Penguin

Linux-vs-Windows

My Thoughts, Unpolished Gems, ,

The greatest gift of all to mankind is the friendship and understanding that which we have cultivated with each other and in cooperation.

Nice site Tim. A little backstory on how I found myself here. I found your site while looking up Phillip S. Callahan after reading about him in Dan Barber’s Book, The Third Plate. You have some interesting info on him as well as what I have seen so far on calendar discrepancies.Clocks, calendars, precision timekeeping are other interests of mine and I enjoyed those posts. After that I checked out your categories and that led me here to this post.

I will be speaking from personal experience with what I have experienced on my machines and others that I have worked on. There is a bit of a chronology to this as well.
Back when Windows started, I was a late adopter. I stayed in the command line, the DOS world, until Windows 95. It was out when I was in college and I briefly had Win3.1 until I could install 95 on the machine I had at that point. At the same time I was using the universities computers, a bank of Win95 PCs was located in a convenient computer lab. The Internet was really coming on hard and fast, so the inevitable occurred, the room was packed to the gills with students and there was a waiting line most of the time. But, there was another computer lab mostly for computer science majors, full of Sun Sparcs running UNIX, barely used at all. The room was cooler and quieter too, a bonus. This was when I got a feel for what a non Microsoft OS could be like. I would up learning it enough to use it with fair competency, a struggle at time to remember how to do something at times, but worth the effort to stick with it as it ran so smooth. I wondered if there was anything like this that I could load on a PC. A few years went by and I started to do this with Linux.
The first few machines I used Linux on were set up with dual boot. Red Hat/W98 and later Ubuntu/XP combos on two separate machines, one after the other in time. Setting up Red hat was a pain at the time and not for anyone that is not “good” with computers. Ubuntu was easy to set up, almost as easy as setting up Windows. But, it was much easy to work with than the earlier Red Hat 9.0 and that was the key. It was easy enough for my non-technical minded spouse to use, she was not lost in it in other words and could actually could use it without a lot of questions or frustration. On top of that the performance of both machines was hands down better with Linux. Things like time from a cold boot to the time you could click and open a program were faster. More programs could be run simultaneously without bogging the machine down. Moving around on the screen and opening files went faster as well. On Linux there was minimal weird behavior and very infrequent total lockups, requiring a reboot. There was no degradation either. What I mean is that it seems after having a Windows install running on a machine for years and then loading programs on it one after the other over time, it seems to get more unstable and flaky over time to the point that a fresh install is needed. This has gotten better at least with Win 8, I have noticed. On a machine that I had after the XP/Ubuntu, one was to be the last Windows machine. A Xeon machine (XP/Lubuntu) that had 1GB RAM, it was expensive RDRAM and I chose to ride it out a while as is, Linux seemed to run a bit better with less memory. In other words it would take longer to hit the out of RAM wall and start to swap to the drive and when it did it was less aggressive and didn’t do a lockup for a long time like it did while running XP. A lockup meaning the time you have to just wait for the machine to start responding again as the disk just grinds. As I said, this was the final Windows machine for me, with expensive memory, it paid to toss the PC and get a newer used machine for the same amount of money as an upgrade. This is the machine that I am on now, 6 years old and running Mint XFCE. Right now I am actually composing this while on it running Slackware in a Virtual Box, to test it out a bit. She, my spouse, has basically the same machine, same age, same CPU, with Windows 7 ( after a brief try at Windows 10, which was short as the performance was sub-par, plus the fact that when it did updates it “inhaled” 100% of the bandwidth on my connection for long time periods was frustrating), the speed difference is quite noticeable between the two machines, Win7 vs Mint XFCE. On a cold start with Mint, I can click and open something like Firefox or Word Processor, as soon as the network card is recognized, about 9 seconds after boot. The Win 7 machine takes at least 3-4 times longer. It also performs much more sluggishly overall when it finally “arrives” after a few minutes. My estimate of the speed at which I can maneuver on the Win 7 machine is along the lines of equivalence to when I tried Ubuntu on a Pentium 4 machine, single core, circa 2004, so 14 years old. One final comparison. I had a neighbor with a new machine, a budget one, but new, with Windows 10 and it still moved a lot slower than the 6 year old machine that I have with Mint.

