"G.W. Haywood" wrote:
>
> Hi there,
>
> On Fri, 27 Oct 2000, Christopher L. Everett wrote:
>
> <snipped helpful advice>
>
> > I need to prove to myself and my marketing guy that my script has
> > certain statistical properties, not the least of which is the
> > question of whether my activity logs match what actually happened.
>
> You've been spending too much time with your marketing guy. "Certain
> statistical properties" is gobbledygook. What properties? Activity
> logs don't match statistically. Either they match or they don't. If
> they don't then either the logging is turned off or it isn't working.
>
OK, I confess: I've written (probably yet another) mod_perl banner
exchange. I need to know that when we serve 100K banners to 40K
different IP addresses a day, and we are selling 30K banners/day,
the 500 sites that hosted our banner ads are getting the 50K banners
that we promised them, and the 30K banners that we sold, we really did
serve. Also, I want to know that the banners my logs say the script
sent are really the ones people saw on their browsers. That's what I
meant by "certain statistical properties".
So, I apologize for not describing my problem clearly in the first
place. And again, my questions are: How would I go about proving to
myself that my script does what I designed it to do? Has anyone else
dealt with a similar problem, and how did they go about doing it? If
I solve it for myself, would anyone else find the solution useful, and
how would I make it more useful to them?
Usually, I would test by running through the script a few times with
some variations, but we are so freaked out by our experience with the
2 other banner exchange scripts we tried, we find a lot of value in
being certain.
Thanks again for your kind help.
--Christopher Everett
