Blog, page 7

Python Playing (from 2007/12/28)

I’ve been playing around with Python a bit more over the break, mostly because I want to be lazy in my code-writing for the forseeable future, plus I’d like to give NumPy a shot, but I want to have a solid background before trying that. One thing that just has not gotten old yet is the ability to assign functions absolutely anywhere in python. You can pass them around like variables, put them in dictionaries, return them from functions, whatever. I mean, I lived in parenthesis for a while in my scheme class, so it’s not like I haven’t been exposed to it, but it’s still damn cool. You can do cool stuff like making a tuple of some index, some value, and the function to process the other two. That makes it so much easier to deal with various combinations of neat datastructures. Anyways, the book I’ve been reading is Dive Into Python, off diveintopython.org. I’m currently at about page 114 out of 327, and I’ve fairly faithfully read most of it up until that point. The format seems slightly frustrating to me, but it’s probably just because it’s such a departure from what a lot of books and tutorials use. It seems helpful and worthwhile in any case.

Cacti (from 2007/06/30)

So, rrdtool is pretty sweet, but it's somewhat of a pain to set up. So… we use Cacti. It's amazing. Supposedly it'll integrate with Nagios as well, and then all of this data will be at our fingertips. For now, I just set it up on my server that's probably going to go down shortly. In any case, I feel like this project is somewhat coming together. Nagios is great for what's going on right now, cacti needs a way to know what's going on right now–A match made in heaven, or something.

Later I'll probably get stuff running on mouradserver1. As well as the bug-tracking setup.  As well as the gtd-php project–maybe. Or on my laptop or something.

Acronis TrueImage (from 2007/06/30)

TrueImage is… well… Quite the piece of software.

What I need it to do: Tell the check_backupdisk script that it's actually running the backup (IE–don't bitch on nagios) and handle all the mountingumountingfscking that it currently does. I think I'll probably end up putting a wrapper script around it…. but we'll see.

MRTG (from 2007/06/30)

So, another day, another (minor) problem. I had connected to a server with KDE instead of our usual GNOME interface. Which probably would have been fine except that KDE had a screensaver that sucked up the CPU. Which also would have been fine, if it hadn't been a server that everyone else used. Oops. RRDtool and MRTG would have shown a CPU spike which I could have investigated.

RRDTool (from 2007/06/29)

I have apparently been missing out. There's a really neat little unix tool called 'rrdtool’ that uses a fixed-size database to look at how something changes over time. I think I'll use it to monitor server load… and possibly network traffic.

Subversion Bite-sized Projects (from 2007/06/29)

Subversion added a tag in their bug-tracking database of projects that are 'bite-sized’: self-contained, somewhat independent fixes that should happen. I'm not sure any look very interesting at the moment, but I'll have to come back to it at some point. Bite-sized projects

Introducing… me (from 2007/06/29)

Or not. Ok, so… Every previous blog attempt has been a pile of crap. Well, therealtravisjohnson wasn't always, but it kinda got stale. So, I'm not gonna bother talking about me until I have a substantial amount of posts.

I got owned on my math quiz today. It's kinda ridiculous that we have a 60 minute quiz after 3 hours of lecture, I feel. Thank god I've largely gotten over the not studying well phase.

Work is going well. I read a bunch on RRDtools and Nagios, and I'm in the process of getting mouradserver1 up and running. It will be our host for the APL wiki, nagios, backups, and who knows what else.

Where I'm At (from 2007/03/03)

So it's almost the end of Winter Quarter 07 at the University of Washington. It's cold and rainy and lame. Last week I got turned down from the Computer Science program here, which meant I spent the weekend generally freaking out.

In any case, I then remembered that I liked the idea of an ACMS degree. The base of the major consists of the physics series, a Numerical Methods course and a Continuous modeling course from the AMATH department, and discrete models and statistics from the math department.

They have a Discrete Mathematics and Algorithms option, which means I take: A mathematical proofs course, a data structures course, a course on Computer Systems, either a programming languages course or an artificial intelligence course, and an Algorithms and Complexity course. Then I take some classes on linear, nonlinear, and discrete optimization or combinatorial theory.

They also have a scientific computing and numerical algorithms option. With this, the CS courses get traded for some Numerical Analysis math classes and 11 elective credits. This doesn't sound as exciting, but it still sounds pretty cool. Probably I'll see how the other stuff goes.

This next quarter I'm signed up for Math 310 and AMATH 353(And german and macroeconomics). The german and econ are for gen-ed requirements. Math 310 is a pre-req for math 327 which is a prereq for the 464 series math courses, as well as a major program requirement. I wouldn't take AMATH 353, except that Kutz is teaching it. It was never a dull one.

Now, why do I have a blog about all of this? I'd like to chronicle my endeavor into the world of mathematics. So we'll see how it all works out, I guess. Next up: talk to some advisors. (backposted from a really REALLY long time ago on Feb 8, 2009)