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Our version of SASVA is flash based and our transition to Viya is happening in June. We asked our SAS guys what the plan was for the interim period after flash gets turned off in January. "Plan?" 
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Nov 11, 2020 11:27
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 20:13 |
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Is it normal to, however briefly, want to take that shithead superfluous semicolon that hosed everything up and instead of just deleting it, commenting it out so that it will spend years of torment watching the actual good code around it function beautifully?
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Nov 12, 2020 21:10
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So work is deploying SAS VIYA later this year, but in the meantime we rely on SAS VA, which relies on Flash. As a stopgap, we are using the Harman browser, which is a browser package provided by a Samsung subsidiary that provides a Flash-enabled browser that is supported beyond Flash's end-of-life. It's a little basic, but it works. ...except for an interesting wrinkle. The length of a URL that you can paste into the browser's address bar is limited by the physical width of the address bar. As in; if the length of the URL as represented on one continuous line of text is greater than the width of the address bar on the screen, any text beyond it will be cut off. If the line of text is about two monitors wide and the browser is fullscreen, you'll get about half of the url. If you resize the browser horizontally to take up half of a screen then you'll get about a quarter of the url. If you have a side-by-side dual monitor setup and stretch the browser across both screens, you can then paste in the whole URL. A direct link to a SAS VA report can have a VERY lengthy URL. It's poorly designed in such a amazingly specific way. 
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Jan 14, 2021 10:19
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I'm at a loss for words. Paraphrased: "Why doesn't this statement run? It is being run against databases that total to 1.1 billion cells, but I'm sure we've run similar jobs before?" The statement: code:
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May 14, 2022 05:14
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Someone talking about future scoping used the word 'blockchain' in relation to our 100TB landing table.
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May 17, 2022 07:57
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Our new Grad has a great attitude and the makings of a good tech support officer, but he doesn't quite grok a few things yet. Like, we gave him the usage stats for our servers which includes information like total space available and current space used which is produced in the form of a monthly excel spreadsheet, and asked him to make a report using our visualisation studio on a bunch of aspects of it including a forecast of when to expect the server to reach capacity. I spent about 3/4 of an hour convincing him: 1. you should use the forecasting tool in the visualisation studio to calculate and represent this rather than putting manual formulas in a bunch of new columns in order to calculate the rate of change and the rate of change of the rate of change and the gradient in order to somehow manually forecast it. 2. you should be creating any calculated columns in the studio report itself so that we can just point the report at each new iteration of the source data whenever it becomes available, and no it doesn't matter that you're pretty sure that you can add the columns that you've been adding to the excel spreadsheet provide the data directly underpinning all your other graphs in about 15 minutes when the new data comes out: this report needs to be available to people with access only to the raw source data and not fall over whenever you're not there.
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May 18, 2022 22:13
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tactlessbastard posted:I was asked in a job interview today to describe how I would go about bringing back into the office a workforce that is very resistant to ending WFH. What was your response/their reaction?
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May 24, 2022 10:00
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There's nothing sweeter than having someone send a very angry email asking you "why hasn't something been done to progress this thing, this is intolerable" with their boss and director and national manager cc'd in, and being able to reply all "As per my previous email dated 15/11/2021 (see attached)..." with the attached email containing a very clear indication that our part of the work is done precisely as they requested, and as a bonus some extremely clear and helpful advice on what their next steps need to be which they've been ignoring for several months.
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May 25, 2022 04:09
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Why did our identity people not only let people have apostrophes in their email addresses, but also made it so that it's the kind of apostrophe that resolves as a single quote in SAS?
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May 27, 2022 12:52
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Arquinsiel posted:I'm guessing it's because they're aware of Irish names. Yes, but maybe use the type of apostrophe that doesn't cause mailing programs to poo poo the bed.
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May 27, 2022 13:12
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Nah, as in, I'm writing a SAS program that takes a dataset containing database details for our EDW including the email addresses of each of the databases' multiple owners, rearranges it to spit out a dataset for each owner containing details of all databases owned by that owner, and then converts that into an excel spreadsheet containing the info which it then automatically emails to each owner with a message asking them to confirm their continued ownership of the database and to indicate where there is scope for reduction in database size/retiring the database as space constraints are becoming a problem. The issue is that I'm trying to get it to work as one-click and you're done as there are 130 owners who need to receive the email and mailing them individually whenever we need to perform this function would be prohibitively time-consuming. But as I'm using a macro to achieve this (e.g. a do loop for do i=1 to &count in order to send the appropriate email with the appropriate attachment to &&email&i), I'm running into issues because the email addresses for people with apostrophes in their names are stored with the apostrophe being ’, however this doesn't resolve to an email address in our system as the apostrophe in email addresses in our system are ', which resolves to a single quote in SAS which causes an error in the program as it interprets it as the commencement of a string with a missing end quotation mark. Hence also why the email addresses are stored with the unresolvable (for our email system) ’, as that's the only way they could be stored. Turns out the only way to get it to work is to to run a TRANWRD function, but you can only do it in the call symputx step where you're defining the email macro variable because attempting to do it at any step that might conceivably have the resulting string stored in a table will cause the program to poo poo itself. But it took a long time to get to the bottom of it and I'm cranky.
