I think it was Golden Grahms or something... except I can't spell.

I developed a new alogrithm over the past few days - new to me - but in the financial world, I suppose nothing is really new, it is just a matter if you have noticed it yet or not. I'm sure if I noticed it, so have others.

Initially I saw really fantastic returns with it... fantastic returns always make me think something is wrong.
Sure enough, there was - the returns were still legit, but they weren't guarenteed and instead just lucky.

Then modified the code down and got much better results. Over 2000 stocks, 80% of them return a positive result of an average of 40% return over a year.

I'm tweaking it now to see if I can get the 80% closer to 100% and ideally still keep the returns higher.
Not sure if it is better to have 100% at 13% gain, or 80% at 40% gain.
I think everyone would rather a 40% gain, but what good is that if it is a gamble? Not much.

I actually bought Komodo from ActiveState and used it a lot with my Perl test programs. It is an editor and I tested it out for a bit and liked it so much that I decided to go ahead and buy it.

I had been using 2 for awhile, then went up to 2.2 and then I finally looked today and saw that 2.5 was out.
I downloaded that and installed it - hot damn! It looks as if it uses less RAM, looks a little better, has a few nice features in the UI, and responds more quickly.

It is rare when I use a product and then am pleasantly suprised by it.

Worked out a new stock algorithm that looks as if it averages 16% a year on $10K put in - trying to play with it so that it can get higher than that.

There is a public transportation strike here right now, so I am renting a scooter to get me to and from work. As a result, I will likely try to come in earlier and leave later just to avoid the bulk of the traffic.
Maybe I can get up and run - for a few weeks I've missed it now due to stupid injuries (speared my foot with a cutrain rod and dropped a machete on my leg) and a hurricane.

I watched Treasure Planet last night with my fiancee's little sister.
That was a really well done movie - I'm suprised I didn't hear more about it. Some neat and fun ideas in there.

No seriously, my power came back on last night.

I'm giddy like a school girl.

3 things - the first being where you can help me out.

1) I started my own company out to a public face. It has been going along okay now just to private people, but not it is up to the scary public. It is up at http://www.stenslandsystems.com.
I am still trying to resolve what credit card processing company I will use - it might be PayPal, but I'd prefer not for a few reasons.
My current customers have just been paying me directly since I know them in person.
I tried to use WorldPay since they will process worldwide currency, but they didn't like that my site is vaguely "stock market predicitions".
I tried half-heartedly, knowing full well it was going well over the poor ladies head, to explain that this isn't as if I'm just winging it, but it is a lot of computation there that is the same as what Fidelity and many other big investment firms use... it fell on deaf ears. I suppose if you don't "get it", then it seems equally improbable as picking stocks from a crystal ball would.

The gist if the overall idea is that it uses genetic algorithms, neural nets, a bit of natural language processing (although that is honestly mostly to build up the database to be used at a later date and it doesn't really contribute to the current output), and a few other fun little tricks to generalize ideas about how and when stocks will move.
It then outputs on any given day what it feels will move in the near future. If you look back through my journal, you will see that I was putting up some of the results of it and it was doing well.

Anyway, please give it a look and if you know people that are interested in such things, please tell them to check out the site and sign up or email me if they are interested.

I am still going to try to apply for a position with a hedge fund here and use more advanced code with them. If that falls through, then the code will all go into the SS site.
Comments (good and especially really mean nasty bad ones since this is the faceless internet) are always welcome. Even if not about the site.
(interestingly enough, Kimble of kimble.org infamy seems to be scamming his way along with something called trendax.com which is pretty much what I am trying to do - except his isn't real and is to rip off investors in his product, and mine is real and actually works... his has a cooler interface for sure though)

2) I tried SpamNet - the Cloudmark spam stopping service. It sucked. I am now trying SpamBayes and running the most current version. I haven't had any mail to check on it yet. During the time of the first Blaster worm, my spam levels dropped down to about 60 a day - Slashdot also posted that a big name spammer had been caught and stopped as well - so maybe the combo of it did that. Either way, I'm back up over 100 a day now.

speaking of the Blaster worm, I got a security notice that there is a new RPC hole in MS OSes and that I should patch all that.

As a result, that brings up number...
3) I am installing shavlik.com's hfnetchk right now. It will supposedly scan the network and check which machines don't have certain patches installed, and then install the patches on them and keep track of all of that.
Our network is small, so it is feasible that I won't have to register for the Pro version - we are slightly smaller than the Pro version minimum, and slightly larger than the free version max - so it means there is a big price annoyance there.
I will try to remember to post up later what I think of it. One of our IT consultants loves it and highly recommends it.

It came, it saw, it fucked up the island.

My place is fine, and I only got a minor machete wound while trying to help others clean up their messes.

The main thing is that it has allowed me to see people under stress - and they change completely. It brings out the nutbags and the assholes.