The difference in performance is just what I have experienced and motivated me to move to Linux 100%. Not to mention the stability as well, less odd behavior and virus and malware issues are bonuses. Linux has come of age, it once was a tool that was too technical for the common user but, at this point most people could get up to speed with it fairly quickly. A little learning upfront is an investment that will save time in the long run with all of the spare seconds saved over waiting for Windows to respond to human inputs.
Microsoft has had a few hits, XP and 7 come to mind, but the product seems to go off the rails badly almost every other release, Vista and 8 come to mind. I wonder why 9 was skipped, maybe it was going in the wrong direction early on and that was realized in house before launch, I don’t know the history with that.

To all the readers, happy computing to all, with whatever OS you run,
Erick

Random AI Picture

Windows Death Cross Malaga Bay

Unpolished Gems, ,

Imagination is the power to make a difference in yourself.

My comments on Windows -vs- Linux from Malaga Bay. https://malagabay.wordpress.com/

I thought this was worth a repost here. I came across the Malaga Bay site.
while doing some research on Philip S. Callahan. A very interesting fellow who studied among other things “why is it that crops which are grown on healthy soils never attract diseases and insects.”
https://malagabay.wordpress.com/2016/03/07/philip-callahan-paramagnetism/

https://malagabay.wordpress.com/?s=Philip+S.+Callahan

Microsoft has had a few OK releases in my opinion, Windows XP and 7 come to mind, the rest seem like they have been wrong turns or at least not fully baked in the oven of development and testing….
https://malagabay.wordpress.com/2016/12/30/windows-death-cross/comment-page-1/#comment-14768

Apple Notepad

Termbin

Info Links, Linux, Unpolished Gems, , , ,

I’d like to make sure everybody is at home when they are on vacation.

http://termbin.com/
An easy to use Pastebin like tool that allows “pasting” from the command line.

Requires that netcat is installed on the PC, which is by default on Linux and can be installed on a Windows computer as well.

.bashrc

I recommended adding an alias to your .bashrc in Linux to make a shorthand to post to termbin…

alias tb='nc termbin.com 9999'

 

Posts stay active for a month as an example I posted the link to this post online via termbin.

Privatebin

Other Bins that are install-able
https://privatebin.net/
https://github.com/PrivateBin/PrivateBin/wiki/Installation

How to Setup A Hastebin Server

http://sergiogervacio.com/host-hastebin-server/

 

termbin.com is powered by Fiche – open source command line pastebin server. There is a link to github repository: https://github.com/solusipse/fiche.

LeelaZero Go Game Analysis

Go, , , ,

You need to think beyond yourself. You know how to look, how to act, how to eat, how to live. And you have to know that it’s the soul in you, not the external world in you.

 

Go is famous for it’s games between masters and now it seems like machine learning is a new master after playing Lee Sedol in 2016. One of the most famous games is covered in the book by Yasunari Kawabata, “The Master of Go”, it is the historic 1938 match between the reigning master, Honinbo Shusai and Kitani Minoru, referred to as The Meijin’s Retirement Game. The SGF of the game is available for downloading.

LeelaZero Analysis

LeelaZero can even analyze a previously saved game that was stored in the SGF format. Opening the file in an editor we can see some details in the header of the SGF file, italics are my notes, not in the file…

PB[Kitani Minoru]  Player Black
PW[Honinbo Shusai] Player White
BR[7p] Black Rank 7p, 7 Professional Dan
WR[9p] White Rank 9p, 9 Professional Dan
RE[B+5] Black Wins By 5 Points
EV[The Meijin’s Retirement Game]
PC[Koyokan, Tokyo (2 sessions), Naraya, Hakone (8 sessions), Dankoen, Ito (5 sessions)]
SO[Yasunari Kawabata, “The Master of Go”;

Below is an analysis of the famous Honinbo Shusai and Kitani Minoru game at move 52, not looking good for black as can be seen from the descending green line on the left.

The Meijin's Retirement Game 52
The Meijin’s Retirement Game, Move 52
Penguin

Pastepile

Linux, Unpolished Gems, Web Hosting, , , , , , , , ,

Future development depends on the determination of future generations to contribute towards building their own society.

Pastepile is a fork of guestbook.cgi – a simple guestbook script, written by John Callender in 1999. It is the last part of his Beginner’s Guide to CGI Scripting with Perl, Running a Guestbook.
This new version, a.k.a Pastepile, is a dirt simple Perl CGI program that creates a blog like pasting tool to be able to paste notes online or on a local server. Allows grabbing snippets of text or code for later use on whether on the local machine or another on the network. I made it sometime after studying John Callender’s tutorial when I was digging into learning about CGI and Perl several years ago.

