New Full Tilt Client is Impressive

I'm a fan of Full Tilt's client in general. But the new Full Tilt client takes the cake. Very impressive:Finally, table filtering works well on a poker room.

The new Full Tilt hand replayer is also the bee's knees. It gives me some ideas for improving the Poker Copilot replayer.

Bad BBC News Stats Again

People who hang out with basketball players tend to be taller than average. So if you want to be taller, then you should befriend some basketball players.

That's clearly false logic. But BBC News ran an article that made a similar claim today. Their claim: 'Keep slim friends' to stay trim.

To be fair, halfway down the article, BBC News does include this paragraph:

The study authors from the University of Hawaii say they cannot tell from their work whether overweight teens influence their friends to become overweight or whether obese adolescents simply choose to flock together.

Breaking news: Something may or may not happen

It is highly likely that you, esteemed reader of my blog, have a better than average understanding of probability. One of my pet peeves is that journalists usually have a terrible understanding of probability.

Take this headline from BBC News, the world's 6th most popular news website, that imparts no useful information whatsoever:

Homes 'may rise in value in 2009'

Well sure they may. There's always a chance home values will rise. There's also always a chance they won't. This headline summarises what we all know: we can't be certain about what happens in the future. Something may happen and it may not.

The article's opening paragraph doesn't get better: we learn a building society claims there is a "reasonable chance" that home values in the UK will rise. As opposed to an unreasonable chance that they won't?

How much is that rise that may happen? There's a big difference in a rise of 10% and a rise of 0.1%. On a house worth 200,000 pound, that's 20,000 pound increase compared to 200 pound. A rise of 0.1% is not different from a fall of 0.1%, statistically speaking, if one takes a margin of error in measuring into account. It's a loss in real terms if inflation is running above 0.1%.

I'd like to hear the building society in question state the probability of a rise in home values by a certain amount. Then I'd like to see the chief economist of the building society put his money where his mouth is, and place a bet on a prediction market, such as Intrade.

Then we could get a meaningful headline, such as: "Nationwide says 35% chance of 5% rise in home values in 2009."

Poker Copilot 2 Screenshots

My graphic designer finished tweaking the new Poker Copilot 2 screenshots.

Poker Copilot 2.01 Released

As promised, I worked unwaveringly today towards fixing the initial teething problems with Poker Copilot 2. The first update, 2.01, is now ready for download, contains several minor bug fixes. Recommended for all.

A Glimpse Inside Poker Copilot Headquarters

"What does your home office space look like?", people seldom - if ever - ask me. But if you were to ask, the answer is this:



My office is almost suspiciously well-ordered for a computer programmer. My excuse: my office doubles as a guest room, and we often have guests. I can't be giving them a room with a messy desk to stay in, can I?

Although I live in the Cologne inner city, I'm lucky enough to have a view onto a pleasant courtyard; an oasis, even:



Here's the books to which I've most frequently been referring lately. All of them are gems:

Some Nice Poker Copilot 2 Charts

A very successful Poker Copilot 2 user posted these charts:

Teething Problems

So I woke up this morning to a mountain of support e-mails and crash reports. Well, not quite a mountain, but a fair-sized hillock.

This is normal for newly released software. Fortunately there are no major show-stoppers, just a few things that eluded me during the beta phase.

My plan for today:

• 1 hour of answering e-mails
• a few hours fixing the most heinous bugs in Poker Copilot 2
• the release of Poker Copilot 2.01
• a swim (healthy body, healthy mind)
  

Thank you to everyone who sent crash reports; these are awesomely helpful in finding and fixing problems. It was a crash report that gave me enough info to solve the nefarious Tunisian timezone bug.

A Million Hands in Poker Copilot?

Loyal Poker Copilot user Bold Bet asks,

How many hands can Poker Copilot 2 handle?

The maximum I've had in Poker Copilot 2 so far is 770,000 hands. I couldn't go higher because I ran out of test hands.

Let me know if you have a bigger Poker Copilot 2 database.

What's New in Poker Copilot 2?

There's now a real SQL database inside Poker Copilot. This means the former 150,000 hand database limit no longer exists.

The HUD is overhauled, shows up to 12 statistics at once and shows on multiple tables at once. It also will optionally show the hero stats just for the current table, to give an idea of the table image the hero has.

There's a hand replayer. Use the hand replayer to review your hands card by card - and learn from past mistakes.

There's a small detached window that shows the most recent mucked hands for all players.

Why did we add these features?
One simple reason: they were the most heavily requested features from users.

Download a free 30-day trial of Poker Copilot 2 now.

Poker Copilot 2: All Systems are Go

It's official. As of two minutes ago, Poker Copilot 2 is in full release.

From http://pokercopilot.com/download.html



I spent the last hours before release hunting down an extremely obscure bug. If your Mac was set to the Tunisian timezone and you had hand histories for April 2009, Poker Copilot would crash. Tunisia changed their daylight savings rules this year and my date library wasn't aware of the changes. Which caused another library to think April 1st, midnight, was late March 31st. Which caused yet another library - the charting library - to panic, as it thought it was finished dealing with data for March.