I'm amazed at the number of people that feel they were saved solely because they prayed to God during the storm. I wonder why God brought the storm in the first place?

I've had to deal directly with two crazy old ladies here - one is a neighbor whom I have to be nice to since we want to buy her house from her. The other one is my fiancee's grandma.
One thinks God saved her and the other old lady's car because she was praying for herself and the car. Seems a bit daft to waste God's time praying for a car when 4 people died on the causeway.
This same woman doesn't like modern radio because it doesn't prase the lord enough and is corrupting our children. She also feels that Harry Potter is the occult and is a work of the devil and it is making evil demon children.

The grandmother doesn't listen when we say that since the power is out, the water pumps can't work, therefore we can't use ANY water at all. If we do, it draws the existing water out of the pipes and then can cause a vaccuum and break the system - requiring a plumber to fix (which they aren't usually all that good at from what I have seen in the past) and there is no way we will get one during this post storm craziness.
Well, she then claims that she only uses "a little bit" of water. As if that doesn't count. She was still flushing her toilet and since it worked, she figured she was special.
She feels that the storm was a result of man's abuse of the environment. Even though she has been in other hurricanes.

ugh.

at least I have power, water, and internet at work.

I live in Bermuda and we are just about to hit by the worst hurricane since 1963 here.

This should be interesting. I've been in a Cat1 hurricane about 5 times in the past in the States.

This one is a Cat3 and nearly a Cat 4 - a Cat4 is 100 times stronger than a Cat1.

This will be interesting I guess.

I have been having some issues with someone in the States. Much in the way that geeks arose around the world and signed spammers up for junk mail at their real addresses, I am considering doing the same to someone else.
I can recall that there were sites in 1996 that made this easy since I know a friend of mine did it to another friend.
But nowadays with all of the spam talk on the net, nearly all searches about junk mail are turning up e-mail discussions.

I guess I will just start with the catalogs.

I work for a company.
The company has two owners.
One owner is a bright guy, but admits that he knows nothing of technology and leaves it all up to me. The other owner fancies himself to be very technically savvy, but he basically only knows that he likes shiny stuff that runs on battery power. It is this owner that makes my life at work miserable.

So painful owner regularly gives me annoying things to do for him, such as finding PDAs that don't exist with features that only he desires.
He is constantly terrified that hackers are breaking into his system to read all of his email.

Speaking of email, he keeps every message that he ever receives or sends. I told him that he could back them up to his local drive and keep some of the messages off of the server (since he refuses to let me increase the drive space on the mail server). So he backs them up to his local drives now. They still remain on our mail server, which also has nightly backups run on it. Then he occasionally also burns out backups of his mail out to CD as well. Nothing like obscene redundancy of things that don't matter. I think he just wants to feel important.
He also had an idea of running a CAT5 cable out one of our windows and over an alleyway to the building next to us (this wire would just hang out over a 2 story drop, spanning well over 12 feet), and then a company in that building would backup our stuff, and we would back up theirs.
I tried to explain that the ideal solution would be outside of the country, let alone one building over. He would have none of that. He is also apparently oblivious to weather or the durability of these wires.

Basically, he won't authorize purchases unless they are from his own batty ideas. As a result, I know our servers are very close to hosing themselves, at which point we will have to upgrade them as part of the repair process. He will then take me aside and talk to me as if I were a child and tell me that I need to let him know about such things ahead of time so that we can fix them before they become a major problem. I will then let him know that I did let him know, and he will dismiss this as totally insane.

If you have ever read All Creatures Great and Small or seen the show, he is like the boss in that, except not at all charming nor ever likeable.
He says racist and sexist things, sends porn through our e-mail system, and is constantly making it sound like his family loves him even though he makes a point to never be home so as never to have to deal with them. He also occasionally drinks so much that he passes out. He is at least in his 40s. Totally classy.

So anyway, Tuesday I get an email from him telling me that he is very interested in Turbo10.com after seeing a TV show talk about it on the BBC. He told me that he wanted me to register with it because it was the wave of the future and superior.
I looked into it, not even knowing what the hell it was. It is a search engine. They essentially scan all of other search engines and then when you do a search with them, they combine all of those results. If you register with them, it means you pay to get placed higher in the searches done for certain words.
He didn't get this at all - totally overlooking the paying part, insisting it was free - regardless of what their site says. He also was determined that registering with them would immediately put us up at the top of the searches for all of the search engines that this site looked at. Right.
So I told him that if we were going to pay, then we are far better off using Google. They have the ads that we can pay for on a per click basis. He then was worried that they would charge us for every hit that our site gets (which is like 3 a year anyway). I then had to explain that no, they only charge on people that see the ad and then click on that to get to our site.
He decided he wasn't too keen on that because someone would "very likely" write a script that would just keep banging on that link just so as to maliciously run up our fees. I had no response for that one.

