Category: Technology

PriceThinker.com first version launched!

My first weekend .com startup initiative has launched. It has taken exactly 2 weekends to hack up this site. See logo

pricethinker100x100

 

Pricethinker is a very useful machine learning application that can predict prices based on numeric features data. For example if one is out shopping, and looking at many similar products, it is hard to figure out the best value product i.e. which gives most features to the price. This tool helps you do complicated price analysis.

A simple example is house price prediction based on 1 feature, say square feet. Which one of the following is the best value? What should be the price of 2000 sq feet be? Pricethinker is exactly the tool to help you. Imagine how complicated it becomes if you also put bathrooms, garage etc into the equation. Its much easier for PriceThinker to do the number crunching for you.

Sq Ft – Price
—————-
2200 – 340000
2100 – 310000
1900 – 260000
2500 – 370000

Pricethinker will tell you that the home with 1900 sq ft is the best value. And a home with 2000 sq ft should cost 288459. The power of machine learning is at your service with simplicity and beautifully!

Putty ssh seession timeouts to qucikly on windows fix

Update the Windows Registry to create or change the TcpMaxDataRetransmissions

The problem of PuTTY or other SSH connections timing out too quickly when network connectivity is briefly lost is Windows problem and not an internal PuTTY problem. You can tweak the Windows Registry settings to try and change or address this issue.

For Windows NT, 2000, XP – the registry key to create or change is:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parmeters\TcpMaxDataRetransmissions

It must be of type DWORD. See Microsoft Knowledge Base articles 120642 and 314053 for more information. Set the key’s value to something like 10. This will cause Windows to try harder to keep connections alive instead of abandoning them.

pricethinker.com domain registerd.

Will be moving over my test app from google apps host to here. Cannot live without mysql db. This is my weekend .com startup initiative. This is a AI application which will allow users to compare prices based on quantitative features. The application will be able to predict prices given training data. Also it will identify the best value item from a group. Hopefully plan to release the first fully functional version by end of this year!

Google Web App or Other Low Cost Hosting Service?

I am evaluating if one were to deploy a “weekend” .com project which would be a better choice between google app infrastructure vs regular isp e.g. http://www.ultrawebhosting.com.

Pros of Google Web App
1) Free for certain bandwidth/ disk usage.
2) Integrated dev enviornment with gwt and google apps framework. Integration with eclipse development platform.
3) Scalable/reliable architecture that google uses.
4) Can use gmail based autentication in applications.

Cons
1) No normalized database. JDO based custom database. The query interface is webbased.
2) No support for PHP. Many tools are built on php/mysql platform, that i can get access to on regular hosting service.
3) JVM has restrictions e.g. no multithreaded code, beside the servlet threading itself.
4) Very rigid work flow for application development/deployment. Its both good and bad. Lesser choices are sometime good.

Created my first GWT and Google App

Developing web application and deploying it on google apps was a breeze, (no fighting with javascript). Very developer friendly infrastructure. I started going through the google gwt tutorial at 1 pm today. At this time i have already tested an deployed my very first google apple called stock watcher.

GWT allows developer to code the widgets in plain java. Then the code is compiled into javascript for various browsers. GWT is a cool and easy way of developing ajax enabled applications.

Programming Collective Intelligence Review

I have been reading Programming Collective Intelligence on my daily travel to NY. This is a gem of a book. It covers many topics in machine learning, that can be applied to projects. All with practical examples and code in python. i had no idea that current machine learning algorithm were any useful. But this book puts so much of AI jargon in to practical use. A typical AI book will confuse the heck with the maths proofs and statistics. But this book is pure practical with jucy examples one can easily understand and put to use! Many hip words in AI made some sense to me after reading this book. e.g. Genetic Programming, Genetic Algorithm (yes they are different), baysian classifiers, hiearchical clustering, k-means clustering, optimization, anealing, hill climbing, decision trees, support vector machines.

Some practical algorithms with code and examples covered.
a) Making Recommendations for movies (e.g. similar to Netflix movie recommendation, or matchmaking ).
b) Writing a search engine, and search results.
c) Optimization algorithms. (optimization is finding a good enough solution when the optimal solution is expensive to find).
d) Document Filtring, e.g. Spam Filter
e) Discovering Groups in a large set of data / Clustering
f) Building Price Models e.g. determining the price of a home given a large data with features.
g) Evloving Intelligence. Genertic Programming.

On Intelligence Review

So I have finally finished reading On Intelligence/ Mostly read it on my commute to NY on bus.

i think the book could have been written in less than 100 or maybe 50 pages. Filled with the authors personal views about intelligence. Also is full of analogies, pages and pages of analogies. The gist of the book is that knowledge in our brain is stored in hiearchies, and the brain is always making predictions e.g. when you are listening to a song the next note is already predicted by your brain, and the brain does that for everything we do.

I thought the book revealed nothing new. Tree is a universal data structure (hiearchical), and CS people already know about that, but have not discovered true AI. Nor the prediction is a new thing, programming language compilers are impplicitly doing the same thing, i.e. looking for the next expected token, i.e. if not found throw a compiler error.

So it was interesting to know that the neo cortex behaves in a certain fashion (at place the author was filling the knowledge gaps of the brain by his own assumptions e.g. this part of the brain may possibly work like this), but the book is not any breakthrough. I.e. you cannot write an intelligent program after reading this book. It will only give you inspiration to dig in deeper.

Alice Story Telling

A few years ago i came accross this wonderful cartoon/animation building software called Alice. This is a very innovative software to learn concepts of object programming. I wanted to teach my daughter Sabah, but she was only 4 at that time. Now she is 6 and is able to read. So installed the Alice Story telling application. She was amazingly quick to go through the 3 built in tutorials. I am working with her to learn it more and be able to make simple stories in it. This software was developed by the late CMU professor Randy Paush. See this inspirational video called “The Last Lecture”.

Moved Over Geocities Website

I moved the geocities website navacrony and seminavacron to my hosting site. Navacrony and SemiNavacron. It was very difficult downloading each file individually. I used the wget to download the mirror of the site.

e.g.
wget –mirror –w 2 –p –HTML-extension –-convert-links –P c:\wget_files\example1 http://www.yourdomain.com

wget is a unix tool. It can also be downloaded with cygwin for windows.