Dammit Jim!

This summer I needed a GPS logger for some field work. After looking through a few different possibilities, none of which were particularily satisfying, I finally found the (ununiquely named) NaviGPS GPS from GPS Central for $200 Canadian. At the time, there weren’t any reviews of it online. I’ve come to depend on reviews whenever I buy something so I figure I’ll do my part and post my review of it. While digging up the company link, I noticed on they’ve changed the name to a ‘GT-11’ and redone the layout of the website. Looks better now. I’m not sure the name is any better though. Sounds like a car. Anyway, I also noticed they have drivers for Mac, XP and Linux so that’s a plus if you need that. 1/18/2007 Edit: It looks like the name has changed again. It appears to be called an Amaryllo Trip Tracker now. Not sure what has changed but the picture sure looks the same as my unit except the big A logo.

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’ve been busy with school administrative stuff and field work in Cape Breton recently. Luckily, I did have the opportunity to go halibut longline fishing with one of the guys up here. That should really be ‘halibut’ fishing. We only saw one (undersize) the whole trip. It was quite a change from fishing on the west coast where even research boats can catch thousands of pounds of halibut a day.