Principles of Technology

We are always trying new things to make our site as clean, efficient, and useful as possible. If you have any good ideas, please drop us a line

See old QFS presentations for the following:

  • FULL MSFT Excel (w/VBA Macros)
  • Financial Chart Making
  • Financial Chart Equations
  • Financial Chart Reading
  • Financial Model Making
  • Presentation of Models
  • Guest Speakers!

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Upon Request:
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  • ActionScript/Flash Models
  • C++ Models
  • Java Models
  • VBA Modelling
  • Web-Based Modelling
  • Equation Proofs
  • + ANYTHING Requested that we can figure out!

Web Technology

To get the main things out of the way, our website uses a combination of PHP4/5, MySQL5.0.24a, Strict XHTML 1.0, JavaSscript, and CSS.
We run a variety of scripts that our webmaster, Varun Dube has written as well as a few that he modified. Below are a list of some scripts with references:

Yahoo!Finance Script

In essence, what happens is we call Yahoo!Finance and ask them to give us the most recent quote in csv (comma separated value) form, and then we split it into an array and display the contents into a table. Everytime you press refresh, the quote is new. Normally, we would have used fopen(), fread(), fwrite(), and fclose(); however, our hosting provider (DreamHost) rightly disables these functions for security purposes. Therefore this script uses cURL functions. Download the Script!!

Sphider Search

This amazing search function is written by Ando Saabas. It is called Sphider. We have modified his orignal one to work on different pages with more relative links, but the algorithm remains the same. Many thanks to him. Download the Script!!

MimeTeX

Seeing as we're a quant group, we should have the latest technology for displaying math equations and such. MimeTeX replaces the need for having a full TeX distribution (+400megs) installed on our server. It is written by John Forkosh and renders decently (LaTeX is still prettier). To simplify the process, we've implemented a script called mimetex.php, which allows us to cache images in our server, making the loading time very, very quick. Download MimeTeX!! Download Script!!. *Note the script was heavily modified by Varun to work on our servers.

MooTools

CSS is fun, but JavaScript is neat as well. Mootools is a modular object-oriented JavaScript frameworked developed by some cool people. They provide a lot of documentation at their site and adhere to strict and efficient coding. What's even more awesome is their belief in open-source. Our webmaster edited the framework for our menubar as well as other pages that needed some 'pizazz' added to them. Download the Script!!

MagpieRSS

We use MagpieRSS (from SourceForge) to call Google News and search for a select set of keywords that we define (dealing with quant finance and such), it then gets the Atom feed for that search and we parse it to spit out what you see on our news page.Download the Script!!

Special thanks to Eric Ho and Ankur Mathur for their ideas and contributions.