Ah, the life of a modern programmer! We have great off-the-shelf libraries, but occasionally, like petulant children, they refuse to play together. And then we have to act like mediating adults and force them to co-operate.

Now I'm taking the girlfriend out for lunch to celebrate.

Interview with PokerSoftware.com

Dan from PokerSoftware.com interviewed me about Poker Copilot 2.

Poker Copilot 2: The Final Beta?

I just uploaded what I hope is the final beta release of Poker Copilot 2. You can download it here.

This solves the final serious issue I mentioned yesterday. That issue prevented the HUD from working with PokerStars if your PokerStars app was somewhere other than in your Applications folder.

I've also turned auto-refresh back on, once all your hands are loaded. To be precise, the charts and stats auto-refreshed after each hand, if

• there are no more than 5000 hands in your database; OR
• Poker Copilot has finished loading all your hands

Sentence of the Day

From the seymour:cards blog:

if anyone was considering a mac but was worried about their poker suffering, I wouldn't: poker lives, and it lives on the mac!

The blog post has something to say about Poker Copilot:

Although it is fairly basic vs Poker Tracker 3 or Hold'em Manager, it does go someway to filling the void. I've only been using it for 24 hours but I had zero problems setting it up, it hasn't missed any hands, hasn't frozen or had any other compatibility tantrums. Something that neither Poker Tracker or Hold'em Manager can claim, at least in my experience.

That's exactly what I aim for with Poker Copilot. Software that simply works.

Where's Poker Copilot 2?

It's coming, it's coming!

There is only one serious known issue remaining. Once I fix this Poker Copilot 2 will be just about ready for release. Except I'll need to make new screenshots, a new video demo, and update the help text.

I've been quietly rolling out new beta releases every day or two. The latest beta, as always, is here. Thanks to those who have been looking out for new updates and trying them out.

There was an unexpected side-effect of releasing the beta: sales! I activated the "register" and "buy now" functionality in the beta for the sake of testing. I didn't actually expect people to use these features to buy version 2 yet. But some people did. Early adopters, you are a small software company's best friends.

Naiveté

In response to my post about Barack Obama's birth certificate, an anonymous commenter wrote:

C'mon Steve! New zealand is not on another planet where nobody knows the history of the US of A, where some kind of "community gaps" had and still have some importance to lots of people, to say it mildly!
The election of Obama does not erase USA's not so far racist past.

To an American my surprise may seem naive. But I've lived in four countries - New Zealand, Australia, UK, Germany - and have never seen an official form asking for my race. That's not to say that those countries have no race issues. But some effort is made to pretend they don't exist.

Anyways, now I'm curious to see New Zealand birth certificates from previous generations, to see if race used to be recorded.

Race on a US Birth Certificate

Here's a copy of Barack Obama's birth certificate:


As a New Zealander, something here amazes me: the race of his mother and the race of his father are recorded. Does this still happen today in the USA? For what purpose would Hawaii record this information?

Java and Synchronisation Bugs

Here's a Java class that can safely be used by multiple threads:

public class Threshold {

  private long threshold = 0;

  public synchronized long getThreshold() {
      return threshold;
  }

  public synchronized void setThreshold(long threshold) {
      this.threshold = threshold;
  }
}

Each public method is marked as synchronized.

What if a few months later someone adds another method:

public class Threshold {

   private long threshold = 0;

   public synchronized long getThreshold() {
       return threshold;
   }

   public synchronized void setThreshold(long threshold) {
       this.threshold = threshold;
   }
 
   public boolean isZero() {
       return threshold == 0;
   }
}

Suddenly it is not thread-safe. The person who added the new method didn't realise that all accesses to threshold had to be protected. Now the isZero() method might be checking the value of threshold midway between the setThreshold() method changing it. The results are unpredictable.

This is a bad problem. Here's why:

• the code compiles.
• the unit tests still pass.
• the app testers will not detect the bug
• almost of the time the code will still work. But sporadically, unpredictably, unfathomably, the code will fail.
  

I found - and fixed - such a problem in Poker Copilot a few days ago.

Currently the only way I know of to detect such problems is careful code reviewing. In a one-person company, careful code reviewing isn't possible. In most other software teams it is possible but doesn't happen.

So what can be done about it? I don't know. It would be nice if a class could be marked as synchronized. Then all methods would automatically be synchronized. It would also be nice if there existed an annotation to indicate the same thing. Our static analysis tools would be then able to ensure that all methods were indeed synchronized.

This is one of many examples that demonstrate how brittle thread-safe code is.

Poker Copilot Upgrades: Free for Some

If you bought Poker Copilot 1 on or after 22nd March, you are entitled to a free upgrade to Poker Copilot 2. Your license key for Poker Copilot 2 will be sent in the next week or so.

If you bought Poker Copilot 1 before 22nd March, you can upgrade for $29.95. You can buy an upgrade here.

