(the Last) StockFighter

If you are making a game about programming, it seems to me that you should make it as accessible as possible. This is not a rant. I know next to nothing about programming and if someone introduces me to a new tool I don't reject it out of hand. However the very first level introduces me to the StockFighter API with this text:

Shell

# Let's try something different this time.  Sure, you could interact with the API
# in an actual programming language, but let me introduce you to httpie, a very
# cool tool.

# httpie is like curl, except much nicer to use.  See: https://github.com/jkbrzt/httpie

# You can install it via: 
# brew install httpie
# apt-get install httpie
# yum install httpie

# We'll start by creating a file representing our JSON request, like:

$ nano /tmp/order.json

# Copy/paste in:

{
  "account": "MST92145671",
  "venue": "LOBHEX",
  "stock": "LPEI",
  "qty": 100,
  "direction": "buy",
  "orderType": "market" 
}

# Got that ready?  Great, here's httpie magic:

$ http POST https://api.stockfighter.io/ob/api/venues/LOBHEX/stocks/LPEI/orders 'X-Starfighter-Authorization:copy-and-paste-your-API-key-here' < /tmp/order.json

# Now isn't that so much nicer than curl?
# No unnecessary headers (the Accept: application/json is implict.)
# You can inspect the requests quickly, with syntax highlighting.

# This is frequently useful when you're exploring a novel API.  Try it out!
# Most developers, after they get a handle on the endpoints, will want to
# write a more robust program in their language of choice, but httpie is
# a good choice for interactive programming when you want to figure out
# exactly what is happening when e.g. a library isn't working as expected.

 

Cool Right? I just put together a new virtual machine and got this blog software working. Now I want to try this API thingy so lets Fire up that httpie and see what happens!

[root@sl7-vm ~]# yum install httpie
Loaded plugins: langpacks
No package httpie available.
Error: Nothing to do

So I'm not easily dissuaded. I check out the web site here.

It says you can use something called "pip" if your favorite yum repo doesn't happen to have hippie in it. Let's try that:

[root@sl7-vm ~]# pip
-bash: pip: command not found

Hummm....

[root@sl7-vm ~]# easy_install pip
Searching for pip
Reading https://pypi.python.org/simple/pip/
Best match: pip 7.1.2
Downloading https://pypi.python.org/packages/source/p/pip/pip-7.1.2.tar.gz#md5=3823d2343d9f3aaab21cf9c917710196
Processing pip-7.1.2.tar.gz
Writing /tmp/easy_install-jC2noC/pip-7.1.2/setup.cfg
Running pip-7.1.2/setup.py -q bdist_egg --dist-dir /tmp/easy_install-jC2noC/pip-7.1.2/egg-dist-tmp-tBPFxY
warning: no previously-included files found matching '.coveragerc'
warning: no previously-included files found matching '.mailmap'
warning: no previously-included files found matching '.travis.yml'
warning: no previously-included files found matching 'pip/_vendor/Makefile'
warning: no previously-included files found matching 'tox.ini'
warning: no previously-included files found matching 'dev-requirements.txt'
no previously-included directories found matching '.travis'
no previously-included directories found matching 'docs/_build'
no previously-included directories found matching 'contrib'
no previously-included directories found matching 'tasks'
no previously-included directories found matching 'tests'
Adding pip 7.1.2 to easy-install.pth file
Installing pip script to /usr/bin
Installing pip2.7 script to /usr/bin
Installing pip2 script to /usr/bin

Installed /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip-7.1.2-py2.7.egg
Processing dependencies for pip
Finished processing dependencies for pip