I dread every time I see the guy - I know that he is working on some new retarded thing to say to me.

There were two secretaries scanning on our Xerox system today and he walked up to them and said "scuse me, I'm just gonna make a copy" and then they kept working and he got pissy. They explained that they needed to do continuous scanning and he couldn't just pop in and out like that. He looked like a little kid that was told he would have to wait until after dinner to get his ice cream. I'm sure he will later talk to someone about having them fired and then talk to me about wanting a personal Xerox machine in his office for free. (he always wants the sky, but doesn't want to pay a thing)

Also, they are trying to consoldate two floors of office space into one floor and it is going to be a disaster - all because this guy doesn't want to move out of this building. Which also means our net connection is going to stay slower than retarded speed.

My own company is about two weeks from being live - I'm desperately hoping that it makes me enough that I don't need to work here. Then once I'm married I can stay here and not have to work - can't wait.

Ugh.

I am considering starting up a site that just chronicles everything that this man does - but I'm nervous that he will stumble on it.

I work with a lot of accountants. I know very little about accounting - so I likely amuse them in the same way that they amuse me.

But with the recent increase of virus messages, I am seeing that people here really don't get that we have virus protection in place on the mail server, so when they get a message from the virus scanning system, that in itself isn't a virus - yet they still call me about it - and I hate the phone.

I'm also seeing that when I told people I setup a mail scanning program to try to help reduce the spam, they apparently thought that I meant "totally negate" the spam.
So they call me and forward me all mail when it gets through, which is good since I need to make it aware of those, but they always act so offended that it got through - ignoring the 2000+ other messages that were blocked that day - instead only focusing on that one that got through.
Also, they really truly seem to think that I sit there and scan the mail and that is the spam system. I tried to explain that I modified some code to do it, but they still seem to talk to me as if I'm the one letting spam through, instead of some program.

Oh well.

I've been riding a scooter into work for this week - it is very fun.

I saw that the Google Toolbar now blocks pop ups and I've decided that will be enough for me to go back to IE.
I had been trying out Mozilla Firebird and while at first I liked it, in the end I was more annoyed than I was overjoyed with it.

Not too much going on lately. Enjoying reading and as usual, wishing I was getting more sleep.

I am house-sitting still, so I am not getting much (anything) done towards my company idea.

I've decided to start a few web discussion boards for high end car owners. Also going to make a blog of my main site, as well as create a new blog with friends where we are essentially offenisve and post stories from our offensive minds.

I wrote a perl script that creates offensive domains for me, and then from that I also write a perl script that writes offensive haikus. It needs to be made smarter and aware of nouns and verbs and the like.

Once my regular blog is up on my site, I will likely post up a link on here and then stop posting to this journal and there instead.
Or something.

Today is one of those days when I can't stand anything. I think that pretty just means that its a weekday.

I've been reading James Harriet's "All Creatures Great and Small" while I'm house-sitting for two weeks (finishing up next weekend).
It is a good book that I am pretty sure I have read before. It is impressive/funny to me how much his job - a vet - reminds me of my own job. He gets called to work on an animal and then people with no training stand around and critique his work. He is called up out of the blue and has to debug whatever the situation at hand is - figure out the problem and then resolve it - quickly and with an audience.
Of course my job doesn't involve a fuzzy cute life on the other end, and I can reboot.
The book is an easy read and is enjoyable. With no net connection at the house and me not caring about TV, that is a welcome change (I would normally read more, but I am addicted to being on the net as much as I can).

Lately I've been spending more time on a fitness site that I used to visit a lot. I mainly visit just to be a dick - but about half the time I give out serious information, either about fitness, nutrition, physiology, etc.
It is a fitness site, so of course it is full of dumb meatheads. For the most part, I'd say it is 98% very strongly religious types.
I'm not personally religious at all, and I hate religion. I personally don't think it should even be called religion and instead should just be tossed into the political science realm.
As for faith, I'm agnostic since I don't see any reason to be any other way. I suppose I learn more towards the athiest side, but with proof, I'll go with either way gladly.
What really bothers me is when people fight and argue over religion and/or the existence of God - but they do it with the worst arguements ever. It reminds me of that page of 300 arguements why God exists that BufferOverflowed posted up about a month ago.
As a result, I really wish it was mandatory that anyone in the world - or at least anyone that gets on the net - should have to at the very least read A Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan.
Have whatever belief you want, but learn to logically argue it - there are far too many people that just have the idea of "I'm me, therefore I agree with myself, therefore I'm right, therefore you are wrong if you don't agree with me" and it is painful to endure.
They essentially clamp their hands over their ears and much like the knight in Monty Python's Holy Grail, they totally deny anything against them. Therefore, regardless of the outcome of any discussion, they will always feel that they have won...
I don't get why they bother - and more importantly, I don't get why I bother reading it or worse yet trying to apply logic to anything.

