R and some other bullshit.

I can’t believe it that I get to use stats on the job. (Note to NinjaRat… This is what you use probability bullshit for! Businesses use it. The government uses it. The military uses it. Our modern world runs on (some of) this shit, …sort of…)

The problem is I have a lot of data related to performance of a website, and they just let me do whatever to try to figure it out, which is pretty cool.

After reading about R on slashdot I decided that it sounded like just the thing I needed to save myself from certain doom. ANd more joyous is that fact that there is this kickass Python binding for it, called rpy2. It kicks ass. I can do stuff all kinds of tests for less than 100 lines of code (I can probably compress even that by leveraging Python’s functional features, more so than what I’m doing now). This is not exactly correct, since I evaluated R a long, long time ago during some school bullshit. Hahahahaha.

As of now I’m thinking about doing some PCA too see for some observations and rank “relevance” of other factors which affects it. For my situation, I know for a fact that the observations depend on these factors!
At least that’s what I’m assuming. Need to think more about this though.

I also want “try” to use statistical process control. Don’t know exactly how that may work tho, yet.

Django blurb:

Task: Need to make a little web-app for a relative of mine who runs a small business.

So I’ve decied to go with Django. Why? Of course I wanted to use SEAM, not because of some Java SEAM (and to a certain extent, JBoss) fetish, but mainly because this is what I have been using, thus I don’t want to abandon it. But, I’m using a shared host that is mainly Apache (no mod_python) based, that is, it’s not a J2EE application server. So can’t use SEAM there. However, it does have python support (I’m going to use FastCGI)… So I’m saved! Yeah.

I’ve been doing the DJango tutorial, so far it kicks ass. Everything is just so succinct, it’s beautiful man. Python is a work of art, imho! Doing web work with Python will be a blast!

One of the biggest thing that SEAM touts is the so called stateful-web-application (which I’m not going to get into right now), the SEAM stateful framework is one of the major features that supposely makes it stand out. I do not have much experience with various web-app frameworks, so I can’t tell you whether that is true or not. However, I will blog about experiences with Django and will try to make a comparison against SEAM. In the sense of ease of use, features, etc. (Definitely not going to go near the scalability question).  Of course I’m probably comparing apples with oranges… And I only have intermediate knowledge of SEAM, and web development in general. Since this is my blog, I will just blog it, I don’t care whether it makes sense, is right, or whatever. *Shrugs*