On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 08:11:24AM PDT, Charles Polisher spake thusly: > 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,
It hasn't been explicitly pointed out yet but math is a lot more than statistics/arithmetic. > - Graph theory (mostly graph libraries like BoostGraph) > to analyze dependency-graphs: packages, header files, > attack trees, Puppet manifests. Graph theory is a good example. > - 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. I'd like to know more about how this was done. > - 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.) I've always wanted to know more about this and have done some reading although I'm not sure how often sysadmins need to come up with their own grammar and should certainly look for an existing tool first. All of the rest are good examples I'd like to know more about also. The only thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is purely functional programming. In addition the the Haskell programming language and more directly applicable to system administration is NixOS: http://nixos.org/ the OS with a purely functional package manager. It isn't ready for production use but the ideas may some day be. Also along these lines is the fact that "all software is math" which means it directly affects all of us: http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20111005102810176 -- Tracy Reed, RHCE Digital signature attached for your safety. Copilotco PCI/HIPAA/SOX Compliant Secure Hosting 866-MY-COPILOT x101 http://copilotco.com
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