obscurus.org

I moved house to somewhere that has BT infinity. That sounds a bit like I didn’t it deliberately, I didn’t. Although, it was a contributing factor. It was finally installed today. Seems pretty good. I don’t know if its true that it it takes a week or so to ‘settle’ down to a stable speed but it does seem a little all over the place. First impressions are that the speed over the wireless network isn’t that impressive. I’m only getting around 10MB ish, up and down. Although the speed testing services didn’t seem to be very consistent. Plug the cable in and things get much quicker, to the point where it seems that the testing services can’t really keep up. I tried a more ‘real’ world test and got 3.5MB per second downloading Ubuntu from the mirrorservice.org.uk. So that suggests that my wireless devices can’t make a good enough connection to get the maximum speed.

Another real world test I tried was BBC iPlayer. In my old place this would constantly pause and need to rebuffer etc. Now I can click around in the play back position bar and the program starts straight away. This is the same regardless of whether I am using wireless or a cable. So where doesn’t that leave me. With a very good internet connections I guess. As long as it doesn’t ‘settle’ down to a speed that I could get without paying for Infinity its all good.

I subscribe to LoveFilm and I have to say was pretty disappointed when they switched from Flash to Silverlight. Mainly because I can no longer stream movies with Linux, but also because I have had problems with Silverlight before. I wasn’t surprised therefore that when they made the switch my media computer stopped streaming films. I tried all the normal stuff, turned off the firewall, added *.lovefilm.com to the trusted website in the control panel. Uninstalled, reinstalled. Tried different browsers, cleared browser cache. Everything. Nothing worked. I even contacted LoveFilm support who asked me to do all that again and then pretty much gave up.

I then noticed that it was only DRM content that wasn’t working! Annoying, as I should have spotted that before. So some more digging and I found that the DRM licenses used by MS software are stored in ”C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\PlayReady\mspr.hds”. So I renamed it. Bingo, DRM content including LoveFilm streaming now works! Doing this will mean you loose all existing DRM licenses, for me that wasn’t an issue as I didn’t have any. Frustrating! At least I can stream films now. Well, just need to encourage my ADSL modem to find enough bandwidth, it over heats poor thing and gets all slow and rubbish.

I am still collecting lots of data. Nearly all day every trading day programs download market data at 5min intervals (for the FTSE100/250/TechMark, the S&P500 and the NASDAQ). At least I am covering a really interesting period of financial history. Even if I haven’t had any time to do anything with the data yet.

The flip side to that is that this is such an unusual period that techniques learn’t using this data might not be generally applicable. A friend that works for a systematic hedge fund told me that their models have changed completely since the crash of 2008. No way of knowing unless I actually get round to doing something with the data.