I can now state that my blog is up and running, because, while my Docker knowledge is still incomplete, my Docker knowledge is now sufficient to setup 3 separate containers for WordPress, ownCloud (which I use internally), and Apache2/Perl that is use to provide you with web games, web ebook apps, SAS help desk functionality and additional files related to my books.
I tried to add my games/apps/helpdesk to WordPress (which is accessed using https://), but, apparently, they are not compatible, so I had to create a new Docker container for them (which is accessed using http://). The helpdesk is still secure, even though there is no password, as I only send copy emails to the sender email address if it is registered, so anyone spoofing an email address will receive nothing.
I am hoping that blog members will now be able to visit my blog site, and prove to themselves that it works for them, and, if it does not work, then will use the Contact Us link on the blog site to let me know.
On 13Feb2025 my broadband was upgraded, which set in motion a chain of events that I have only this weekend managed to control. As a result, where before you used https://hollandnumerics.org.uk/wordpress to access this site, you should now use just https://hollandnumerics.org.uk. Which means that the link to my last “hopeful” post is now here: Have you missed me? I think my blog site is back. Let me explain…
While in February I thought my blog site was back online, it was unbelievably slow, so I started searching for a reason:
I checked the firewalls in the new docker containers, Linux server and router, but nothing I changed had any positive impact.
I asked for help from the WordPress and Jetpack community, but nothing improved my situation.
Finally, after scouring through the various logs on my Linux server, I found a reference to incorrect DNS (Domain Name Server) addresses. Correcting them in /etc/network/interfaces to match my router resolved all of the problems connecting to WordPress and Jetpack servers, and, suddenly, my blog site sprang into life again.
On Thursday (13Feb2025) my broadband connection was upgraded from copper wire to full fibre, but it could not be tested, because my router was not compatible.
I reconfigured my router to temporarily go back to my copper wire connection, but, even though my internet service provider (ISP) had agreed to send me a suitable router, they still shut down that line, because the full fibre installation had been completed.
The new router arrived at breakfast time on Friday (14Feb2025), but we did not hear the doorbell, because it relies on WiFi, which had been disabled! Only a chance look out of the window revealed a very patient postman! A very stressful hour followed while I configured the new router ready to restart the blog server, reinstated the internet and WiFi connections, and connect the new web phone, as I needed to work on a client’s server that day. Later in the day my ISP sent me a message that my router was on its way to me!?
My ISP’s support teams are very friendly and helpful, but I am certain they would be less busy if they completed tasks correctly at the first attempt! Friday afternoon was punctuated with online chat discussions with them about access to their business portal to update the web phone settings, which have now been resolved.
My penultimate discussion with my ISP resulted from some access issues to the blog server. In order to assign a web address to the server’s IP address it has to be static, which had been ordered as part of the upgrade package. Mid-afternoon the web address stopped working, which suggested the IP address I had assigned to the web address was dynamic, rather than static. I assigned the new IP address to the web address and, so far, it has not changed again, but my ISP has not yet confirmed that it is now static, which is why I said that I think my blog site is back.
Finally on Monday (17Feb2025) I had a very fruitful conversation with my ISP’s Tech Support, who understood me immediately and finally set my IP address to a static IP address, which worked after I had rebooted my router. This was a revelation, as my previous contacts with Tech Support had been convoluted and ultimately unsuccessful. Therefore, I have spent the day rooting out the occurrences of the old IP address from my WordPress configuration. I am hoping that members of this blog will now be able to interact with it again!
Recommendation: If you have a working server connected to a specific static IP address, DO NOT change it!!
There will be a scheduled downtime of the blog site on Thursday 13 February 2025 while the broadband connection is upgraded to full fibre. The upgrade work is due to take place between 0800hr and 1300hr (GMT), but the downtime may extend beyond this period to allow for any amendments to server connections that are also needed.
A message will be sent to Twitter/X, LinkedIn, BlueSky, Mastodon and blog members as soon as the site is fully available after the downtime.
There are a number of SAS-related jobs in the SAS Jobs Listing this month in the UK, Europe, India and Philippines and the links are open to all site visitors:
Country
Jobs Advertised
From Company
Europe
Pharmaceutical contract positions
ClinChoice
Europe
Pharmaceutical permanent positions
ClinChoice
UK
Pharmaceutical contract positions
ClinChoice
UK
Pharmaceutical permanent positions
ClinChoice
Philippines
Pharmaceutical permanent positions
ClinChoice
India
Pharmaceutical permanent positions
ClinChoice
Please use the links in the SAS Jobs Listing to apply for these positions. All recruiters have contact details and links to their web sites on each job post.
