Ok, to be fair most of the time my internet connection is great – it’s nice and fast. But periodically it will go all wonky for a few days and then I want to ‘keep an eye’ on it. A bit tricky… However there are two good things: there’s a fairly simple web page on the router that gives me all its stats, and Be (my ISP) has an excellent forum with lots of helpful technical people & Be staff to give tips on what to do. So if I can gather useful info for them, I’m sure I’ll be able to fix it.

What I decided to do is only use Python to ‘scrape’ the data I wanted from the Router’s web page and the stuff it into some data store and give me a nice graph out of it. I did look at cacti/rrdtool but I would have had to install and configure lots of other things (as I’m on a Mac) and I just wanted to use Python ideally, because Mac OS X comes with Python pre-installed.

So instead, I’ve knocked up a simple script that reads the Router status once a minute and writes a row of data out to a sqlite database (which is very simple to knock up). Then I have another script that reads out of that database and produces a html page with a graph or two. I’ve used the Google Visualisation API to draw the graphs, because they have a simple python API for it and a nice timeline graph that I can use.

I’ve a little Mac mini that I can leave on running my little ‘monitor.py’ script and Mac OS X has ‘web sharing’ (using Apache web server) that I can use to invoke ‘report.py’ to produce some nice interactive graphs of the history of my router. (a quick link on how to set this up)

So now I will leave this running for a while and see what data it produces. When I have a LOT of data I should probably summarise per hour and/or per day, and not keep every single minute’s worth of data. I don’t need to worry about that too much yet.

I might even be able to use this approach at work, although we do have Cacti set up there, so that may be a better option, but it is very complicated to configure and this might be a simpler/more flexible solution – especially with lots of good graphing solutions now out there.

The scripts are here: speedtouch_monitor.zip (41 KB)
They should work with a Speedtouch 585 Modem set to it’s default IP address (eg any Be customer).
You will probably need to enter your router’s password in the monitor.py file.

Also here is an example report from report.py.

My previous prototype had some extra button squeezed in. This wasn’t great, because it made the space for all the other ‘pot ball’ buttons smaller, and also I just couldn’t work out how to make an icon for ‘safety’ or ‘missed long pot’.

My brainwave was to not put new buttons in. Instead I’ll make an overlay appear when the ‘swap players’ button is pressed and held down. The user can then drag up the screen to choose a short/long pot miss. If the user just presses down and releases their finger they will get a ‘safety’ which is roughly the same behavior as before. I think this will feel quite good in practice and also can be done without looking at the screen too much.

Here’s an idea of what the overlay will look like:

As well as being able to specify what kind of ‘not pot’ happened, there are times when you need to just swap which player is the ‘striker’. This happens at the start of a match or in a respotted black – the referee will flip a coin and allow the winner to choose, so there’s no way the App can know. This is rare enough that I’ve put it right up the top of the screen.

I think this will hopefully be the best solution; it doesn’t change the layout of the app for existing users who don’t care about stats, but allows advanced users to track different types of ‘missed shot’ easily.

Whilst I’m talking about the snooker scorer app I just want to thank one of its critics – SaiChinLi left a one star review of v1.1 in the UK AppStore and pointed out a number of scenarios where the app didn’t allow score to be kept.

One can deal with criticism in two ways and I always try to take it constructively – in this case, SaiChinLi pointed out some things I’d frankly forgotten to cope with and happily they weren’t too tricky to add. So version 1.4 of the Snooker Scorer app should hopefully fix all of the issues they raised and I’d hope they re-review the app at that point. So if you’re reading, thanks for the feedback! Please let me know if there’s anything else. I’ve also set up a new email address of snooker@technobubble.info for any snooker scorer feedback.

I’m always happy to add new features to the App because I use it as well – one of the rules I set for myself in app development on the iPhone was to only do things that I would use. I think it’s important to use your own applications generally as a developer, otherwise its easy to miss things and do a bad job.

In testing with Apple at the moment is a 1.1 update that will add

• Undo (which I was planning to add anyway but was mentioned by a Finnish reviewer)
• A bug fix – if the last ‘red and color’ you potted was a yellow, this would incorrectly have been considered as the last yellow. Now it will ask you to pot the yellow again, which is correct (pointed out by Ruud – many thanks!)
• Remove Red Ball – a new action on the menu, you can take a red ball off the table without affecting the score. Ruud pointed out that you sometimes need to do this in Snooker, e.g. if you pot two balls in a single turn that’s not a foul, but you’ll only get 1 point for it. Also you could foul by potting a color and a red. In that case the color would be respotted (and the opponent would get points) but the red would not.
• More info – the single line of information now changes every 2 seconds to show more information, including Current Break, Score Difference, Maximum Break, Points Remaining, Red Balls Remaining.

All in all this is a good next version – I’m very happy that I managed to get undo and an updating info line in so easily (the NSTimer class being easier to use than I’d expected).

There are three things I’d like to add at the moment.

First, a UK reviewer mentioned wanting to keep more player stats, which got me thinking. At the moment there are no stats, but I think I can add them relatively easily. Right now I just have a ‘swap players’ icon to end a break, but TV stat scoring distinguishes between three different cases:

• a missed long pot
• a missed short pot
• a safety – no pot attempted

If I can come up with some good icons for these (could be fiddly!) I could allow people to distinguish between these different cases (the initial break-off shot would count as a safety) then I could track lots of good stats such as:

• pot success rate (long, short, overall)
• safety success rate
• highest break
• average break
• average shot time (with some extra code behind the scenes)

I’d show these stats if you hold down a ‘stats’ icon, which I think would replace the current ‘swap players icon’. Something like this – but with icons instead of text:

Secondly I’d like to put in a more comprehensive settings screen that allows users to set up a game that’s in progress, so you can edit not just the name of players but the scores and balls remaining.

Finally, in a previous post I mentioned wanting to get some live scores downloaded from professional matches. I did look at the world snooker website but that was problematic for a couple of reasons; most importantly their terms and conditions don’t allow it, but also their scores are rather unreliable.

I think a better long-term idea is to allow users of the Snooker Scorer app to upload their scores (as they change them) to a web server and then let other Snooker Scorer apps to view the scores from that web site. That could be this web site in fact – I don’t think it would be a lot of bandwidth/usage and this website allows MySQL databases so I’ll look into it. I think this ‘crowd sourcing’ is the way to go; everyone could then benefit from just one person either watching the game from the audience, or at home watching the TV. There would be no legal issues regarding the data either.

I’ll try to get all of these changes into the Snooker Scorer app eventually, in the order I’ve talked about them. I’m getting into iPhone development now so hopefully it won’t take take too long. I’m optimistic about getting stats tracking in by next week. Right now I’m racing Apple’s approval process – it seems to take about a week to decide on each revision, by which time I usually have a new version to upload. So it looks like I’ll be keeping Apple busy with new versions for the time being (if you’re reading – sorry guys!)

There’s plenty more I would like to add to it, like working out how many Snookers someone is behind, collecting statistics for an entire match, allowing mistakes to be undone. I’d love to be able to get live scores into it somehow, so you can follow games as they happen (a bit like the wimbledon desktop app that IBM seem to do each year) but I’ll have to try and find a live score feed from somewhere. Tricky. Perhaps it can be ‘crowd-sourced’ from someone willing to sit on a web page and update the scores?

The main barrier to adding new features is time, and B’s macbook being dead again, so I have to share my iMac with her. Fingers crossed that the repair guys actually fix it this time.

Anyway – it’s been fun learning how to make an iPhone app so far and going through all the gubbins needed to get it on the app store. I don’t think Apple have made it too hard, although some parts (like tax forms) could be easier.

Now we’ll see if anyone likes it!

Update: Direct link to Snooker Scorer in iTunes app store.

A really nice idea is that of automatically turning off comments after a certain length of time (i.e. 3 months) as I’ve noticed almost all my comment spam is for OLD posts.

James McKay has already done this and offered it up to the internets here. It is made of 100% WIN and I like it very much indeed. It has many settings to fiddle with, although the defaults work right out of the box too.

I’m also using a ‘captcha’ service from ProtectWebForm.com that appears to be a free service – what nice people. They have a cunning method of detecting if you are using a proper web browser or something without Java Script, which most humans have turned on, and will only show you the “enter the magic secret code” form if it thinks you are an ROBOTZ!!!onetyone.

So far, after turning those on I have NO comment spam – wahey! I’m very happy.

Ahh my pics are rubbish anyways… but I shall have to sort it out for bobble’s site.

Hooray!

You can see my Co Comments here

One of the things I miss from 20six is being subscribed to any comments once you’ve made a comment in someone else’s blog. I have a few ideas on how to fix that – but that’s for another day. Today I’m going to tell you how you can keep track of comments.

