Apparently Ralph Nader is considering another White House bid. If he were to run, I can’t see any mainstream candidate being a better recipient of my vote than he would be.
[more...]

Date handling in JavaScript sucks. It’s quite astonishingly bad, in fact, and I always think that I’m forgetting to do something when I try to use it—but no, it appears that the major JavaScript developers have never pushed a robust date object. I’m not sure why, as the Web’s international nature seems to make that more important, not less. On top of which the browser should really tell the server what time zone it thinks it’s in, but that’s another story. Anyway, there’s a library I’ve been looking at, and which we’re apparently going to use at work, Datejs (available at datejs.com).
[more...]

This is a fourth-order post, a post about a post about a review of a book. Such are the times we live in. Which times, according to the book, are not necessarily cut off from much of human existence by the division of the past into history and ‘prehistory’. The blog post is Internal Affairs: Biochemistry and the Body Politic, the review is Steve Mithen in the London Review of Books on Daniel Lord Smail’s Deep History and the Brain.
[more...]

I already have a buch of plans for larger projects, including finishing the sfmagic.org rewrite, but I think it makes sense to have some smaller projects to work on as well, things that I can switch to and make significant progress on in a relatively short amount of time.
[more...]

In fact, he didn’t even make it to the final, breaking his streak of ten straight Grand Slam finals. Sunday’s champion will be the first man not named Nadal or Federer to win a Grand Slam since the 2005 Australian Open.
[more...]

‘Shock’ might be too strong a word, but over the last year or so I’ve really had this “the future has arrived’ feeling. Some trends have been slowly taking shape over years—like the Blade Runner-style huge video billboards. (Of course, all of the technological trends have been taking shape for years, but for some the development has been mostly hidden until they reach a critical point of functionality.)
[more...]

No, not that, but this
[more...]

Individual draft groups in MTG are called “pods”. The sfmagic group runs drafts every Wednesday (19:30, Milano’s Pizzeria), and it’s these drafts that I’m rewriting a site to track the results of. At the moment I’m writing the data entry side, and took a slight detour to write a utility to help in the weekly organization.
[more...]

Since I started this incarnation of my blog (either about two or about one-and-a-third years ago depending on your criteria) I’ve mentioned quite a few projects, and thought it would be worthwhile to look back at them and check their status.
[more...]

Last night I got around to watching the recently-leaked Tom Cruise Scientology video. Probably old news to a lot of people, since it’s been doing the rounds online, but if you missed it, it’s worth a look.
[more...]

After using a Trek 4300 since mid-2000, I decided it was time for a new bike. The old one was in need of some serious work, and had been unreliable for quite some time—only a couple of the gears were effectively usable, for example. I use my bike a lot and hope to use it more, so reliability is rather important, and I decided that I would both repair the old one and get a new one.
[more...]

Sadly, I’m not quite going to finish a drop-in replacement for the current sfmagic.org codebase by my deadline of tomorrow. I’m close, and I think I have everything except the data entry portion, which I’ll lay out in this post.
[more...]

Unless I’m forgetting about something important, head-to-head is done.
[more...]

I haven’t had much time to work on the project over the weekend, but I have made some progress in getting the queries into SQLAlchemy form.
[more...]

I’ve stripped some fields from the h2hresults table, and I’ve created some queries that do what I want but may not be the right approach.
[more...]

I haven’t had much time to work on the rewrite, because I’ve had some serious computer problems at home—rather than being able to move from my laptop to the faster and more coding-suited (multiple monitors, better keyboard, etc.) desktop, I’m still on my laptop because my desktop is completely unstable and needs to be replaced.
[more...]

I didn’t have much time to work on the rewrite today, and spent what time I did have messing around with graphs.
[more...]

I didn’t have time to get stuck into head-to-head today. Instead I did the minor data cleaning and code tweaking required to generate the superset, or block, standings. While doing that I started thinking about unit testing for sfmagic.org.
[more...]

Today most of my time on the project was spent setting it up on one of the machines in my home network, which may end up being its home once it’s ready and deployed.
[more...]

Tracking head-to-head results is something I’ve been thinking about doing for quite some time. It’s an obvious feature, but I shied away from it first because it seemed complicated on the database side when I started the original site and later because the reporting interface seemed like it would have to be clunky.
[more...]

I now have standings tables for the seeding and the overall standings. These are generated from the limited data set I’m currently using, but the generation process works with incremental updates (as long as all tournaments on a given date are in the system before the generation is done).
[more...]

I’m about 40 percent of the way to the new standings tables. I’ve also decided to keep going with the sfmagic.org posts for a while, as I didn’t start them on 1 December as intended because the second draft wasn’t finished.
[more...]