History

Pastepile originated as a way to paste snippets of code and write short notes on configuration changes that I make on servers, including a Raspberry Pi that I run. The only requirement is the installation of a web server such as Apache. This little Pastepile tool made it easy to keep track of information related to the servers in one place  and search-able via a browser. After using it in the is mode for a while, I cloned it and started to use it as a general place to paste info and write short notes. This makes it easy to save something while on one machine on the network and be able to retrieve it later on that machine or another.

Example of What it Looks Like

Subject: Running a form-to-email gateway at 19:04:44, Sat Feb 3, 2018 from 192.168.1.7

http://www.resoo.org/docs/perl/begperl/form_to_email.html

Subject: Slackware Linux Essentials at 12:10:03, Thu Feb 1, 2018 from 192.168.1.179

www.slackbook.org/html/index.html

Additions:Remote Address,Time,Reversed Order

Besides stripping down guestbook.cgi to remove code specifc to it’s guestbook function and cleaning up the code to reflect it’s new use, three functional code changes were made. One is to add a timestamp to keep track of when the entry was created. Another change made was showing the IP of the machine the post originates from by reading the environment variable $REMOTE_ADDR to keep track of where the post originates from. Many machines on my network have static IP’s so this is handy for me at least. The final change was to reverse the order of the listing. In guestbook.cgi a First In On Top ordering is the layout of the guestbook posts. For Pastepile I reversed it so the most recent and not the oldest post is on top of the list, Last In On Top ordering. This made sense as the most recently written notes are more likely to be important and I want those to be close to the top of the pile and let the file get long with the aging information at the bottom.

/p/

For ease of access via a shorter link a simple index.html redirector page was place in /var/www/p/, following a 4chan-esqe style of folder naming and a nice short link to get to the pastepile.cgi script, which lives in the /usr/lib/cgi-bin/ directory. The /p/ directory also holds the pastepile.html file that is created by pastepile.cgi as it’s data page.

 Redirector Example for /var/www/p/index.html

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url='http://192.168.1.17/cgi-bin/pastepile.cgi'"/>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<p><a href="http://192.168.1.17/cgi-bin/pastepile.cgi">Redirect</a></p>

</BODY>
</HTML>

paste-pile-mover.sh

A helper script called pastepile-file-mover.sh, moves the pastepile.html, the data file created by pastepile.cgi from it’s default location to a date stamped file in a location set in the script BASEDIR/dir/filename. Where BASEDIR is your choice ( I use /var/www/p/), dir is the current year and filename is YYYYMMDD.html, so that that there is a  year and date hierarchy. I allow this script to run at the start of the month via root CRON to “clean” out the Pastepile and archive the old one, much the same way that log are rotated.

0 0 1 * * /home/erick/bin/pastepile-file-mover.sh

pastepile-file-mover.sh

#!/bin/bash

# Move the pastepile.html file from it's default location to a date stamped
# file in a location BASEDIR/dir/filename
# So that it has year and date heirarchy

# For now, Monthly, Move pastepile over to year dir and datestamped HTML file
#0 0 1 * * /home/erick/bin/pastepile-file-mover.sh



BASEDIR=/var/www/p
# Testing
#BASEDIR=/tmp

dir=$(date +"%Y")
#echo $dir

#File name timestamped
filename=$(date +"%Y%m%d").html
#echo $filename

# Make the YEAR dir if it dow not exist.
if [ ! -d "$BASEDIR/$dir" ]; then
  # Control will enter here if $DIRECTORY doesn't exist.
  mkdir $BASEDIR/$dir
fi

# Do the move to the YEAR directory with the YYYYMMDD.html filename.
mv $BASEDIR/pastepile.html $BASEDIR/$dir/$filename

# This is needed make a new pastepile.html and chmod 666
# else pastepile.cgi does not work, it can't make it's own output file.
touch $BASEDIR/pastepile.html
chmod 666 $BASEDIR/pastepile.html

Last but not least pastepile.cgi

#!/usr/bin/perl -Tw

# pastepile.cgi a fork of...
# guestbook.cgi - a simple guestbook script

# This program is copyright 1999 by John Callender.

# This program is free and open software. You may use, copy, modify,
# distribute and sell this program (and any modified variants) in any way
# you wish, provided you do not restrict others from doing the same.

# pastepile.cgi - guestbook.cgi, modded to become # a pastepile program. Erick Clasen Jan 25,2018
# This new version is a dirt simple CGI program that creates a blog like
# pasting tool to be able to paste notes online or on a local server.
# allows grabbing snippets of text or code for later use on whether
# on the local machine or another on the network.

$data_file = '/var/www/p/pastepile.html';

$max_entries = 0; # how many guestbook entries to save?
                   # set to '0' (zero) for infinite entries...

use CGI;
use Fcntl;
$query = new CGI;

unless ($action = $query->param('action')) {
    $action = 'none';
}

print <<"EndOfText";
Content-type: text/html

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Raspberry Pi Server Paste Pile</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1>Raspberry Pi Server Paste Pile</H1> 
<P><EM>$ENV{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/p/</EM></P>



<A HREF="../status/index.html">Back to Status Index</A>&nbsp;
<A HREF="../p/2018">2018 Paste Archive</A>

<P>You can <A HREF="#form">add your own subject and entry</A> using the form at the bottom of the page. Here we is has your pastes...</P>

<HR>
EndOfText

# Input action to add a new entry. ----------------------
if ($action eq 'Add entry') {

    # process the form submission
    # and assemble the guestbook entry


    # Input the subect and the paste which is called a comment here in this code.
    $subject = $query->param('subject');

    $comment = $query->param('comment');

    # clean up and fiddle with $subject
 unless ($subject) {
        $subject = 'No Subject';
   if (length($subject) > 50) {
        $subject = 'Subject line too long >50 chars';
    }
# End Input action to add a new entry. ----------------------



    }

    # Add a time stamp, put in variable theTime. This allows the paste to be timestamped.
    
    @months = qw(Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec);
    @weekDays = qw(Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun);
    @digits = qw(00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 59 59);
    ($second, $minute, $hour, $dayOfMonth, $month, $yearOffset, $dayOfWeek) = localtime();
    $year = 1900 + $yearOffset;
    $theTime = "$digits[$hour]:$digits[$minute]:$digits[$second], $weekDays[$dayOfWeek] $months[$month] $dayOfMonth, $year";

    # untaint variable
    unless ($theTime =~ /^([^<]*)$/) {
        die "couldn't untaint name: $theTime\n";
    }
    $theTime = $1;

    

    # clean up and fiddle with $subject--------------------------------

    $subject_clean = "$subject";
    $subject_clean =~ s/, , /, /;        # remove duplicate ', '
    $subject_clean =~ s/^, //;           # remove initial ', '
    $subject_clean =~ s/, $//;           # remove final ', '
    if ($subject_clean =~ /^[,\s]+$/) {
        # nothing but commas and whitespace
        $subject_clean = 'Subject format wrong!!';
    }
    
    if (length($subject_clean) > 75) {
        $subject_clean = 'Subject too long.';
    }

    # disable HTML tags
    $subject_clean =~ s/</&lt;/g;

    # untaint variable
    unless ($subject_clean =~ /^([^<]*)$/) {
        die "couldn't untaint subject_clean: $subject_clean\n";
    }
    $subject_clean = $1;

    

    # clean up and fiddle with $comment----------------------------

    if (length($comment) > 32768) {
        $comment = '...overloaded blog buffer chars > 32768.';
    }
    unless ($comment) {
        $comment = '...nothing to speak of.';
    }

    # fix line-endings
    $comment =~ s/\r\n?/\n/g;

    # lose HTML tags
    $comment =~ s/</&lt;/g;

    # untaint variable
    unless ($comment =~ /^([^<]*)$/) {
        die "couldn't untaint comment: $comment\n";
    }
    $comment = $1;
    # end cleanup #comment-----------------------------------------

    

    # assemble finished guestbook entry -- anything after this line until EndofText will show in the post!!!!!

    # Enviroment variable for REMOTE_ADDR is grabbed and printed directly. No untainting, but probably safe to do.

    $entry = <<"EndOfText";

<P><STRONG> Subject: $subject_clean </STRONG> at <EM>$theTime </EM> from <EM>$ENV{REMOTE_ADDR} </EM> <BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE>$comment</BLOCKQUOTE></P>
<HR>
EndOfText

    # open non-destructively, read old entries, write out new
   $all_entries .= $entry;
    sysopen(ENTRIES, "$data_file", O_RDWR)
                             or die "can't open $data_file: $!";
    flock(ENTRIES, 2)        or die "can't LOCK_EX $data_file: $!";
    while(<ENTRIES>) {
        $all_entries .= $_;
    }

 if ($max_entries) {

          # lop the tail off the guestbook, if necessary

          @all_entries = split(/<HR>/i, $all_entries);
          $entry_count = @all_entries - 1;

          while ($entry_count > $max_entries) {
              pop @all_entries;
              $entry_count = @all_entries - 1;
          }

          $all_entries = join('<HR>', @all_entries);

      }


   

    # now write out to $data_file

    seek(ENTRIES, 0, 0)        or die "can't rewind $data_file: $!";
    truncate(ENTRIES, 0)       or die "can't truncate $data_file: $!";
    print ENTRIES $all_entries or die "can't print to $data_file: $!";
    close(ENTRIES)             or die "can't close $data_file: $!";

}

# display the guestbook a.k.a pastepile.html

open (IN, "$data_file") or die "Can't open $data_file for reading: $!";
flock(IN, 1)            or die "Can't get LOCK_SH on $data_file: $!";
while (<IN>) {
    print;
}
close IN                or die "Can't close $data_file: $!";

# display the form    

print <<"EndOfText";
<A NAME="form"><H2>Add a comment/entry to the paste pile (no HTML):</H2></A>

<FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="pastepile.cgi">
<TABLE>



<TR>
<TD ALIGN="right"><STRONG>Subject: </STRONG></TD>
<TD><INPUT NAME="subject" SIZE=30></TD>
</TR>

<TR>
<TD ALIGN="right"><STRONG>Entry :</STRONG></TD>
<TD>
<TEXTAREA NAME="comment" ROWS=5 COLS=30 WRAP="virtual"></TEXTAREA>
</TD>
</TR>

<TR><TD COLSPAN=2> </TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD> </TD>
<TD><INPUT TYPE="submit" NAME="action" VALUE="Add entry"></TD>
</TR>
</TABLE>

</FORM>
</BODY>
</HTML>
EndOfText

 

fb-submit

Meta Response

My Thoughts, , , , , , , , , ,

Does the interaction of social and emotional data with the power of social and emotional data translate into positive results?

Recently I was given a Meta Survey via Facebook and I replied with this…

What is your biggest concern about Meta?

I work with ML/AI and I know it is possible to steer people with it to get a given outcome in very subtle ways. My concern is that companies like Meta are steering people towards content that produces a psychological reaction that then produces addictive behavior in order to keep them engaged with the goal of gathering personal data for the purposes of sale of such data and targeting people with advertising that encourages them to consume more than they would under normal circumstances. Generally with social media the corporations running it are extracting a resource, as in data, time and attention from people in a way that tilts the scales in favor the social media platform providers. To improve this would require more transparency with regards to the data that is collected and an ‘open book’ policy where individuals must give consent to all elements of data harvesting and are allowed to access the records that are kept on their personal data. Also, to have tools built into the platforms that allow people to block things as simple as using keywords to black/whitelist content and optimize the user experience in a way that allows them to override algorithmic control of the content that they are presented with, including advertising. AI/ML works best when it is collaborating with the user and not in the role of an invisible hand that exercises control over their experience from beyond their control.

What do you value most about Meta?

The fact that there has been some open source release of code such as PyTorch which I use on a regular basis.

Meta Survey
Meta Survey

 

Extremism and Mental Illness and Social Media

There is something that is pushing extremes and actually it is in both directions. This seems to have happened ever so slowly, it has crept in. Someone I heard on a podcast said once “Almost everyone is in Wokeistan or Trumpistan and there are like 7 people left on Earth that are like WTF???” It is an exaggeration but makes a point. There are disturbing things in the realm of mental illness, one of the worst is the fact that there is now a catagory for suicide in pre teens. There was no such category at one point as it was too rare of an outlier to keep track of, since 2007 there is. What happened around that time? Smartphones with social media apps, correlation is not always causation but, it does make you wonder. If anything the issue pushing extremes can be found in the media, both traditional as it grapples with loss of market and pushes more extreme ‘bait’ to keep viewers. And, lastly you guessed it, social media in which the invisible hand of algorithms feed us content determined by large corporate interests. I think that it will, and this is the hope, that it will selfcorrect, the pendulum when it gets to an extreme will eventually go in the other direction. This is the blessing of free, democratic countries, change is possible. Democracies are a mess but, they are the best we have as of now,considering the alternatives have generally turned out worse for people.

sellbuy-o-meter

Trading, , , , ,

We are governed by laws, not by laws, but by people. Government is by people.

We all need a sellbuy-o-meter

  • Get the timing just right every time.

  • No more missing the tops and bottoms.

  • Maximize profits right from the start.

  • Be a winner every time.

Hey there, it’s your favorite lawyer, Saul Goodman, and I’ve got some advice for all you traders out there. You need a sellbuy-o-meter, plain and simple. This little gadget tells you when to buy and sell, so you can get the timing just right every time. No more missing the tops and bottoms of the market, my friends. You’ll be maximizing your profits right from the start and be a winner every time.

With this sellbuy-o-meter, who needs stop losses? You’ll be making maximum gains with no losses. Your eyes will thank you, too, because there’ll be no more chart reading voodoo and magic. Put away your lucky charms and get ready to use some 10x or more leverage.

And let me tell you, you’ll sleep like a baby at night knowing you’ll never get a trade wrong. Risk management will only entail replacing the batteries in the meter. (Batteries not included, unfortunately.)

So what are you waiting for? Order your sellbuy-o-meter today and get a free spouse-o-meter! This little beauty tells you what mood your significant other is in – mad, sad, or glad – we’ve got them all covered. Don’t hesitate – order now!

sellbuy-o-meter
sellbuy-o-meter

Sometimes these Clickbait con-tra-prenur social media ads just get under my skin. It feels a little bit like I am being sold a scam by Slippin Jimmy a.k.a. Saul Goodman.

Daytrading: Response to Clickbait Ad

I responded to an clickbait ad on social media with the following.

Daytrading, I would not recommend it for newbies. It’s not for everyone and it’s not something to jump into blindly. With trading in general, start very small, like 1% of your net worth, learn and then build up your position sizes slowly as a reward for success. Other than your ‘play’ money, while learning just buy and hold with the bulk of you invest able $. Daytrading is something to do only when a level of mastery of trading on higher time frames using small money. Trading will cost you money and time until you gain experience, these are the facts, plain and simple. It is part skill, part art, timing and luck. The shorter the time frame, the higher the market noise relative to the signal that you are trying to capture and make trades on, this combined with fees and slippage makes daytrading difficult to begin with (Super quick trades, noise, fees and slippage will eat your $ up.). Is it possible to make money daytrading ,yes, but you will be strapped to a computer to do it, is that something that will be enjoyable in the long run, seriously think about it. Do you really want to sit in front of the computer watching 1,5,15m candles with a finger hovering on the mouse all day. That’s for machines to excel at, really, that’s how the big firms can even make money at all, besides low fees and getting paid for order flow. Being able to code algorithms to trade for you via an API, then you just have to babysit the system to make sure it is working right, less work than sitting in front of charts on PC all day, requires math,coding and fintech type skill however. That might be a path to daytrading for the committed in the long run. If none of the preceding jargon makes sense, time to study up. Knowledge of probabilities and statistics go a long way, I had to relearn quite a bit of this, yeah it sucked a bit, should have paid more attention in those classes. Understand what the Kelly Criterion is, “Fortune’s Formula” the book, covers it. That way you can get a grasp on risk management and don’t blow up your account. A so-so trader with good risk management will make money. A good trader with poor risk management will fail, the account will go up and down, maybe most and more down,boom and bust and potentially fully bust. Works by Ed Thorp, Elder Alexander, Perry Kaufmann, John Murphy are a good foundation to understand trading. Reminiscences of a Stock Operator Book by Edwin Lefèvre Zen, they hand this out at Goldman when you start there. Get to understand the Psychology of trading and money (Morgan Housel), the ups and downs are rough. If you don’t get a grasp on how it impacts you emotionally it will be painful in the gut. Position sizes, watch those, you want to be able to sleep at night, once again we are talking risk management. If you’ve studied the foundations and it still doesn’t make sense keep studying, it might keep sinking in while you practice trade with small money and put a chunk in buy+hold. As you gain experience some of the material you study will start to make more sense, time to reread. If after all this, it still doesn’t work, find a mentor who will help you, someone who has “made it” and is willing to give back to help the next generation. Ideally buddy up with someone from the start, find a club. There is too much hype and charlatanism out there waiting to mislead and take advantage of newbies, pushing a lot of nonsense.

