« July 2008 | Main | November 2008 »

August 2, 2008

How to Deal with Those People

"The best response to 'Have a nice day,' I think, is the one devised by a British friend of mine. He says: 'Thank you, but I have other plans.' "

- Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System

Posted by Dean at 2:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 1, 2008

Occupational Hazards of Simulation

As some of you may know, I work with wireless network simulations. Simulation is a tricky thing. You're putting together a system with a group of assumptions that you claim tell you something about what would happen in real life. Mostly, I think I get things right. However, when it comes to taking data, the simulation I built that seems to work pretty quickly is no longer as efficient as I thought.

Say you run a simulation, and it takes 60 seconds to complete. That sounds great! But to get some valid data, you want to run it 10 times and take the average of the results, so that will take 10 minutes. But then you want to run that simulation for several parameters, like 6 different data rates, so now that simulation will take an hour. And then you want to run that simulation at 6 different data rates with 5 different different protocol options. Now that really fast simulation that took 60 seconds to complete takes 5 hours to give you a decent amount of data.

And that's assuming that it runs correctly and that you got all the data you wanted the first time.

Posted by Dean at 12:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack