I just heard about PolyMon this evening. It’s an open source system monitoring project. It can monitor servers, system logs, etc. Users can create custom monitors via PowerShell scripts. Sounds like its worth further investigation.
Monthly Archives: July 2008
Normal approximation errors for binomial and Poisson distributions
Textbooks say the normal approximation to the binomial distribution is good when “n is large.” How large is large enough? Some books say n ≥ 10. How good is it in that case? Hmm, it doesn’t say. The same holds…
Connecting probability and number theory
E. Kowalski has a post this morning called Finding life beyond the Central Limit Theorem. The post mentions a theorem I’ve never heard of that connects basic concepts in probability and number theory. Surely the Central Limit Theorem and the…
Try the simplest thing that could possibly work
Classroom exercises always have nice, tidy solutions. So students implicitly assume that all problems have nice, tidy solutions. If the solution isn’t working out simply, you must have made a mistake. Outside the classroom, applications seldom have simple solutions. So…
Hard to spend money
Jeff Atwood’s latest post asks whether money useless to open source projects. Four months after his donation of $5,000 to the ScrewTurn Wiki project, they haven’t cashed his check because they haven’t thought of a way to use the money even…
Posted in Business, Software development
Seven things that kill brain cells
My previous post listed seven things that cause new brain cells to grow, taken from a talk by Dean Ornish. Here’s the corresponding list from the same talk of things that decrease brain cells. Saturated fat Sugar Nicotine Opiates Cocaine…
Posted in Uncategorized
Seven things that cause new brain cells
Dr. Dean Ornish gave an inspiring three-minute talk at TED entitled Your genes are not your fate. As part of his talk he lists six things that cause new brain cells to grow: Exercise Chocolate Tea Blueberries Alcohol in moderation Stress…
Random inequalities III: numerical results
The first post in this series introduced random inequalities. The second post discussed random inequalities can could be computed in closed form. This post considers random inequalities that must be evaluated numerically. The simplest and most obvious approach to computing…
Random inequalities II: analytical results
My previous post introduced random inequalities and their application to Bayesian clinical trials. This post will discuss how to evaluate random inequalities analytically. The next post in the series will discuss numerical evaluation when analytical evaluation is not possible. For…
Random inequalities I: introduction
Many Bayesian clinical trial methods have at their core a random inequality. Some examples from M. D. Anderson: adaptive randomization, binary safety monitoring, time-to-event safety monitoring. These method depends critically on evaluating P(X > Y) where X and Y are…
Multiple string types: BSTR, wchar_t, etc.
This morning I listened to a podcast interview with Kate Gregory. She used some terms I hadn’t heard in years: BSTR, OLE strings, etc. Around a decade ago I was working with COM in C++ and had to deal with…
Including images in LaTeX files
Here are the rules for including images in LaTeX files as far as I can tell. Near the top of your document, use \usepackage{graphicx} to load the graphicx package. Then at the point where you want to include your image,…
LaTeX and PowerPoint presentations
I use LaTeX for math documents and PowerPoint for presentations. When I need to make a math presentation, I can’t have everything I want in one environment. I usually go with PowerPoint. Yesterday I tried the LaTeX Beamer package based…
New blog on reproducible research
Yesterday I added a blog to the ReproducibleResearch.org web site. You can visit the site here or subscribe via RSS. I’d like a couple people to join me in writing this blog, and I would greatly appreciate suggestions, guest posts, etc.…
Visualizing software development effort
Thomas Guest posted a great article today called Distorted Software that, among other things, points out the problem with software diagrams with big boxes and little arrows: Most of the work will go into making the connections work. In other words, the bulk…