Another Similar Response to an Ad on how to figure out Bull/Bear conditions

You can tell if it is bullish or bearish in a few minutes, why it is bullish or bearish, well that can take much longer to figure out. But, you can learn this yourself or find a mentor. Hang around the right people and you will learn, find a mentor who will help you, someone who has “made it” and is willing to give back to help the next generation. Ideally buddy up with someone from the start, find a club. There is too much hype and charlatanism out there waiting to mislead and take advantage of newbies, pushing a lot of nonsense………But for now, practical wise, an example of figuring out bull/bear bias of an asset. Ichimoku chart is good to use and learn, on it, is the Tenken above the Kijun? Is the price above both of those? Is the price above the cloud? Also is the asset in a golden cross 50 day MA > 200 day MA. Then look at the macro picture, over all market up? Is the sector up? These are Bull signals, the more the better. Better yet, figure out your own method and come up with a checklist. Also, price can always change on a whim, you can’t predict it. Use risk mgmt to mitigate against loss, tomorrow there could be a banking crisis, political crisis, war, flash crash, protect against those as well as you can.

laptop

Scraping a WordPress site for text to use with char-rnn

Linux, Scripts, WordPress, , ,

As with anything else in life, it is possible to change nothing but yourself.
The first step toward making change is simply to change yourself.

In this quick example the gist of scraping a WordPress website using Linux and Lynx will be shown. Wget is great at scraping from the web but, I have found out that it does not always work well with WordPress sites.

Grab some text

Step one of the process is to grab some text to work with. In the example I tried I grabbed all of the text of the posts of this blog by scraping it with wget. I also used the text of the US Constitution to see what the tools would do with it as well. Generally the more text, the better the machine learning code will be at generating something interesting.

Scraping the posts

Using the command line web browser lynx in a script I was able to download the text of the posts on this site. Initially I thought to use wget. But, I remembered that wget will do a good job downloading static sites and sometimes will not do so well with ones like this one that is created in WordPress.

There is probably a way to loop this code in bash, and increment a counter for the pages. But, being that this is a one time thing, I opted for a quick approach instead of thinking too hard on making a loop.

#!/bin/bash
lynx -dump -nolist http://erick.heart-centered-living.org/ > my-posts.txt
lynx -dump -nolist http://erick.heart-centered-living.org/page/2/ >> my-posts.txt
lynx -dump -nolist http://erick.heart-centered-living.org/page/3/ >> my-posts.txt
lynx -dump -nolist http://erick.heart-centered-living.org/page/4/ >> my-posts.txt
lynx -dump -nolist http://erick.heart-centered-living.org/page/5/ >> my-posts.txt
lynx -dump -nolist http://erick.heart-centered-living.org/page/6/ >> my-posts.txt
lynx -dump -nolist http://erick.heart-centered-living.org/page/7/ >> my-posts.txt
lynx -dump -nolist http://erick.heart-centered-living.org/page/8/ >> my-posts.txt
lynx -dump -nolist http://erick.heart-centered-living.org/page/9/ >> my-posts.txt

This code will output a file that contains all of the text from the posts on this site. Up to Fall of 2018 when I ran it.

Wave Styled by ML

Modifying a image with a style using machine learning

Machine Learning, , , , , , , , , , ,

The first ingredient to happiness in happiness is an attitude of openness.

Fun With Machine Learning

I have been sharing the following images around. They were created with machine learning code that I came across and modified a bit while examining how it operates.

See the following for more info… How to Generate Art Demo Command Line Version

The code basically takes an image and imposes a style from another image upon it. It is rather computational expensive as it takes around 12 Gigabytes of RAM to “work” on a 1024×1024 pixel image and about 2 hours of compute time to run the 20 iterations required to complete an image. Machine learning is a fascinating new frontier in technology that I have been spending some time since the spring of 2018 getting to understand on a deeper level. I’ve seen a lot of technologies come and go but, this field has stunned me, is moving forward very fast and is here to stay.

Prior to 2018 I had some exposure to machine learning in the sense of using adaptive control systems in industry. I also worked on a research project that involved a type of fuzzy logic and cellular automata for a learning system that would be used in a control loop. I also developed code that used a tractrix curve as the main element of a control system. But, that is kind of simple machine learning as compared to what is going on today.

This link is to the original paper on this topic, there are some more images in it as well,

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.06576.pdf?fbclid=IwAR19_eqx3SmHMyqnAnirbfyAWDqLYkqMp98C0XZ6GEfeXZRxnDPaagZ5B_E