In the most unexpected of places…
Poker archive
Sorry for the lack of up front communication, folks, but I decided I had to try restricting the hand converter to registered users to see if it would help solve any of the crushingly awful performance problems you’ve all been experiencing lately. At the same time, I’ve taken the comments off the page, so for the time being there isn’t a way of getting touch with me, but that’s ok, because:
- I know what the problems are
- I have a list far longer than both my arms put together, even if I stretch really hard
- You all think I’m ignoring them anyway
Well, 1 and 2 are certainly true. 3 is questionable - I really do plan to work on this again soon, but it’s kind of my third job out of three at the moment, and the pay seems better on the other two, so that’s where I’m focussing.
But to whet your appetites, I’ve done a little work on a super-duper version of the converter under Drupal. If you don’t know, Drupal is a CMS that’s a bit like Mambo and Joomla, only better. I’m having to learn as I go, but so far it’s shaping up to be pretty cool, with configurable options stored in your user profile, rather than stored as cookies, there will be fancy ways of reporting problem hands, and at some point I hope to expand it into a proper tournament or session replayer. Or something.
The possibilities are not quite endless, but we can dream. Perhaps I’ll even canvass all your thoughts, all you good users, and see what you’d like done.
Laters.
I’m still a little busier than I’d like to be, so I haven’t had time to work on the masterpiece that will be HandConverter 2.0, or to even fix the problems that are stacking up as comments against the hand converter. Please bear with me people, I haven’t forgotten you - as ever I am grateful to anyone who can find bugs (which isn’t always that hard, granted…) or send me hand examples to help me make the converter best in class.
I have a long term gameplan for something to do with the hand converter, but I don’t want to say too much about that yet. Regardless, I will put out a plain update before then.
Happy new year to you all!
I just increasingly can’t shake off the feeling that I could be doing something more productive, both financially and mentally, with my time than trying to laugh off the bad beats of the low limit grind. I’ve just managed to donk off $470 while chasing a $500 bonus, which means for about 40 hours of toil I get a princely $30 added to my bankroll. Which sucks ever so slightly.
I have a seemingly continuous series of ideas floating through my head at one time or another, all to do with making money on the web, or at the very least learning some new technologies and applying them in some fashion: whether it’s profitable or not, I am starting to think it will be more useful than repeatedly flopping the nuts only to lose on the river.
In a way, I would miss playing, though. Partly because at the back of my head I just know I’m still a good player. I’ve become very lazy, though, and I’m possibly the only player left not making use of all the wonderful tools that allow even the most average of players find an edge somewhere, so maybe I have only myself to blame, but then again if it comes down to which toolset you use to get the biggest edge, then I’m just no longer interested. What I would miss most, perhaps, is the community at ITH, which I wouldn’t be nearly as involved in, and depending on which of my ideas I pluck out of my head first, I would have to offer to give up my moderating duties there too. I’d be like a normal poster again - can you imagine anything worse? 
I guess since I probably would then no longer talk about poker or music at all on this blog I’d have to find a new name for it. But maybe that’s no bad thing, really.
I can almost hear the collective whoops as word spread that the hand converter is back online. I’ve disabled some plugins from the site and made a few changes here and there, and while the converter was offline, everything seemed to run pretty smoothly. I’ll be looking to see whether that continues now it’s back online, or whether everything grinds to a halt immediately. If it does, I’ll need to go deeper into what could be causing the bottlenecks (as if it could be anything other than shoddy code I’ve written…) in order to improve performance. Slightly worryingly, the first thing that happened after I re-activated the hand converter was that it loaded up a blank page for me…
I hope you all have better luck!
I made some hand converter updates yesterday, adding support for a few more sites (support which I cannot guarantee to be 100% because in two cases it is based on only one hand history), and fixed a couple of miscellaneous bugs. It looks like Party have changed their tournament hand histories recently, so I’m just working through some changes for that, because the converter seemed to be having trouble picking out blinds and antes.
If anyone has any sites they want supported, please let me know.