Links

A quick and temporary note about a couple of links that I’ve just found:

Update

I’ve just popped this note to the top of the stack again to mention a useful article from Craig Shallahamer on “Important Statistical Distributions”. Every DBA and developer should read it – as an introduction to the patterns you find in real-world data it’s short and sweet; it’s also very important. I often see test data which is “the wrong kind of random”: nearly everyone thinks a uniform distribution is okay for testing their systems when lots of data sets exhibit “normal”, “log normal” or “poisson” distributions – and it makes a huge difference to the validity of performance tests if you get it wrong.

Update 2

Richard Feynmann is one of my “heroes” – so I had to pop this post to the top of the stack when I found this online archive video of him talking about Quantum Electrodynamics for the Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures at the University of Auckland some years ago.