The sharp-eyed amongst you might have already noticed that WordPress is quite good at providing RSS feeds. For blogs you can generally find the feed for the whole blog at [blog address]/feed/ – for example my article feed is here: http://technobubble.info/feed/
But here comes the clever bit – you can also get a feed of comments for each post in a blog, again usually by adding /feed/ on the end of the address.

So, what do do with all these feeds? Well I use Bloglines, which is a fee web service that will give you a simple web page full of all the feeds you are subscribed to. You can just go to Bloglines and (once registered) add a feed from the post URL – it will figure out the /feed/ bit by itself.

However, if you want to tinker with your WordPress blog and make it a teeny bit easier for people to do, you can edit your theme to put a direct link to Bloglines that will add your comments feed. I’ve done it for my site – see at the bottom of this article there will be a line that says something like “RSS feeds for comments on this post. Add Comment Feed to Bloglines.”

So, you need to find which file in your theme to edit. For my theme is was comments.php, but it can vary. Just find whichever line talks about RSS feeds for comments and stick it near there. The magical bit of PHP code you need to add is:

<a href="http://www.bloglines.com/sub/
<?php echo comments_rss(); ?>">
Add Comment Feed to <abbr title="Bloglines in an online RSS feed syndication service">Bloglines</abbr>.</a>

This will put a link on your page that readers can click on and go straight to the right bit of bloglines. the ?php bit just finds the link to the comment feed and then adds it to the Bloglines subscribe address, which is http://www.bloglines.com/sub/[link-to-subscribe]

Anyway – hope that’s clear. I might share more of my “things I’ve worked out about WordPress” here if people are interested? Hopefully it will be of help us make lovely blogs!

Here is a Windows version of a 20six blog downloader script I original wrote in PHP.
It should work quite nicely, and it’s good enough to recommend people using Windows give it a go!

Here it is:
Blog Backup for Windows 1.6 (50Kb zip file)

It should run on any recent flavour of windows, although it uses the .NET framework 2.0, which you may need to download from Microsoft (22Mb) if you don’t already have it. Sorry!

Recent Changes:
v1.6
Bug Fix

• Doesn’t crash when given src = "" tags

v1.5
New Features

• Now uses DIV tags to separate comments for easy importing (used by wordpress RSS Archive importer)

v1.4
New features

• Downloads images in comments as well as in blog

Fixed bugs

• Less picky about matching image tags now – just looks for the “src equals” and doesn’t care about case

v1.2

New features

• Now has a readme.txt
• Logs handy info to log-USERNAME.txt in the output folder. Handy for support.

Fixed bugs

• image links starting with “..” wouldn’t have been downloaded correctly
• the image links were being replaced with the wrong path

For interested programmers, here is the source: Blog Backup for Windows 1.6 Source Code which uses C# and Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. MIT license applies – do what you want with it, but it’s not my fault if it all goes horribly wrong, right? Good.

I may eventually write an equivalent Blog Uploader tool that will take the output of the Backup/archiver (which is an RSS “feed”) and then put that into the blogging service of your choice. (assuming it supports MetaWeblog API, or I implement other APIs like LiveJournal or MoveableType) However – it is better to try and get your blogging service to import the archived posts, so that they do not appear as brand new posts! That would be confusing…

WordPress RSS Archive importer v1.1

It is based on the RSS importer that ships with WordPress 2.0, but it has been changed to work with my 20six backup script and windows tool. These download comments as well as simply posts, and use html ‘div’ tags to indicate where each comment is, whilst keeping the same format as 20six comments (including ‘sweeties awarded’). It also does a better job than 20six at spotting comment spam – it will import them but flag them as ‘needs moderation’.
To use it, download the zip file, unzip and upload rss-archive.php to your WordPress installation at /wp-admin/import/ and then upload your archive-myblog-year.xml files to /import/ and your images to /images/, on your web server. (use any FTP program to do this; the details will vary according to your web site configuration)

Then simply go to the WordPress admin page at /wp-admin/ in your web browser, click on Import and then RSS Archive, and just choose the archive to use! I will be using this to import my old 20six posts to this blog later today, and bobble is going to be using it as well!

To archive your 20six blog:

Use the PHP Archive Script or Windows users may want to use my Windows 20six Backup tool. It doesn’t have full support for tagging comments yet, but it probably will do in a couple of days. (Currently the comments are imported as part of the post, rather than as ‘proper’ WordPress comments)

Updated: version 1.1 now copes better with blogs that use tables in comment formatting, rather than line breaks.