Blink 7

Excel Tutorial: Using Conditional Formats for Traffic Lighting

Simplicity is key when presenting statistics to management or customers. Data analysts are often tempted to put as many details as possible on the standard “one sheet” template; however, too many numbers on a page can cause confusion about where to initially focus. When reducing the number of statistics on a page is not an option and summary stats are not appropriate, traffic-lighting is a quick...

SAS Tutorial: Creating Categories with PROC FORMAT

When performing data analysis on a cohort population, it is often desirable to categorize characteristics can have many values. Age, income level and credit card score are examples of population attributes that can be placed into “buckets” and easily analyzed based on broad categories (without having resort to linear or logistic regression). While variables can be quickly encoded using IF statements,...

SAS Tutorial: Loading Tab-Delimited Files

Imagine you are given a list of major Canadian political donators and wish to load it into SAS for further analysis. The list is in a text file with fields delimited by tab characters. SAS Enterprise Guide (EG) offers wizards to automatically import a variety of file formats, but using these GUI’s preempts the chance for automation or additional processing during import. Using code to load data...

The $699 Memory Stick

When buying electronics, two factors remain relatively consistent - If it’s new, it costs a lot more If Sony is involved, it costs a lot more Yet, even these two truisms fail to account the the $699cdn (roughly the same in American dollars) price tag placed on a (third-party!) Memory stick currently being advertised at Staples. Granted, 4GB cards are relatively new but can be obtained for...

Tutorial: Spotting a Phishing Scam in your Email

Phishing, in practical terms, is an attack used by hackers to gain access to private information such as credit card numbers, social insurance numbers and user passwords. Rather than breaking down a physical or technological barrier, phishing is a social engineering attack where targets are typically duped into providing this information directly to false versions of legitimate websites run by the...

Tutorial: Manually Adding Digg Support to Wordpress

What is Digg? Generally referred to as a social news site, Digg is technically a user-driven news aggregator. Registered Digg users can “digg” (i.e. bookmark and submit) an article on a web page by submitting a URL, along with a brief description. URL submissions are placed on display for other Digg users (registered or not) to read, comment on, rate, and bookmark for themselves. How Digg can...

Tutorial: Two Ways to Lookup Your Own IP Address

What is an IP address? An IP (Internet Protocol) address is a unique address within a network used by devices to communicate with other devices within the network. Computers, printers, routers, and network hard drives are examples of devices that could have an IP address within a network. IP addresses are generally assigned according to country and internet provider. There are also some specially...

Hamachi Patch for AOE 3 (all versions) and AOM

It was some time ago I wrote the original tutorial on how to make Age of Empires 3 work with a freeware Virtual Private Networking (VPN) program called Hamachi. There have been many questions about where to find the AOE3VPN.exe patch referenced in the tutorial, with some readers were to find it from the supplied Google search bar. The good news is that a much-improved patch is available from Crea-Doo...

Tutorial: Getting into Windows Explorer … Easily

Note: This tutorial may seem simplistic to some but I’ve been answering these questions for several years and still wince while watching casual PC users take nearly half a minute to find Windows Explorer in the start menu. Some “advanced” users fare little better, so please be patient. What is Windows Explorer? Windows Explorer is a file management system for the Microsoft Windows family...

Tutorial Requests

Blink 7 is a tutorial-driven website, committed to covering the topics that interest you. Please use the comment section of this page for the following - Requests for new tutorials Requests for new reviews Requests for Extensions to Existing Tutorials General Correspondence Any topic will be considered, but the main areas of interest are: SAS Programming Web Development Video Editing and Encoding Electronic...