Reinforcement Learning

Some really cool videos to learn AI and Reinforcement Learning.

Check out.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTmAYxRV7H9NTdgC9bNixvw

Installing Zipline on Ubuntu 14.04

As mentioned on their website Zipline is a Pythonic algorithmic trading library. It is an event-driven system that supports both backtesting and live-trading.
Zipline is currently used in production as the backtesting and live-trading engine powering Quantopian – a free, community-centered, hosted platform for building and executing trading strategies.


I found installing zipline pretty difficult to install because of its dependencies of older versions of libraries like numpy, scipy, numexpr etc.


These are the steps it took me to finally get going 

1. sudo apt-get install liblapack-dev
This ensures that your lapack/blas dependencies are taken care of which is required by scipy


2. sudo apt-get install libamd2.2.0 libblas3gf libc6 libgcc1 libgfortran3 liblapack3gf libumfpack5.4.0 libstdc++6 build-essential gfortran python-all-dev libatlas-base-dev
This would ensure that you now have a fortran compiler on your system for the dfftpack in scipy


3. sudo pip install zipline
This will finally install zipline along with all its dependencies


Have a go at it.

  

Layer 7 Switching + Load Balancing = Layer 7 Load Balancing

                                                                       Image Courtesy : devcentral.com
Oh this is amazing. Read about it today from http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2008/08/12/3529.aspx.
Nicely Explained indeed.

 Layer 7 load balancing implies that i can absolutely have customised servers with modified kernels and network configuration which are best at spitting out the data that they are supposed to like Static components (css/js/images/static html) or ASP/PHP(Web handlers/severs) or large blobs (Videos for instance) . All these will definitely have varied filesystem network needs, and Layer 7 load balancing allows to group these types and provide them effectively.

Debugging Kerberos Authentication

Have you guys ever had problems configuring/debugging Kerberos Authentication and scratched your heads and gone all wild figuring out - I did everything right. Why can I still not Sign IN???

Very recently i had got messed up in a similar situation till i came across this tool by Brian Murphy. The features this tool boasts of are

• Supports IIS 6.0 as well as IIS 7.0 (useKernelMode / useAppPoolCredentials)
• Allows adding backend servers of type UNC, HTTP, LDAP, OLAP, SQL, SSAS, and RDP
• Allows chaining of multiple hops (versus only a single backend)
• Performs duplicate SPN check against all trusted domains.
• /Set/SPNs.aspx - Allows adding and removing of ServicePrincipalNames
• /Set/Delegation.aspx - Allows changing Trust for Delegation settings.
• /Set/Providers.aspx - Allows correcting of inadequate NTAuthenticationProviders settings.
• /Report.aspx - Gives a picture of what is right and what is wrong.
• /Wizard.aspx - A set of wizard steps that supports adding more tiers to /Report.aspx.
• /Test.aspx - Allows double-hop tests for webServer-to-Sql or webServer-to-fileServer or webServer-to-webServer

You can find more about the tool at
http://blogs.iis.net/brian-murphy-booth/archive/2007/03/09/delegconfig-delegation-configuration-reporting-tool.aspx

It is also published on IIS.NET and can be downloaded at
http://www.iis.net/community/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1887

So free yourself of Kerberos authentication woes now!.

Accessing OData fom Windows Phone 7 - Latest Client Libraries do not have support for LINQ

I had been trying to get OData access to a source using Windows Phone 7 and repeatedly faced roadblocks while following a lot of examples on the web till i realised the difference between the CTP and the Latest production version between the OData client libraries.

A lot of the examples on the web to demonstrate the use of OData using Windows phone 7 target the CTP release of the OData client Libraries which had support for LINQ.

The same is detailed in the blog post by Chris Koenig at
http://chriskoenig.net/2010/10/30/odata-v2-and-windows-phone-7/

Additionally the WCF Data Services Team blog clearly states the major differences at
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astoriateam/archive/2010/10/28/data-services-client-for-win-phone-7-now-available.aspx

LINQ is not supported presently in the client libraries. Period. So beware of the examples out there which target the CTP version.

I have found out a neat sample which actually uses the newest version effectively and have tested it out. You would find it at.

http://phonetocloud.info/2011/03/03/introducing-the-odata-client-library-for-windows-phone-part-3/

Silverlight 5 Beta and WsHttpBinding

Silverlight 5 still supports only the basicHttpBinding and NetTcpBinding for your WCF services.
GO to the link below to find the differences between basicHttpBinding and wsHttpBinding.
http://www.codeproject.com/kb/WCF/httpbinding.aspx.

However the Silverlight 5 release is still in Beta and more may be expected in the final RTM. Let us keep our fingers crossed. There is a talk for support of WS Trust in this version although i havent tried it yet. Will update the post once i test it out completely.

Aptana Studio (Getting autocomplete to work with popular Javascript libraries)

I have been using Aptana Studio lately for my PHP projects. Created on Eclipse as the base, I actually found it pretty good to start with. It has support for other languages too such as Ruby and Python(Aptana RadRails and Aptana Pydev respectively) . Take a look at the great number of Javascript libraries that it supports as well (providing great autocomplete features).

I initially could not get Autocomplete support for Jquery after installing the add on. A little bit of digging in got it working. To enable it go to

Window->Preferences->Aptana(Right column)->Editors->Javascript->CodeAssist

You will see check boxes against all the JS libraries you have installed support for. By default they will be unselected. Check them and you are ready to GO!