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Introduction to Artificial Intelligence - Microsoft - DAT263x on edX

Recently, my company encouraged us to learn more about Azure ML Studio.  A little Googling led me to a course on edx.org offered by Microsoft called Introduction to Artificial Intelligence .  While it was at least 50% advertisement for some of Microsoft's cloud-based AI offerings, it was definitely worth the 10 or so hours I put into it over the last 24 hours. This was a fairly high-level course that discussed aspects of statistical techniques like regression, categorization and clustering, as well as more advanced concepts including artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP), and chatbots.  Overall, what I learned wasn't so much about these topics, but how much Microsoft's ML Studio has to offer in the way of getting you up and running quickly and easily with these technologies. Having said that, it's Microsoft, and there were several things that didn't work as they should have, as I expected.  Full disclosure:  I'm an AWS certified ...
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Boston Housing Dataset Missing From UC Irvine's Site

I'm putting together a series of blog posts on Python for R programmers, and I figured I'd use the Boston dataset of Boston housing prices.  It's a pretty well-known dataset for regression, and it's included in R in the MASS package and in Python in sklearn.datasets .  I know the data originally came from UCI, so I wanted to give credit where credit was due. When I clicked the first few Google links that appeared, I got this message on the UCI site: I'm sorry, the dataset "housing" does not appear to exist. Weird that they're not linked at all, but I found these links. Here's the link to the dataset in their archive. Here's the link to the data dictionary. Enjoy!
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“Cannot generate SSPI context” error message - SQL Server connectivity issue

We were doing a ton of stuff to a named instance of SQL Server at my office yesterday, our QA SQL server to be exact, which sits on the same hardware as our development server. We didn't really do anything to our development (default) instance, other than reboot both nodes of the cluster about six times. Granted, this is going to cause some issues with connectivity, but as there are only two other developers, we were able to keep busy with other projects during the multiple failovers. For some crazy reason, after I left last night, one of my developers couldn't connect to SQL Server anymore. I put a screenshot up from an application she's developing that connects Access 2007 to SQL 2005 (don't worry, this is a very small application connecting to a database with a very small user base). I tried running NET TIME on her machine and on the node of the cluster that had ownership of SQL, but that didn't work. I couldn't imagine that the time was different between...
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Cherry Ale - Plan B

So when I went to get the cherries for my Black Cherry Ale, I noticed that they were a little more per pound than I'd expected. I also noticed that there weren't as many pristine pounds as I'd hoped. Some were a bit wrinkly, some looked a little beyond prime, and some had mold growing on them. Yuck. So I headed to the Ballast Point Brewery's home brew store , and stood in line. After only a few minutes, one of the guys behind the counter recognized me as a brewer, and not just an avid fan of micro brews, and pulled me out of line. I explained my plight, and that I was looking to totally change my beer plan. He pointed me towards some cherry puree, and I figured I'd go ahead as planned. They were out of the UK Progress hops, so we went with Bramlings Cross hops, a similar type of hop in that they're from the UK and have a relatively low alpha acid rating (6% i think for this batch). Also, the guy who gave me the recipe for my light German ale that everyone...
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Black Cherry Ale Recipe

I've been brewing my own beer on and off for over 15 years now. I took a break after my friend Jeff moved to Japan and I replaced homebrewing with marathon training as my main hobby. At this point, I'd had a hand in brewing about 12 different types of beer. This was my favorite. This is a recipe for a beer I did towards the middle of my original stint as an avid homebrewer. I've just brewed my first batch in many, many years, and it turned out very well. But now, it's time to go back to a classic. This stood out back then as the best beer I'd ever made. I'm excited to see how it will turn out this time. Name of Beer : Black Cherry Ale Original Date of Brewing : 1995-06-17 Volume of Beer : 5 gallons Ingredients 8 lbs pale malt syrup 2 oz. u.k. progress hops (5.9 aa) 4 lbs black (Bing) cherries 2.3 ml readily pitchable California Ale Yeast Details Boiled water, added malt, added malt, added 1 1/2 oz. U.K. Progress Hops after returning mixture to boil Nothing...
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Google Sidebar launches non-default Web browser in Vista

I finally tried out Google Desktop, including Google Sidebar, on my laptop running Vista. I really love it, especially the fact that I can tell it to Big Brother me and tailor content based on my Web surfing (and program use, possibly). The one pain I found is that, even though FireFox is my default browser, it always launches links in IE. Apparently, it's a known issue and Google's planning to fix it in the next release. http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Desktop_How-do-I/browse_thread/thread/96ff7be4fa9f38e6/b4ff327f534b047e
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