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May 27, 2022 13:50
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Agrikk posted:Funny you should mention office 365 – Excel and Word 2010, huh? Yes... Terrible... 
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Jun 13, 2022 22:11
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GreenBuckanneer posted:Please we need your help now, we'll back pay the difference Have you decided what your premium consulting fee and minimum daily rate is? $300/hr and 7.5 hrs minimum seems fair.
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Jun 23, 2022 21:56
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Tangentially to Lum's post, can anyone with more of an idea than I explain to me in words of one syllable why Microsoft Office products are such absolute dogshit with regards to copy/pasting between or even within products? It's literally faster to paste a small block of text into notepad, re-copy it, and then paste into the target application rather than doing it directly. Pasting text shouldn't lock both programs for 10+ seconds.
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Jun 30, 2022 01:40
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Whoever decided that every single windows application will respond to the scroll wheel when the mouse pointer is over it except for Microsoft excel which will only respond when the app is in focus and which will then respond regardless of where on screen the mouse cursor is can suck the farts out of my arsehole.
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Jul 19, 2022 15:11
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Despite my pre-existing conditions and my workplace posting multiple COVID contacts in my building each day, I am required to come in one day every week, also despite the fact that I'm on a national helpdesk in a team that's distributed in multiple states and I never ever provide support face to face "Opportunities to network and form workplace relationships" is the stated reason for wanting people to return to the office, despite the fact that one day a week I will be in a state of paranoid hypervigilance as I devote my mental energy towards avoiding multiple maskless coughing people rather than my work.
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Jul 28, 2022 23:52
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Our level 1 support team, which covers a range of platforms (primarily SAS and SQL) and is beloved by all with a sterling reputation for providing same day (if not same hour) solutions for technical issues and for being able to expedite escalations to teams that are otherwise frequently nonresponsive, is being completely disbanded with 2 1/2 weeks notice. This is the first we have heard about it, there has been no consultation with senior management or discussion regarding providing continuation of our support functions. We are being split into two platform management support teams, one for SAS, one for Teradata SQL. The guy who knows about SAS is moving to the SQL team, the grad student who is studying SQL is moving to the SAS team. We have individually and collectively asked management to flip that particular apportionment, and have been told decisions are final. We have asked what our job duties in the new teams will be, and have been told that this is what the 2 1/2 weeks between the news and the new team assignments will be used to work out. During this period, the aforementioned team members have 3 collective weeks off booked in advance. There is also a platform migration from SAS to viya that is happening in October, that the original team was going to help handle. We asked if the team dissolution could be delayed until after then and the response was an unqualified no. The question of who handles cross platform issues e.g. issues with SAS connecting to Teradata is that if your team gets the enquiry and it appears to be an issue with the other team's platform, you drop it and transfer to the other team. Double handling is baked into the new model.
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Sep 1, 2022 01:30
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It's amazing to watch the answer to "what motivates you at work" go from "I'm finally hitting my stride in a good team with great people who all work well together and have each other's backs and do good work and are universally well regarded" to "my mortgage requires payment and my long service leave kicks in next year" in the space of a ten minute zoom call. gently caress, closing the team and making a shift to that kind of platform centric approach may well be justified and could have been accepted by everyone, but actually consulting with the people doing the work and giving them a bit of involvement in the process was apparently too much to ask. Instead everyone feels like a replaceable cog that management can just hammer in wherever they feel like.
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Sep 1, 2022 11:18
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SixFigureSandwich posted:People keep using YYMMDD as a date format for some godforsaken reason which is what is currently pissing me off In what context? It's useful for chronological ordering when sorting by filename at least.
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Sep 1, 2022 13:08
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Wibla posted:Get out. Get out now. In 9 months my mortgage hits zero and completely coincidentally I get 90 days of long service leave that I can cash out immediately if I'm so inclined. If this happened then, I'm not sure I'd still be employed the day after hearing the news.
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Sep 1, 2022 13:11
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Counterpoint: ever hired someone for an L1 tech support helpdesk who claimed to know enough about a range of programming languages that they needed to support but in fact was hoping that programming was something where with no prior experience you can fake it until you make it? A simple "you have 5 minutes per language to write a 10 green bottles program" would have saved a lot of people a lot of time.