[root@sl7-vm ~]# pip install --upgrade pip setuptools
/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip-7.1.2-py2.7.egg/pip/_vendor/requests/packages/urllib3/util/ssl_.py:90: InsecurePlatformWarning: A true SSLContext object is not available. This prevents urllib3 from configuring SSL appropriately and may cause certain SSL connections to fail. For more information, see https://urllib3.readthedocs.org/en/latest/security.html#insecureplatformwarning.
InsecurePlatformWarning
Requirement already up-to-date: pip in /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip-7.1.2-py2.7.egg
Collecting setuptools
Downloading setuptools-19.1.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl (463kB)
100% |████████████████████████████████| 466kB 330kB/s
Installing collected packages: setuptools
Found existing installation: setuptools 0.9.8
Uninstalling setuptools-0.9.8:
Successfully uninstalled setuptools-0.9.8
Successfully installed setuptools-19.1.1
/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip-7.1.2-py2.7.egg/pip/_vendor/requests/packages/urllib3/util/ssl_.py:90: InsecurePlatformWarning: A true SSLContext object is not available. This prevents urllib3 from configuring SSL appropriately and may cause certain SSL connections to fail. For more information, see https://urllib3.readthedocs.org/en/latest/security.html#insecureplatformwarning.
InsecurePlatformWarning


[root@sl7-vm ~]# pip install --upgrade httpie
Collecting httpie
/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip-7.1.2-py2.7.egg/pip/_vendor/requests/packages/urllib3/util/ssl_.py:90: InsecurePlatformWarning: A true SSLContext object is not available. This prevents urllib3 from configuring SSL appropriately and may cause certain SSL connections to fail. For more information, see https://urllib3.readthedocs.org/en/latest/security.html#insecureplatformwarning.
InsecurePlatformWarning
Downloading httpie-0.9.2-py2.py3-none-any.whl (66kB)
100% |████████████████████████████████| 69kB 556kB/s
Collecting requests>=2.3.0 (from httpie)
Downloading requests-2.9.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl (500kB)
100% |████████████████████████████████| 503kB 235kB/s
Collecting Pygments>=1.5 (from httpie)
Downloading Pygments-2.0.2-py2-none-any.whl (672kB)
100% |████████████████████████████████| 675kB 464kB/s
Installing collected packages: requests, Pygments, httpie
Successfully installed Pygments-2.0.2 httpie-0.9.2 requests-2.9.0
[root@sl7-vm ~]#

So what happened there? It looks to me like I just installed a package outside of the rpm database. In general I try to avoid doing that. It can lead to a situation known as "Dependency Hell". This was why the yum system was introduced. The intention was to avoid having to install packages from source. You will note that the pip package and the httpie package spray files all over the place. In addition this new POS ( Piece of Software) has introduced a security vulnerability into my relatively clean box. It is a pretty minor one, but it is not simple to fix. I am running Scientific Linux, a RedHat derivative. This is important because RedHat uses python for all of it's system software. Leaving aside for the moment advisability of writing crucial system software in an interpreted language, lets look at this security issue . The message I get when I try to install httpie says this:

InsecurePlatformWarning: A true SSLContext object is not available. This prevents urllib3 from configuring SSL appropriately and may cause certain SSL connections to fail. For more information, see https://urllib3.readthedocs.org/en/latest/security.html#insecureplatformwarning.

The linked page tells me that my version of python needs a tweak (or three) to handle HTTPS requests. The recommended fix is to "upgrade" python to version 2.7.9 ( am running Python 2.7.5 ). I downloaded this OS today. It still has that new car smell. I will not "upgrade" python.

Long story short, This is a crappy tool. Why didn't you show an example using the tools that come with the OS? In my case that includes wget, cURL and ... what else? elinks maybe? There is another example on the page that uses ruby. I will write about that next time.

-StarFighter

This is my blog about the StockFighter on-line programming challenge. Stockfighter is an online programming "game" that requires you to write an automated trading system ( or several of them ).  This will be a difficult assignment, so I am writing this blog to serve as a quick reference and to motivate myself to complete the challenge.  The blog will almost certainly contain spoilers so don't read it if you want to find the answers yourself.  My technique will evolve as I go along so I don't know what language I will write in or what systems I will use.  The only thing I am sure of is that I do not wish to use any hints or assistance.  I have almost no experience in programming or stock markets so this will be a real education.  I expect that it will take me a long time to finish.  I hope that I will not be the last one to finish the challenge, but if I am the last one, then I will become "The Last StarFighter" ;-)