Recruiters looking for candidates
I’m always looking for new recruiters to post SAS-related jobs on this site covering India, UK, the Americas (particularly USA), Europe and the Rest of the World.
If you have a regular supply of SAS jobs in any of these regions, then there is a free trial which is open to all recruiters, but with 2 simple rules:
The free trial will be extended by an additional calendar month only when a job is posted, and will expire automatically if no job has been posted in a calendar month.
The posted jobs must be in some way SAS-related.
Please register for Free membership, and then send your jobs to phil@hollandnumerics.org.uk before 05Feb2025 to be included in this post next month! You will be manually upgraded to a Recruiter member if you’ve never taken part in this free trial before.
The current regional breakdown of registered blog members is as follows, but note that the SAS Jobs Listing is open to all site visitors:
I am researching for 3 new Altair SLC books to add to my recently published book about Altair SLC. They will look into a range of aspects and programming using full licences, unlike my previous book that concentrated on the free Community Edition (now called the Personal Edition), and also more advanced aspects available in the Personal Edition, but not included in my previous book, such as Workflows, clinical data analysis and ODBC database connections.
What information would you like to read more about in the new books?
I have already been trying out the Communicate and Link features of Altair SLC, and hope to extend this to the Hub very soon.
Altair SLC: The SAS Language Compiler (paperback) – Second Edition
The book concentrates on Altair SLC, looking at the pros and cons of using Altair SLC to develop SAS programs. Code samples are provided throughout this book, so you can learn more about Altair SLC and SAS programming by following these examples.
Topics included:
What is Altair SLC?
Introduction to Altair Analytics Workbench
Altair SLC for Clinical Trials
Generating Graphics with Altair SLC
Using Altair SLC with R and Python
Download for free the SAS programs in this book from here.
The book concentrates on Altair SLC, looking at the pros and cons of using Altair SLC to develop SAS programs. Code samples are provided throughout this book, so you can learn more about Altair SLC and SAS programming by following these examples.
Topics included:
Phil has used SAS on all of the platforms, mainframe, UNIX, and Windows. If Mac was a platform, Phil would take you as reader there, too. He takes you to Altair SLC, R, and Python, where you can be a user of the SAS language, and those two ever more popular adjuncts to SAS, without the expense of a SAS licence, and clarifies the differences between SAS Software and Altair SLC. The book includes a graphics capabilities tour with the various tools in its scope. Nowhere else available is the chapter devoted to Altair SLC for Clinical Trials, which is like a book-guided Hands-On Workshop self-help get-acquainted tutorial. The book will take you to places that nobody else would take you. Explore it and explore SAS.
Disclosure of Material Connection: Some of the links in the page above are "affiliate links." This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."
Altair SLC: The SAS Language Compiler (PDF) – Second Edition
The book concentrates on Altair SLC, looking at the pros and cons of using Altair SLC to develop SAS programs. Code samples are provided throughout this book, so you can learn more about Altair SLC and SAS programming by following these examples.
Topics included:
What is Altair SLC?
Introduction to Altair Analytics Workbench
Altair SLC for Clinical Trials
Generating Graphics with Altair SLC
Using Altair SLC with R and Python
Download for free the SAS programs in this book from here.
The book concentrates on Altair SLC, looking at the pros and cons of using Altair SLC to develop SAS programs. Code samples are provided throughout this book, so you can learn more about Altair SLC and SAS programming by following these examples.
Topics included:
What is Altair SLC?
Introduction to Altair Analytics Workbench
Altair SLC for Clinical Trials
Generating Graphics with Altair SLC
Using Altair SLC with R and Python
Download for free the SAS programs in this book from here.
Phil has used SAS on all of the platforms, mainframe, UNIX, and Windows. If Mac was a platform, Phil would take you as reader there, too. He takes you to Altair SLC, R, and Python, where you can be a user of the SAS language, and those two ever more popular adjuncts to SAS, without the expense of a SAS licence, and clarifies the differences between SAS Software and Altair SLC. The book includes a graphics capabilities tour with the various tools in its scope. Nowhere else available is the chapter devoted to Altair SLC for Clinical Trials, which is like a book-guided Hands-On Workshop self-help get-acquainted tutorial. The book will take you to places that nobody else would take you. Explore it and explore SAS.
