Guus Snijders wrote: > schreef "David Lang" <[email protected]>: > > and also the fact that sometimes a O(N^2) algorithm may be preferred to a > O(logN) algorithm if N is small and the fixes overhead of the 'more > efficient' algorithm is higher than for the dumb one. > > Seems to me that this would be great subjects for some articles/blog > entries. ;-) > Especially if one could explain such subjects from an sysadmin background.
Sucks to be the sysadmin with one hammer running into many kinds of nails. I defensively collect math-based tools/techniques that help fix broken stuff and make reliable stuff. For instance, - Graph theory (mostly graph libraries like BoostGraph) to analyze dependency-graphs: packages, header files, attack trees, Puppet manifests. - Monte-carlo simulations of RAID systems confirmed a batch of disk drives was vastly exceeding the claimed AFR, the vendor eventually copped to a quality problem. - Formal grammar: Yacc, Lex, XML/DTD, ALGOL :). I write (or find, or generate) a parser once or twice a year to create steak from hamburger. Hand-rolling parsers is a pain ( http://pastebin.com/rBHMTF5r for my latest hand-rolled effort. Yuck.) - Performance math (how fast can a storage system or network transfer data?). My client's slow application is merely a series of cascaded caches having exponential performance characteristics under load. - Relational algebra (SQL). - Karnaugh maps for minimizing logic, state machines for making it right. - Assorted statistical distributions to predict expected occurance of rare events, like double disk failures or co-occurance of a drive failure plus an uncorrected latent sector error (Mean Time to Total Data Loss). - Combinatorial optimization / linear algebra - Type theory, category theory, vagueness theory, number theory (tiny slices of these) for insights into large data sets (30GiB of firewall logs). - Knapsack (bin packing) for allocating storage. Google won't hand you this stuff on a platter. You have to prepare. Math is your friend. -- Charles Polisher Pedantic, I? _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
