Yesterday an email informed me the new Dave Matthews Band CD has been posted… fingers crossed it’ll be with us tomorrow.
Every now and again there are new CDs that arrive in our household that demand a proper sit down and listen in their entirety on our 5.1 system, instead of via iTunes on our computers. Fear Of A Blank Planet was one that springs to mind (a true classic, especially in 5.1) and Experiments in Mass Appeal was probably the last one. Big Whiskey And The GrooGrux King is going to be the next one… my first opinions will follow in a few days. 
This week I rewrote the SQL to calculate the win loss averages for the Snooker players. The old version using the old database design ran to 40 lines of case and if statements. It was severely limited by my database knowledge several years ago.
The new version is a dozen lines, that has a nested query to calculate the percentages from aliases that count the scores. It delivers all the information ready to be output to the screen by the HTML class. Tidy.
Last night (before midnight, I’ll have you know 
) I managed to implement a jQuery slider widget for selecting the different seasons that I have data for over the years. Out goes the old menu page leading to each section of the site, in comes a stylish, when I do the graphics, slider which I want to look like the classic snooker hall wood and brass scoreboards.
jQuery makes it so easy, an amazing free javascript library.
Also in the order with the new graphics card was our long awaited replacement for our MP3 server, an Eee Box from Asus. They’re great little machines with an Intel Atom processor so their power consumption is very low and they’re almost silent. Oh and it has blue LEDs! The old out going Pentium 3 server machine, running Fedora, was getting noisy, not good for Steven’s room and his music recording.
The Eee Box set up
I upgraded the XP Home to Pro and copied the 80gb of MP3s to it, so we’re almost ready to swap it out and remap our network drives to it’s MP3 share.
The first attempt to copy the MP3s failed, out of space. Out of the box, the Eee Box is setup with three partitions, C: OS, D: Data and E: Restore. I quick Partition Magic session dumped the D partition and extended C to 150gb or so. That’s better.
It's tiny, did I mention it has blue LEDs!
I installed a shiny new nVidia 9600 GT today. Luckily I had a new PSU in the order. We try to keep a spare power supply at home, they seem to be the most likely part of a PC to fail. I had to fit the new PSU though, because the new card needed an extra power connection and my existing PSU didn’t have that type of connector on it. So really I need to get another PSU for our stock now.
So my PC is up and running again, working off my old laptop wasn’t too good. Although on the plus side I did install the latest version of Eclipse, that I didn’t know existed. Now I wonder how easy it’ll be to upgrade from 3.1 to Ganymede on my PC.
As the pictures show, my graphics card decided it was time to die. I was using it tonight, when suddenly the music stuttered and that nice random pattern appeared across the screen.
That's not quite right
I powered off the PC quick, but it was too late, the card is damaged. Grrrr. Scratch one nVidia 8600 GT. 
Interesting random pattern!
Big Whiskey And The Groogrux King is the title of the new upcoming Dave Matthews Band CD. Please let it be a vast improvement on the last one, Stand Up.
Having followed DMB for many years, Stand Up was a real low point for my tastes. Apart from a couple of songs, it washed over me without any real lasting gems.
The free taster track, Funny the Way It Is, indicates that they’re back on track. Great lyrics and even… a guitar solo!
Roll on the 2nd June .
I’ve added more classes to the Snooker App. A news table has been added to the database too.
I also spotted a glitch with the migration data. I forgot about walkovers, well the missing player in a walkover. The migration routine had created a new player without checking if the name was empty. Ooops. I’m glad I resisted the urge to migrate all the seasons that are stored in the old database format. Fully testing one league from the 2008 season has been manageable.
The next big step will be the SQL query to work out the player’s win loss averages. Also, with the new database design, I will be able to display a lifetime average (well back to 1996 anyway ) and many more statistics. History of wins and losses in any match will be interesting too.
All the data for displaying a full scorecard from the Snooker league app is working. Viewing the var_dump() shows all items and objects are correct.
Next job is display it. I’m thinking a AJAX/JSON call to display it as a pop-up might be nice.
Saturday was a good programming day, I almost completed all of data migration routine. Just the high breaks and match comments needed finishing today. The latest season migrated without errors… yata!
Next is the big task of the scorecard class, it’ll be a busy class.