Queueing Theory

Finishing off an assignment for my Data Structures and Algorithms course and felt like posting a small snippit of my work.



The assignment is fairly straight forward, and once you've wrapped your head around the problem, everything pretty much falls into place.

Basically, the assignment is an exercise in Queueing Theory. In particular, it's a simulation of the length of the wait queue of a bank, given a certain number of tellers, the time it takes for a teller to service a customer, and the interarrival time of customers at the bank.

It's not due for another week, so I can't post any more code until it has been handed in. But I would like to explore this topic more in the future as it can be applied to a whole variety of simulations ( eg network traffic, etc. ).

Well, back to coding!

Programming Challenge

Looks like Sun has yet another programming challenge. I think that these are great, but I can't help but laugh a little because Sun is getting a bunch of students to write software for projects that ( I assume ) don't have enough interested engineers at Sun.

The prize ( a Ultra 20 Workstation ) is an apealing prize, but you mustn't have much on your plate if you're willing to pour enough time into a project that may be profitable.

Well, good luck to those who try this one!

Some time at the cabin

Katharine, Winnifred, Findley & I spent a few nights away at the cabin. I have a week away from classes and it was just the excuse that we needed to get away from everything and enjoy some time to ourselves.

Attached are some random pictures taken during the trip. One picture of a large "puddle" in the road is actually the result of a beaver dam overflowing a swamp over the road. We weren't able to get any good pictures of the beaver, but he didn't seem to care that our car was idling feet away from him while he worked.

Algebra

Working on a Linear Algebra assignment and needed a bit of a break..

I'm solving systems of linear equations, and thought that Maple might be helpful, but unfortunately it doesn't show its steps, so it's not the answer to my prayers that I was hoping for.

Well, I guess that after tonight I'll be able to say that I can balance chemical equations using Gauss-Jordan elimination.

Well, I should get back to the pencil & paper method. Perhaps some tea first...

A first

Just setup my first blog, so here's my first entry.

Nothing to say yet, so a couple of images will have to suffice.