Dammit Jim!

I was curious how I spend my time and wanted something simple to log which window was active on my computer. I couldn’t see anything that did this easily on the internet, although there is a (more sophisticated/complicated) browsing history tracker, and I needed to relax for an hour or two so I thought I’d give it a shot in Python and see what came out. After looking at the flashing taskbar icon tutorial, how to get the currently active window, how to detect if Windows is idle and how to get rid of the console window, I could finally start programming. I really don’t know how people programmed before Google.

Python sure is handy. I just found out that if you make a program that uses wxPython or something to generate windows and don’t want the big (somewhat ugly) black console window, all you have to do is change the program name from program.py to program.pyw or run pythonw.exe instead of python.exe. Pretty obvious now but took me a few minutes to come up with the right google. Now I just wish it wasn’t using 16 megs of RAM for a 30 line program…

I was up in Cape Breton doing some field work and had to do without regular internet access. After 3 years of high speed wireless internet at home and university quality LAN’s at work, this came as quite a change. Dealing with this brought me to a couple useful programs.

I just thought I’d do a quick post about SAS macro variables. They’re a pretty important part of SAS but when I had just started people told me not to worry about them and to just enter values by hand. After I finally got tired of constantly looking up results and entering them into programs over and over again, I decided I had better figure out how real programmers did it. As a side note, I’ve had a couple people tell me SAS was dying out but I see it appears to be in the top 20 of programming languages so I guess it’s going strong.

I guess this is obvious to most people but it took me quite a while to dig it out on the internet. I wanted my bash script to be able to read from standard input like cat sourcefile.txt|bash myscript.bash. It turns out the standard input can be read from /dev/stdin. So if I wanted to sort the standard input, myscript.bash would look like: sort /dev/stdin

I think this is probably basic UNIX knowledge but I’m not a programmer.