS Dashboard – Fixing the “too many dials” issue

There’s an interesting feature of SAS BI Dashboard that caught me out when trying to put together some KPI gauges. We wanted a set of dials that would show us the counts for several types of public security offences. Naturally we configured indicators using count as the measure, but found that the dashboard was showing an indicator per record in our system:   With a bit of faffing around, I… Read More »SAS Dashboard – Fixing the “too many dials” issue

SAS – How to Export/Import packages

My team and I have been developing a solution which involves a degree of SAS reports and related metadata. I set up a scheduled, automated backup of our information maps, reports, etc for posterity, and out of general paranoia. For this I used SAS’s command line export and import capabiltiies, which probably weren’t designed to be used that way, but which turned out to be really useful. It took a… Read More »SAS – How to Export/Import packages

Converting custom date formats in SAS Information Map Studio

Background Let’s assume you have some dates in a custom format:   date20131007 month102013 SAS Reports need to be able to a) present dates in a human readable format and b) understand dates to allow filtering and other funky stuff. For that reason we need a way of translating these custom dates into SAS dates. Step 1 – Get an Information Map with a date field Use an existing one,… Read More »Converting custom date formats in SAS Information Map Studio

How to restart SAS server

More detailed instructions can be found here, but below are the steps I use. Note – All instructions assume the SAS is installed on a linux box, in /usr/local/, since that’s where it was installed on my machine. Stop all JBoss server instances /usr/local/jboss-5.1.0.GA/bin/SASServer1.sh stop Stop SAS processes /usr/local/config/Lev1/sas.servers stop Start SAS processes /usr/local/config/Lev1/sas.servers start (wait a couple of minutes) Start JBoss server instances /usr/local/jboss-5.1.0.GA/bin/SASServer1.sh start (wait about 5, 10… Read More »How to restart SAS server

Creating SAS Web Reports from an Oracle data source

Here’s a sparse set of instructions for the steps you need to take to configure SAS to access data from an Oracle data store and surface it through SAS Web Report Studio (as an example). Note that once it’s in a SAS format this can be used in any SAS product, and therefore means you can do all sorts of analytics on it. Hence the VA screenshot. Caveats – Please… Read More »Creating SAS Web Reports from an Oracle data source

Recursively list all files in Windows

  You’re probably familiar with dir, the windows command which lists all files in a certain directory. If you ever find the need (as I have) to recursively list every file in a directory, as well as all its sub-directories, you can do this by setting a couple of parameters on the dir command. dir /s /b Warning: This will output a lot of stuff, so I’d recommend piping the… Read More »Recursively list all files in Windows

Showing command history in UNIX with timestamps

A handy little command for checking the history of all commands executed through the UNIX command prompt for that user. history This will return you a numbered list of commands, oldest first. Note that by default, “history” will NOT show you timestamps, which can be very handy if investigating activity on a certain machine. To show history with timestamps, you’ll need to set up an evironment variable to store the… Read More »Showing command history in UNIX with timestamps