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Oct 9, 2022 02:20
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Internet Explorer posted:L1 tech support helpdesk who needed to be proficient in a "range of programming languages" to the point where they could support them??? "Know enough about" not "Proficient". "Dear L1 support. Whycome my code take long? Please see below for example." code:
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Oct 9, 2022 10:26
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Sywert of Thieves posted:We have a ton of 10+ years-old legacy code in our giant web application that was written by someone not...very proficient at it. When he needed a database query to fetch data from 18 different tables, instead of making 10-15 separate queries, he'd just write one query that joined all the tables together in a gigantic 2-page mess of poorly constructed (and badly performing) sql. It has proven extremely hard to replace this crap with sane stuff since "catching up on technical debt" was only introduced in management's lexicon since January. I think that people think that doing it all in one step is in some way more clever or more efficient so they cram everything in like that. The above code that I quoted was the actual structure of a query someone was directing at tables comprising somewhere in the ballpark of a billion rows combined, so yeah, that basically brought our entire production environment to a standstill.
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Oct 9, 2022 13:34
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Whoever decided that Agile should be applied to general project management and handling of BAU functions can suck the rancid farts directly out of my arsehole.
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Oct 11, 2022 08:32
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Fil5000 posted:How do you... how do you do Agile on BAU processes? They assign the same number of story points in Jira to "manage all inbound contact to a Level 1 tech support/access provision inbox" as they do to tasks that take about 2 days of a fortnightly sprint, and that task actually takes anywhere between an average of 20% of each day in one given week to 100% of each day in a particularly busy week because it's completely variable/dependent on how many people happen to contact which is by its very nature not estimable. My previous service desk role was folded into a platform management team with 3 weeks warning and prior to a role description being written for my position in the new team. Then they pile on more work on top of that to the point where even discounting my supposed workload via those helpdesk story points I have more points worth of tasks allocated to me than anyone else in the team below associate director level. Also when they suggest that I can do task x this sprint with a view to doing task x+1 next sprint and I point out that if I just take an extra 20 minutes I can just do task x+1 and get it all wrapped up sooner and eliminate a round of managerial oversight and back and forth they say 'no just do task x right now'. This is, somehow, agile.
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Oct 11, 2022 14:29
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Breetai posted:They assign the same number of story points in Jira to "manage all inbound contact to a Level 1 tech support/access provision inbox" as they do to tasks that take about 2 days of a fortnightly sprint, and that task actually takes anywhere between an average of 20% of each day in one given week to 100% of each day in a particularly busy week because it's completely variable/dependent on how many people happen to contact which is by its very nature not estimable. "Your priority is to enter your program of work for the next two fortnights into Jira by tomorrow as I'm on leave for a month and need to see what you'll be doing." "This will be challenging to achieve as it relies upon me first scoping out a multi-month-long program of work that will inform the next several sprints which is a time-intensive task that I haven't even been able to start thinking about because I spent every working minute last week attending to the support desk and the support desk continues to demand my time and there are several urgent access requests from people who are literally blocked from being able to do their work until they are cleared." "Then don't attend to the support desk until it is done." "Even if multiple people can't do any work as a result?" "Yes."
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Oct 12, 2022 04:38
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Do I use STP? Yeah: poo poo That Pisses network engineers off
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Nov 3, 2022 09:09
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Breetai posted:Our version of SASVA is flash based and our transition to Viya is happening in June. So the interim solution for the last 2 years was to purchase the Harman browser which is a Samsung proprietary browser that has legacy support for flash. Viya rollout is still pending. After dragging his feet, the national manager of the division that was asked to pay for next year's licence renewal said no, the day before the holiday change freeze. Our entire data division is going to lose its visualisation capacity on midnight on the 31st, and our entire front line staff of tens of thousands will not be able to see their KPIs until this is resolved. My (now former) boss is somewhere between livid and hysterical with laughter, as he has all the receipts to show that he requested the renewal in a more than timely manner, and his official notification circulating the news that this has happened will direct all enquiries to the national manager who skimped on the budgeting.
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Dec 22, 2022 02:17
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It always helps when the people making decisions about information security also know even the tiniest bit about what they're doing. Case in point: my ex-boss, manager of a Platform Management team, who wanted to stop giving external government departments who access our government department's databases access to our deployment of WINSCP as she was concerned that bad actors would use it to copy files to their servers for unknown nefarious purposes. Never mind the fact that our deployment of WINSCP 100% only allows access to file paths and read/write permissions that the individual user already has been granted access to in our SAS environment, so if someone wanted to inappropriately copy our poo poo a simple DATA step would do the same thing.
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Jan 14, 2023 23:07
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 20:13 |
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It's an interesting time for sas dates: for the month of April this year the number of days since Jan 1 1960 is such that April 20th is '23120', April 27th is '23127' etc so that raw sas dates look really close at a glance to a (downshifted by a couple of months) yymdd format, and I've already seen one oopsie where someone ran a program as at a triggerdate that they got from a log of a previous run and thought it was a date in January.
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May 3, 2023 01:52
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