Tag: python

Simple Python Scrapper for Daytum

I use one of the major running sites to keep track of my running log but unfortunately there’s no public API.  The underlying html is a mess and would be utterly complicated to scrape.   For this training cycle,  I’ve been keeping a second log using Daytum since their iPhone app makes updating it way easy. […]

When Google Analytics meets SAS

Thanks to Tricia’s introduction, I recently realized that Google Analytics is such a powerful tool for web analytics or business intelligence. It will fit the special needs if we use SAS to analyze the well-structure users’ data accumulated in Goog…

Map and Reduce in MapReduce: a SAS Illustration

In last post, I mentioned Hadoop, the open source implementation of Google’s MapReduce for parallelized processing of big data. In this long National Holiday, I read the original Google paper, MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters by Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and got that the terminologies of “map” and “reduce” were basically borrowed […]

Using SAS and Python to normalize database

Many occasions, data needs to be normalized to speed up query operations before entering a database. Interestingly, SAS’s data step array cannot accept mixed data types including both numeric and character ones, which makes it unusable for such a pur…

Too Big to Be Accurate(1): Which is the Most Powerful Calculator in the World?

Calculate the factorial of 171 (171!)? Just TRY! It is equal to 171*170*169*….2*1.
1. Google calculator
As Google fanatics, I first try to search the answer via Google:

Whoops, nothing interested returned! Type “170!” and get the output:
Why kinda things happened in this calculator? 171! is just equal to 171*170!.
2. Excel
Switch to Excel spreadsheet. Function fact(*) […]

SAS vs R in data mining (1): challenges for SAS

The past three years witnessed the rise of R, an open source statistical software. Search R related books in Amazon, and tons of recent titles show up ranging from graphics to scientific computation. Thanks to those graduates sprang out of school that …