Phillip Pearson - web + electronics notes

tech notes and web hackery from a new zealander who was vaguely useful on the web back in 2002 (see: python community server, the blogging ecosystem, the new zealand coffee review, the internet topic exchange).

2004-5-22

Statistica's COM library docs suck

Argh ... trying to automate Statistica to get it to do some graphs, except the documentation for the COM library omits basic things like the types of objects that functions return. The docs say things like:

    LinePlot2D.Options

    Description

        Returns the statistical graph options of the graph

    Return Value

        None.

    See LinePlot2D for additional properties available to STATISTICA LinePlot2D objects.

Nowhere in there did it mention that LinePlot2D.Options is a property of type StatsGraphsOptions, so you have to go and find example code to be able to find out what the options actually are.

It also doesn't tell you what values enumerated variables can have. That is really annoying.

At least I'm working in Python, which figures out most of the types for me, so I can just grab the Options property and look at the results of dir(opts) to get more of a clue as to what's going on. If I had Visual Studio installed, which I don't, I would probably be able to get much more info on the calls by browsing the type library, but I've only got the 60-day demo version at home, and I don't feel like waiting 6 hours for it to install. win32all's COM MakePy tool has given me a statistica.py file to look at, but it doesn't have all the info I need either.

... more like this: []

It doesn't cost a lot to come to NZ any more

Weird feeling - finding an advertisement for cut-price airfares for people to come here.

[sfo to auckland for only USD 748]

Is that a return fare? That seems really cheap. I suppose it's about NZD 1250 or so, but we pay several hundred dollars more than that to fly the opposite route.

I can't believe that it only costs USD 460 for a return trip from Los Angeles to London, either. I guess it's not as far for Americans to go ... London is a 24 hour flight from New Zealand, and the price hardly ever drops below NZD 2000 (about USD 1200).