Cool new stuff from Fencing Time & askFRED.net

[peet]

Hi everybody-

Here's a little shameless plug (in the form of a feature upgrade notice ):

Beginning now, users of Fencing Time version 1.4 who upload results to askFRED.net will notice that their pool sheets and DE tableaus are also uploaded with them. No extra action on the user's part is necessary.

The first tournament to benefit, the Western Washington Division Mid-Winter Open. Check out the results, and here's one of it's events' pool sheets, and here's the DE tableau from the same event.

So, now you can track your pool performance, and see it's effect on the DE. See exactly who fenced who, and what the score was. (ok, i'll admit, sometimes i'd rather not be reminded of the score...... )

So there's another good reason to upgrade your Fencing Time to the latest version!

Thanks to all our beloved users!

-peet
the FRED guy

[Rolls]

Wow. I can't tell you how cool this is. This is type of inovation really helps fencing. And the results are shown in such a pretty layout too.

Now, I'm going to be shouting to all the tournament organizers in my area to use Fencing Time just for this feature.

Rolls.

[wflaschka]

Wow. Pretty soon, peet will be positioned to have the biggest (and only?) database of Fencer-on-Fencer results.

Over the years, lots of people have had ideas about a performance/training database. Basically a big hunk of data that produces statistics. As more tournament results get put into askFRED, it will become very compelling for coaches and others, to run queries on the data. In fact, this could be a new revenue stream for the site.

As a web programmer, I also have to say I'm very impressed by how great askFRED is.

[foildad]

Very Cool. Every club in our division except for ours is still using Xseed. Maybe now they'll see the light.

[telkanuru]

Hate to rain on parades, but the NE division has been doing this sort of stuff with En Guarde for ~2 years. Having it centralized is kinda nice, tho.

[peet]

Thanks for the kind words everyone!

wflaschka is right on about the power of having the data too: Once there is enough of it in FRED's db, some very interesting questions could probably be answered. Even now, with a little creativity, FRED's "super search" page can tell some interesting stories. For instance, I once used it to prove that statistically speaking, it is actually easier to earn a rating in epee than in foil. As soon as there is enough pool & DE data in the db, I'm gonna add some search criteria to the "super search" that hit the bout data (think "How many times have i lost a final 8 bout 15-14?").

Hate to rain on parades, but the NE division has been doing this sort of stuff with En Guarde for ~2 years. Having it centralized is kinda nice, tho.

No worries! You're not raining on any parades at all. It's cool people are doing similar things with EnGuarde. In fact, the EnGuarde XML output provided some good ideas on how Dan & I could add this stuff to our existing XML data transfers. Also, since the formats are related to one another, I hope to one day support integraton between EnGuarde and FRED the same way that FT & FRED work together. (xSeed too, but that's gonna be waaaaay harder.)

I once tried to get Adam Blake up there at PDF to help me understand how to do it, but it never happened, unfortunately.

Anyhoo, Thanks again everyone....

-p

[telkanuru]

I once tried to get Adam Blake up there at PDF to help me understand how to do it, but it never happened, unfortunately.

Yeah, he runs tourneys nicely. In any case, he has a 'how to use En Guarde' page which is linked to from the PdF page (www.prisedefer.com)

[peet]

Yeah, he runs tourneys nicely. In any case, he has a 'how to use En Guarde' page which is linked to from the PdF page (www.prisedefer.com)

yeah, i read that page, and looked through his pack of "tuned" EnGuarde support files, but i'd need to hack through them quite a bit to make it work smoothly with FRED, and as the comments, field names, & such in those files are all in french, it made it kinda hard without being able to ask a human some questions.

Not to mention i run macs over here, so i couldn't even actually run EnGuarde until i recently installed VirtualPC.

If anyone were to persuade him to contact me, I'd be only too grateful...
peet@askfred.net

Or maybe i should just try emailling him again....

cheers!

-p

[R. Exnicios]

......

Not to mention i run macs over here, so i couldn't even actually run EnGuarde until i recently installed VirtualPC.
...

Wait! What? Is there a way to get Fencing time on a Mac? And before people start the Mac vs. PC wars. I live in a Mac/PC world. My wife works for IBM and I use a Mac!

Peet - Great job on Askfred!!!

Cheers

R

[peet]

Wait! What? Is there a way to get Fencing time on a Mac? And before people start the Mac vs. PC wars. I live in a Mac/PC world. My wife works for IBM and I use a Mac!

Sorry, no. FT is built on .NET, and as such is currently Win-only. I keep threatening to learn Java so i can port FT to mac, but you know how those things go....

And before anyone starts telling me about mono (a port of .NET for other platforms), yes, there is that, but honestly, I'd rather start fresh in Java than wrestle with .NET outside of it's native habitat.

Actually, to be more precise, you can run VirtualPC, and then FT inside of that, if you really want to run FT on your mac. That's what I do for testing purposes. It's a little slow, because my machine (dual 450mhz G4) is a little weak for the considerable resource needs of VirtualPC

Peet - Great job on Askfred!!!

Thanks!



-p

[noahz]

And before anyone starts telling me about mono (a port of .NET for other platforms), yes, there is that, but honestly, I'd rather start fresh in Java than wrestle with .NET outside of it's native habitat.

This might start some sort of flame-fest but....

.NET is basically a knock off of Java. Aside from some trivial keyword differences, C# looks and acts like Java.

See: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/11/18/152437/24

As long as you de-coupled program logic and presentation, the only tricky part in the port will be the Windows Forms, which has no direct equivalent in Java. There your choices are Swing or SWT, both of which are almost completely controlled by code, not graphical editors. Fortunately, the popular Eclipse IDE has some Visual Editor plugins that work fairly well (however, you still need to know the underlying code to know how to use it).

N

[dberke]

This might start some sort of flame-fest but....

.NET is basically a knock off of Java. Aside from some trivial keyword differences, C# looks and acts like Java.

See: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/11/18/152437/24

As long as you de-coupled program logic and presentation, the only tricky part in the port will be the Windows Forms, which has no direct equivalent in Java. There your choices are Swing or SWT, both of which are almost completely controlled by code, not graphical editors. Fortunately, the popular Eclipse IDE has some Visual Editor plugins that work fairly well (however, you still need to know the underlying code to know how to use it).

N

You are correct - C# and Java are so similar in syntax and behavior that a port theoretically wouldn't be too difficult.

Alas, you also point out the biggest hurdle - the UI. Since Fencing Time is heavily reliant on Windows Forms for its UI, a lot of effort would be needed to recode all of the windows, dialogs, and custom controls in whatever Java UI package was chosen.

Also, and I'll be honest here, some business logic managed to leak into the presentation layer. I'll be fixing that with my latest refactoring of the code (for Fencing Time v2.0) so hopefully that will make it much more port-friendly.

Dan

[Mergs]

Wait! What? Is there a way to get Fencing time on a Mac? And before people start the Mac vs. PC wars. I live in a Mac/PC world. My wife works for IBM and I use a Mac!

Peet - Great job on Askfred!!!

Cheers

R

Ah, one of those mixed marriages!

[Gav]

Very nice - I am impressed. I have one small criticism. The seperation between Fencer and club. I don't like the way they are seperated by '---'. I think it would look nicer if they club was entered into a seperate cell..

Told you it was a small criticism.

Keep up the good work.

[gladius]

Great improvement and a great job! Congratulations!

And now some suggestions...

1. It would be nice if the data were presented in black and white without background color making reading easier.

2. Page(s) should be printable and/or in PDF format for easy access

3. Present the DE tree in a way which is easy to print and see in one or two pages

In my opinion, a nice presentation is what the Germans do, which I prefer to the French, even though the French with all the colors is nice also.

Check this one done by the Germans covering a single weapon/gender tournament of 206 fencers with two series of repechage from 64 and 32, and DE for final 8.

http://www.fechten.de/cgi-bin/smarta...04_ajgd_dd.pdf

Anyway a great improvement already. Keep up with the good work!