The Curious Case of Equatorial Guinea

Equatorial Guinea, a country in West Africa, has a population of 500,000. It's both one of the world's richer countries and one of the world's poorer countries.


Rich, if you measure by GDP per capita. How rich depends on who's figures you read. They vary between ranking Equatorial Guinea as richer than Luxembourg (very rich), and as rich as an average European Union country (pretty darn rich).

Poor, if you look at the United Nations Human Development Index. 8% of children die before their 1st birthday. 30% unemployment. Massively corrupt ruling elite who steal most of the wealth.

And now the tenuous Poker Copilot link: Stats can give a misleading impression. It's important to look at more than one measurement. Even a wide range of stats can't beat first-hand experience.

Poker Copilot 2 Early Access Program Update

For the curious, an updated Poker Copilot 2 early access version is available at http://pokercopilot.com/eap

What's changed:

• it works on PowerPC Macs
  
• the mini-dashboard charts are working again
  
• the database is quicker. I loaded 720,000 test hands into the database this afternoon without a hiccup.
  
• there's a new window that allows you to monitor the loading of hands
  
• charting by date works again and has some improvements
• a "crash reporter" will help you automatically notify Poker Copilot headquarters with important details when things go wrong
• small tweaks based on your feedback
• small bug fixes also based on your feedback

Known problems:

• The HUD is not available in this version (it's a temporary thing!)
• charting by hands is unavailable
  

You can run the EAP version without affecting Poker Copilot 1 at all.

To keep things progressing, I'm going to try moving to a weekly release cycle.

PokerStars Update meet Poker Copilot Update

I checked my e-mail on this sunny Saturday morning. Many e-mails, all saying the same thing: "I updated PokerStars and now the Poker Copilot HUD is broken." Only for tournaments, mind you. So I delayed my planned swim and set to fix the problem.

It's now fixed in a Poker Copilot update you can download. It's version 1.73 and you can download it here: http://pokercopilot.com/download.html

Poker Copilot 2 ETA? No!

I get e-mails frequently asking when Poker Copilot 2 will be released. And I always say, "I don't know." Why?

1) As a one-person show, I am susceptible to unexpected delays due to sickness, computer malfunction, family tragedies, or an overwhelming and spontaneous compulsion to spend two weeks on a Spanish beach.
2) Software products get delayed. Always. Things take longer than expected. Bugs appear and eat previous schedule days. Some planned feature turns out to be unusable, difficult to implement, or unstable.

1) + 2) = If I promise a date, I'll miss it. I don't like breaking promises. So if I'm not certain I can keep a promise, I don't make it.

There's a set of features I'm including in Poker Copilot 2. Once they are done, I'll do some dedicated testing. Once that seems stable, I'll release a beta version for wider testing. And when that seems stable, Poker Copilot 2 will be released.

HTML 5 and 3D Animation

Software developers, if you are using Safari 3, check out this demo of what can be done with HTML 5. This stuff works already. Today.

The next few years will bring us some astonishing web applications.

A Change of Opinion

While entering Frankfurt train station last week I had to walk through a gauntlet of smokers gathered around the main entrance. "How dare they?" I haughtily thought to myself. " How dare they force me to endure this carcinogenic smoke in order to catch a train?" Yes, I am an arrogant, bigoted anti-smoker. I loudly complain about people smoking in my vicinity. Let people smoke but don't expose me to the effects, I say.

But after passing through the gauntlet last week, I had a sudden change of judgement. Second-hand smoke apparently increases the risk of cancer. But how is this different to my own activities that also negatively impact on others? When I drive, I force pedestrians and cyclists to involuntarily breathe my car's carbon monoxide exhaust. When I fly, I force people living near airports to suffer noise pollution. How do they sleep?

The only difference is that smokers can see the passive sufferers around them. But with the people I make suffer, they are out of my sight. It doesn't mean they suffer any less.

Free Poker Copilot Upgrades

I often get asked, "if I buy Poker Copilot now, will I need to pay for an upgrade to Poker Copilot 2?"

The upgrade to Poker Copilot 2 is free if you buy version 1 now.

Anyone who buys Poker Copilot after March 2009 gets a free upgrade to Poker Copilot 2 when it gets released. Because Poker Copilot 2 will cost more that version 1, you'll pay less than waiting for version 2. Plus you'll benefit from having Poker Copilot help you now.

Sitting Out in a Tournament + Stats

Loyal Poker Copilot user Terence describes a common tournament situation:

Two players have been sitting out for the first 36 and 50 hands respectively. You would believe these two are so tight if you didn't know they'd been sitting out. Their true stats turned out to be around 30% to the flop not 2% and 50% to the flop not 3%.

Can you please do something about this or at least include the option 'count hands sitting out' or not.

It's a problem...officially the players are "sitting in", paying antes and blinds, losing money, and possibly even sometimes winning. But actually the players are "away from keyboard".

What's your opinion in how to treat players sitting out in a tournament? Record stats or not?

Macs, Students, and Poker Copilot

A surprisingly high percentage of my Poker Copilot customers have e-mail addresses that end in .edu. This means they study or work at US universities or schools. Surprising because everybody knows students don't buy software, right? And students can't afford Macs, right? Which only leaves faculty, and surely there are not that many economics and maths professors playing online poker on their Macs in the evenings, right?

Therefore I find this photo revealing:


It looks like I've been making some false assumptions.

Making Websites Readable

Problem: If, like me, you are over 30, you probably find some websites are a strain on the eyes. Esepcially towards the end of a working day.

Solution: Go to the Readability project. Drag the "bookmarklet" link you find there to your bookmarks toolbar. Then, when you find a website hard to read, click on the bookmark. The page will be magically transformed into the most readable thing the web can offer. Most of the time. Suddenly the words will want, need, demand to be read.

For example, the blog entry you are currently reading becomes:

Sentence of the Day

From the back story of Panic, an independent, 2-person Mac software firm:

It seems you can either be free to do anything you want, to create anything you dream of without answering to anyone, or you can be rich. You're not likely to be both.

As I consider where I want to go with Poker Copilot, this was a great story to read. Not that AOL or anyone in particular is knocking on my door at the moment. But, you know, if they were, and I had a weighty decision to make...

Why Windows is Better than Mac OS X for HUDs

Since switching from Windows to Mac OS X, I've become a rabid member of the "Mac OS X is soooo much better at everything" camp. Zealous, raving, irrational, and happy. So it causes me great pain to acknowledge that developing a poker Head Up Display (HUD) is easier under Windows.

Here's why: On Windows, it's straightforward to write software that hooks into another application's window. I can write software to draw whatever I want within the application window. It's startingly easy to do.

On Mac OS X, there is no documented way to do this. Any attempt leads to great pain. Poker Copilot deals with this by keeping track of the currently-focused poker window's position and size and attempting to align a HUD window with the poker window. The HUD window belongs to Poker Copilot and is not really connected to the poker room. It only seems to be. This is the reason why Poker Copilot only shows the HUD for one poker table at a time. This is a fragile approach.

As a general principle, it's good that Mac OS X makes it difficult to hook into another application. It prevents possible security and stability problems. (I did warn you that I've become a rabid Mac fanboy!) It's not good when trying to make a good HUD though.

Enter Mac OS X 10.5 aka Leopard. It provides a new Apple library for developers that lingers somewhere between documented and undocumented. Let's call it sub-documented. The documentation largely consists of a demo app. This new library allows Poker Copilot to closely monitor any changes to all poker tables, and finally allows a HUD as good as the ones used by our endarkened Windows brethren. Including a HUD on multiple tables at once.

And so I get to my point. Due to these HUD issues, there is a good chance that Poker Copilot 2 will only work with Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) upwards. That _was_ my plan. But the #1 feedback I've received from the first Poker Copilot 2 early access program is, "Hey, it doesn't work with Tiger? What's gives?" Oh boy... I'm going to have to give this some thought...

Alternative Poker Copilot Icons

Does Poker Copilot's sad king icon make you despondent? Loyal reader and Poker Copilot user Brieuc created a couple of alternative icons for Poker Copilot.

I particularly like the one with a green spade symbol wearing a pilot's cap and scarf.

The NY Times Reporter Who Should've Known Better

There's a great article in the New York Times, written by a man who should have known better. He's an economics reporter who was aware of - and wrote warnings about - the craziness and dangers of the US mortgage industry over the last few years. And yet, being an irrational human, who acts on emotion as much as cold-blooded reasoning, he took out a sub-prime mortgage he couldn't afford and eventually went delinquent on his loan.

It reminds of those times when I'm playing Hold'em, on the last table of a tournament. I'm holding an unsuited Ace and Jack with a not-so-great flop, I know - through cold-blooded reasoning - that the odds are against me, I'm playing against someone who is almost certainly holding a better hand, and yet my emotion tells me to call his all-in raise! And I do and I lose.

It seems to me the best poker players can turn off their emotion and act only on reasoning - not just on easy plays, but in game-winning (and game-losing), high-stakes, high-pressure situations when the emotion is so strong.

Poker Copilot 2 Early Access Program

Poker Copilot 2 is far from finished. But if you are like your software to be cutting-edge (read: unfinished and buggy!) then you are welcome to try the first early access version of Poker Copilot 2.

You'll find it here: http://pokercopilot.com/eap

What it includes:

• mucked hands viewer
• hand replayer (double click on a hand in the mucked hands viewer or the recent hands summary)
• a database that allows any number of hands - although I've only tested it up to half a million or so
• better statistics screens

Known problems:

• It's somewhat sluggish
  

You can run the EAP version without affecting Poker Copilot 1 at all.

Solution for the Full Tilt "Hand History in the Future" problem

Poker Copilot 1.72 is now available for download. This fixes a couple of bugs in determining the table size. It also includes a work-around for those of you affected by Full Tilt hand histories which sometimes erroneously include a game time 30 minutes or so into the future.

If you have this "Hand History in the Future" problem, then here are the steps you can take to fix it:

1. Download Poker Copilot 1.72.
2. Install Poker Copilot 1.72
   
3. Run Poker Copilot, go to the Preferences, choose the "Obscure" panel, and select "Auto-correct invalid Full Tilt hand times"

You can tell if this bug affects you the next time the Poker Copilot HUD misbehaves by select Tools -> Console, and looking for this message:

WARNING: Full Tilt game #12191638279 has future game date:

Ghent: The Meatless City

One day a week at least. As a vegetarian I find this freakin' awesome:

The Belgian city of Ghent is about to become the first in the world to go vegetarian at least once a week.

Okay, Cologne, I challenge you to follow suit. And Frankfurt. And Melbourne.

Google Visualisation API review in 4 words

Two Enthusiastic Thumbs Up!

When I'm not working on Poker Copilot, I still do a couple of days IT consulting per week. For my current gig we're charting loads of historical statistical data. Exchange rates, GDP, inflation rates, unemployment, all that sort of stuff. The user chooses from any of tens of thousands of series and can compare them in various ways.

Yesterday I took a look at Google's new Visualisation API. I experimentally added an interactive time-line a la Google Finance to our project. Within a couple of hours I had working interactive charts that worked with any of our data. I also had sortable-within-the-browsable data tables. Most of the time was spent shaping our data in a way that the Google Visualisation API could use it. It was almost embarrassingly simple to add this interactivity to our project within only a couple of dozen lines of JavaScript.

Sneak Preview at an upcoming Poker Copilot feature

Here's a video of me playing a hand on Full Tilt Poker, and then - I'm so excited I can hardly say it! - watching it on the Poker Copilot Hand Replayer. It's still under development, and it's still uglier than sin, but it's coming...

Poker Copilot HUD Problems with Full Tilt

It seems that in the last week or so Full Tilt's hand history files have some occasional errors. Some hands are recorded as having been played a half-hour or so into the future.

This really confuses the Poker Copilot HUD. With these errors in the hand history file Poker Copilot can't reliably tell who is currently sitting at your table.

How can you tell if this is affecting you? When the HUD misbehaves, take a look at Poker Copilot's Recent Hands summary. In the final column, do some of your hands appear to have been played 30 minutes or so in the future? Then this problem affects you.

There is no work-around, unfortunately. But I'd be grateful if you report your issue to the Full Tilt support forum. Please post the erroneous hand history file, if you can find it, so that Full Tilt can see evidence of this problem.

Sentence of the Day

From our arch-hero, Joel Spolsky's latest article in Inc. Magazine:

It's inspiring to know that starting with the premise of treating your customers well really does pay off.

The New Poker Copilot Website Design

Way back in November, I mentioned that I wanted to get the Poker Copilot website redesigned by a pro. The reason: apparently it's an important part of improving sales. It's now done.

Bob Walsh recommended Stefanie Fontecha of Fontecha Designs as a top notch web designer, so I contacted her. She told me it would be some months before she could get to me, because she already had a queue of clients. That's a good sign, right? If she had a queue of clients, then she was probably pretty good. That was my thinking.

It turned out to be better than that. Stefanie is a rare creature, a real "twofer". Twofer? With Stefanie I got two-fer-one, someone who does web design AND understands the technical nuts and bolts underneath, someone who can work with JavaScript and knows how to integrate those fancy web tools like FeedBurner and Get Satisfaction directly into my site.

To say I am pleased with the end result is an understatement. The little touches she added of her own choosing added even more value. For instance, the Poker Copilot demo video is embedded into the bottom of each blog article. Exellent idea. Another example: the latest blog article headlines are now included in the "About Poker Copilot" page. I didn't even know that was possible without server side programming.

Now let's see if sales improve!

[BTW: I never met Stefanie in person. We didn't even have a telephone call. All our communication was through e-mail. She is somewhere in the US, and I am in Germany. So I guess you could say I "offshored" the work to the US!]