pftq.com
June 8th, 2016
Posted by pftq

Blackened Mirrors (Piano Improvisation)

After about an hour of trying to work on another song, I sort of just lost it and played this instead.

693 unique view(s)
April 1st, 2016
Posted by pftq

Presentation Deck for Tech Trader

This is a simple presentation deck I put together for Tech Trader, a fully autonomous trading system that has been trading with no human intervention for over 3 years.  The presentation is kept at a high level and discusses the technology and thought process behind the system, which is a combination of unconventional approaches to AI as well as just pragmatic and common-sense considerations in the logic of the system.


It also touches on my short thought piece Creating Sentient Artificial Intelligence, which contrasts the more "human" approach taken to AI via Tech Trader vs the more quantitative approaches often lumped together as Machine Learning.
726 unique view(s)
March 11th, 2016
Posted by pftq

Ethereum Added to Tech Trader

Been a while since I've visited the cryptocurrencies space.  It's a pleasant surprise when you have a few sleeper investments you forget about go up over 20 fold.

I went ahead and retooled the old Ripple on Tech Trader site to be more general across the four major cryptocurrencies I know of - Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, and Stellar.  The charts aren't too fancy or interactive but nonetheless useful for daytraders like myself that like to see where all the supports levels and trendlines are.

688 unique view(s)
February 12th, 2016
Posted by pftq

Hiraeia (Piano Improvisation)

A rather peaceful but bittersweet melody that I played out randomly a few nights ago.  It's the longest piano improvisation I've made ever and after almost a year's hiatus, but I think it's my favorite piano composition so far.  I forget how nice it feels to really just flush your thoughts out over piano, and it's been a long time.

748 unique view(s)
August 7th, 2015
Posted by pftq

pq Visitor Counter and Tracker - Improved Spam and Bot Detection

The pq Visitor Counter and Tracker is an old but useful script, which has been integral in helping me keep track of what users are seeing on the site and cutting out spam/bots who are being more of a nuisance.  Its primary functions are as a unique visitor and view counter, but because it is virtually part of every page on the site, it comes in very handy as well for controlling entry points to the site, seeing malicious activity as they happen, and creating filters to block less friendly users based on the pattern of their activity.  This filtering then subsequently lends itself to cleaner analytics and understanding of how many real users you have and what their activities are.

I've spent the last few days adding new methods to tracking spam and bots so as to shut them down early if they're malicious and track/filter them out from being treated as human (for visitor counting, comments, etc) if they're crawlers.  I've also improved the look of the tracker page, so it's easier to identify between human, bot, and spam.  Bots are highlighted in a light shade of green now, with their user agents or other identifying factors similarly highlighted.  Spam is struck out in red to indicate they are being shut down on your site and definitely counted into your hits.  See the below screenshot or go straight to the visitor counter's demo to play around with it yourself.
1169 unique view(s)