Also, perhaps I'm just dumb, but I can't seem to figure this one out for myself. I've asked people before, but unforunately they were of the type "whatever I think is right, therefore anything that disagrees is wrong" camp and that didn't help me at all.
I'm curious what people that are of a certain faith that believes in one type of God or Gods thinks of another faith and their God or Gods.
Like, say for instance that in the end, Christians happen to be perfectly right - dead on right. There is a single God and he is all powerful, created everything, etc.
What happens to all of those people that were chasing false dreams? How did they get to that point?
Christians tend to not give that a lot of thought since that is pretty much how they see life now, so if it comes true, they don't have an altered reality.
So then, say another religion is actually the "right" one and it turns out that Christianity was way off. There isn't a single God, and the idea that Christianity was following turns out to be total nonsense? What have they done with their life? How had they felt so right? What happens now?
Most people just shrug their shoulders and assume that they are in the right camp because that was what they were taught as they grew up and therefore, it is right.

Don't know - I have it pretty easy at this point since I don't believe in any of them - they all sound equally nuts to me.

I won't even go into the evolution discussion, that is another one that brings out some interesting people and ideas. I'd lean towards the "crazy" title, but then I'm very much like them - just because I have a different opinion of what is true and right, I would be thinking less of anyone that thinks differently.
That said, I suppose anyone that ignores scientific theory and logic is pretty much someone that I'm gonna ignore.

And no, I have no desire to debate anything on this thread. It never, in my experience, results in "oh shit, I've wasted my life - I'll convert to whatever it is you just told me this instant."
Therefore, it is wasted time and I can mentally masturbate about some other idea that is more productive in my mind.

Yesterday was the first day one of the owners was back from vacation. This is the same owner that is always having me do strange stuff - the one that knows tech just enough to make it painful for people that really know tech things.

He got 15 virus messages in a row out of nowhere - the virus checking software found them all - either dumping them to quarantine or repairing them.
They were of different types of worms and Word macro viruses - from some different people, although 3 of them were from the same guy.

Still not entirely sure why that happened.

He wants the Nokia 6800 and I'm responsible for finding and getting it for him. He doesn't have a US charge card or mailing address, so it makes it hard for him to get things on the web. My fiancee has a US card and shipping address through a friend - but she doesn't walk to help the guy out (he is her uncle).
So I'm not sure what to tell him about that since the truth might not go over well.
She is okay with him using the card, but she doesn't want her friend to have to carry it into here - she has had to do that before and she doesn't want her friend to always be bringing stuff in everytime she comes in.

off to work.

A friend sent me myie2.com.

I have only glanced at it so far - but it basically looks like IE, does the popup blocking, blocks banner ads (some), does tabbed windows and shizzle - I'm gonna try this out.

It looks interesting.

My fiancee and I are house-sitting a place near here starting tomorrow and going for two weeks - as a result, will only be online while at work.

off to dinner.

I have long been interested in spam. I have run SpamAssassin for what feels like a long time now.
I got my levels of spam down to just over 100 a day and spamassassin gets nearly all of it.

That said "nearly all" of it means in the 98-99% region. Of the 100+ messages a day that I get, usually 1 to 3 of them get through. Sure, there are days when none get through. Then there are other days when I wonder if the filter is running at all.

It is much better now that I am running a faster server and therefore the script can do as it pleases - not limited to finish in 30 seconds and on a better processor (Athlon XP 2200+).

But I have added a bunch of new e-mail addresses and these are going to get a lot of spam. Not in that I want them to - but they are part of my company that I am putting up. These are web facing e-mails and I have to check all messages coming trhough them in case they are customers or potential customers.

With my other accounts, it is no big deal if I lose e-mail - I don't care that much if I get mail or not.
But more and more now, my mail is becoming more valuable to me since these people represent income for me.

As a result, I've decided that I am going to try out dumbing down my spamassassin so that it lets more though, and then I am going to run CloudMark's Spamnet on my system.
This will be of no help at all for when I ssh in and use Pine - but lately with my slow net connections, that is becoming more and more of a hassle.
So I use Outlook nearly all the time now to check over 10 accounts (a few of them just forward down into one account anyway).

I am curious to see how wel Cloudmark does.
They claim that they are in the 90% area - so I want to see if my 75% spamassassin (remember I'm going to make it more easy going) and then 90% Cloudmark - will it do better?

I figure it will likely do very well with known spam, and less well with new variations that come out.

In the end, it is $4 a month - which even if that can help the 30 or so extra spam that get through a month right now - let alone later once I have about double the addresses listed on the net - then I will be pleased and don't mind the fee since the cost is well worth it for me.

If you have heard good/bad about Spamnet - feel free to let me know - I am downloading the trial right now just to see for myself - but I'm always up for hearing other nerd opinions.