Disclosure of Material Connection: Some of the links in the page above are "affiliate links." This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."
I have always wanted to create a neural network using the SAS language from the moment it was announced, but SAS software restricted this feature to paid-for components that I had no other use for. However, using features available in the free Personal Edition of Altair SLC and Altair Analytics Workbench, I have created a neural network to analyse the Iris data set, which uses PROC MLP, but I created it using pre-built nodes for a Workflow in Analytics Workbench.
I have just watched a video demo from an Altair Employee on the Altair Community site about importing EG project files into Analytics Workbench Workflows. No version numbers were mentioned in or around this video, but it appears to be possible now, or at least soon!
For business users the Linux installation of Altair SLC is treated as a server, rather than a workstation, installation. However, when I installed it I thought that the only way to access it would be as a server from a Windows-installed Analytics Workbench, but there is also a Linux version of Analytics Workbench available to business users, and it looks just like the Windows version.
More reasons to consider migrating from Foundation SAS to Altair SLC!
Keep your eyes open for more books about Altair SLC coming soon…
Several years ago I wrote a conference paper about reading non‑standard spreadsheet files called “Help, I’ve Received a Spreadsheet File from StarOffice Calc…..!”, which explained how to extract the XML from a StarOffice Calc file, and then convert that XML into a SAS data set.
OpenDocument spreadsheet files can now be read with both Microsoft Office and LibreOffice (my preferred office suite), but a SAS program still has no way to read this file format directly.
I have now published a SAS program, which works in SAS Software and Altair SLC, to extract all of the individual XML sheets from an OpenDocument spreadsheet into their own SAS data sets. See the “SAS Hints and Tips” chapter in “SAS Programming Experiences: A How-To Guide from a Power SAS User” (both in paperback or PDF formats) for details about this SAS program.
This newsletter is the home of Foundation SAS and brings you information about making the most of SAS 9 and Altair SLC. This issue has been delayed, because I under-estimated how much effort organising my significant birthday celebrations would take!. It will, therefore, cover Q3 and Q4 of 2024. This newsletter issue includes a macro that everybody needs to know for categorical data with a group variable from LeRoy Bessler, and Richard Carson gives us 2 useful tips. As usual I have publicised some SAS-related events for the next few months, and I have also added some more SAS formats, options and functions that you may or may not have come across before, but you might find interesting, and even useful.
If you would like to contribute an article, to re-visit and improve an existing article, or just discuss the possibility of doing so, please feel free to send an email to me at view-uk@hollandnumerics.org.uk or phil@hollandnumerics.org.uk. Publication deadlines are the 14th day of February, May, August and November each year.
To be able to read this and all previous issues you will need to follow these steps:
If you have not already registered on this blog site, go to blog.hollandnumerics.org.uk and register for free membership.
Once successfully registered, click the menu item [Subscriptions for Forums and Features] > [Request access to the VIEWS UK forum] to request free access to the VIEWS UK forum, then add your name and email address to the form before clicking [Send].
On receipt of a request for an existing blog member I will register them for free access to the VIEWS UK forum, and then send them an email to confirm this.
The next time they log onto the blog site they will see VIEWS UK in the forum list, where you will find the latest issue of VIEWS News, forum topics to find the backissues, functions and formats in every published issue, and a tag cloud covering every forum on the site to which you have access, including VIEWS UK and the VIEWS News issues.
They will also be automatically informed of any VIEWS UK updates.
2024Q3 included my 70th birthday, so I hope you can forgive me for being a bit late with VIEWS News 77. I am hoping VIEWS News 77 will be worth the wait.
For those of you that are ageist, I am not old, I am just experienced!! Also, as I am not retired (yet), my working life does get in the way too!
My current plan is to publish VIEWS News 77 in the next 2 weeks.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, replied in time to my celebration post with suggestions for discounted prices for my “SAS Programming Experiences” and “Altair SLC” ebooks, so I will not be able to reduce their prices in September.
However, I will reduce my ebook prices for 3 days in October instead!
From 2-4 October 2024 the ebook download prices will be reduced, and downloading these ebooks from this site will also allow you to freely download them again when a new edition is published:
