May 9, 2008

Cython

After I had finally convinced myself to get out of bed this morning to go to my ACMS seminar, I quickly checked my email and my heart sank a little. Today’s talk was on SAGE. Don’t have anything against SAGE, but I thought it was just a big pile of open source packages in a big, heavy install. Sorta cool, but worthless, in other words. Turns out, I was pretty wrong about that.

March 12, 2008

Vertigo

No, not that dizzy, spinning sensation. The Firefox extension. Someone finally caught on to the fact that on a lot of modern computers, we have a lot more horizontal space than vertical. Whoever it was, they must have also been miffed that they never seemed to have room for all of their firefox tabs. So, they made a vertical tab menu, which is actually pretty cool. The standard stuff (ctrl-tab) still works, which is convenient.

December 28, 2007

Python Playing

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.

June 30, 2007

Acronis TrueImage

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 mounting/umounting/fscking that it currently does. I think I’ll probably end up putting a wrapper script around it…. but we’ll see.

June 30, 2007

MRTG

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.

June 30, 2007

Cacti

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.

June 29, 2007

RRDTool

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.

June 29, 2007

Subversion Bite-sized Projects

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

June 29, 2007

Introducing... me

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.

March 3, 2007

Where I'm At

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.