PHP/ir

Benfords Law is not an exciting new John Nettles based detective show, but an interesting observation about the distribution of the first digit in sets of numbers originating from various processes. It says, roughly, that in a big collection of data you should expect to see a number starting with 1 about 30% of the time, but starting with 9 only about 5% of the time. Precisely, the proportion for a given digit can be worked out as: Read More »

Once again, a complete lack of new content on this blog is marginally explained by conference activity. I recently spoke about different deployment options at the ThinkVitamin Code Management & Deployment online conference, if you're interested check the Deployment Tactics slides on slideshare. Read More »

Apologies for the lack of updates recently, but it has been a busy summer! October is looking interesting though, with a few conferences coming. Read More »

Monte Carlo simulations are a handy tool for looking at situations that have some aspect of uncertainty, by modelling them with a pseudo-random element and conducting a large number of trials. There isn’t a hard and fast Monte Carlo algorithm, but the process generally goes: start with a situation you wish to model, write a program to describe it that includes a random input, run that program many times, and look at the results. Read More »

Apologies for the quiet times on the site recently, but for a bit of slightly off-topic content, how about a book review! The book in question is Pakt’s Expert PHP 5 Tools by Dirk Merkel, which is a tour through a variety of processes and systems that the author suggests should be in use by any serious PHP developer. Each chapter covers a different tool, namely: Read More »