Regards,

Steve
---------------------------------------------------
Steve McLeod
Founder, Poker Copilot
http://www.pokercopilot.com

Poker Copilot 2 Beta Released

Under the early access program (EAP), I've now released the first beta release of Poker Copilot 2. It's EAP build 27 and you can download it here: http://pokercopilot.com/eap.

There may still be bugs; I'm actively testing at the moment.

Improvements since the previous EAP build include:

• a one-third reduction in time needed to load hands into the database
• a much more stable HUD. I spent much time last week profiling the HUD, and fixing inefficiencies and threading problems
• the custom charts now are fully implemented

What is a beta release? From Wikipedia:

...software which has been released to users for software testing before its official release. It is the prototype of the software that is released to the public. Beta testing allows the software to undergo usability testing with users who provide feedback, so that any malfunctions these users find in the software can be reported to the developers and fixed. Beta software can be unstable and could cause crashes or data loss.

Java and IOException handling

What's wrong with this Java snippet?

  static String readFirstLineFromFile(String path) throws IOException {
      BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(path));
  }

The answer: if an IOException occurs, the FileReader is not closed. The calling method that catches the exception can report the exception but doesn't have the opportunity to handle the exception.

Here's an improved (although not perfect) version:

  static String readFirstLineFromFile(String path) throws IOException {
      BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(path));
      try {
          return br.readLine();
      } finally {
          br.close();
      }
  }

This is a "you can only find it through careful code review" bug.

Our C# colleagues have a language feature designed for these situations. Joshua "Effective Java" Bloch proposes such a feature for Java 7, called "Automatic Resource Management".

Why do I mention this? In keeping up with what's coming for Java 7, I stumbled upon this proposal. I realised that in Poker Copilot's Java code, I frequently use the poor idiom at the top of this blog entry. But I stand in good company: According to Joshua, 2/3 of the uses of the close method in the JDK are wrong.

Stack Overflow: A Knowledge Management tool that delivers the goods?

If you are a programmer and not yet using, abusing, and relying on Stack Overflow, you are missing out. When I ask a programming question on Stack Overflow, I normally get some helpful replies within minutes. This is almost-real-time, distributed technical support that gives the right answers.

How I use Stack Overflow:

• I ask questions to which I know an answer, in case a better way has been eluding me for many years.
• I ask obscure questions to save me hours or days of research and experimentation.
• I ask questions about "the right way to do things" when I learn a new technology.
  

Joel and Jeff, the Stack Overflow lads, are selling the Stack Overflow engine as a product. It might just be the enterprise knowledge management tool that finally works.

Paragraph of the Day

Tony Featherstone simultaneously laments and extols working from home:

Still, home-based work has its moments. On my first day, I shaved and ironed my clothes, thinking I should treat work seriously and look the part. That lasted a day before stubble, sneakers and tracksuit paints took over. As I write this blog, I have a scruffy look that only a mother could love.

Speaking from my own experience, I think he's right on the money throughout.

A Twitter Security Breach and Frustrating Password Policies

Do you work for a big corporation? Does the corporation frustrate you with password policies that seem unnecessarily complicated? You have to change you password bi-monthly. You have to use a combination of lower case, upper case, numbers, and punctuation. You can't reuse the last 7 passwords. And so on. It frustrates you. It frustrates me.

But then I read of a Twitter employee having her Google Apps account breached, by someone who guessed her insecure password. Confidential Twitter info gets into the hands of online tabloid journalists, hungry for a story. And then I realise the wisdom of these frustrating password policies.

Part of the joy of leaving corporate consulting and running my own one-person software firm is that I am freed of onerous bureacratic tasks. Yet sometimes those onerous tasks are necessary.

Custom Poker Copilot Icons

I believe the term is "user mods" :-)

Brieuc has further refined his alternative Poker Copilot icons. I really like them. My girlfriend doesn't. I guess it's a question of taste. However only one of us enjoys old 1950s German "Heimat" films - and it ain't me. So maybe I'm the one with better taste.

(And guys, let's keep the comments family-friendly this time, shall we!)

Easy Way to Improve Code Coverage

I have a bunch of unit tests that get automatically run over Poker Copilot several times a day. In theory, these help me detect when I accidentally break some feature while changing code elsewhere in the application. In practice, the unit tests are only a first line of defense - but a helpful one.

"Code coverage" is a measure (as a percentage) of how much of my code is covered by these unit tests. OCD types like to have high code coverage. Lazy people struggle to reach a double digit percentage. I oscillate between the two camps. Consider me "lazy OCD".

Typically to get the code coverage up, you write more tests. Over the last month I've been tidying things up in the code, in preparation for the coming release of version 2. Finding and deleting unused methods and classes reduced the lines of code in Poker Copilot by 13.6%.

So there it is: the easy way to improve code coverage is to delete unused code. Finding that unused code is a bit trickier - unless you have IntelliJ IDEA's wonderful, amazing, indispensable static analysis tools.

It's Official: Full Tilt Poker Approves of Poker Copilot

I received an e-mail today from Full Tilt Poker:

We can confirm with you that Poker Copilot is allowed to be used as long as it contains only hand histories from hands in which you yourself have participated.

But note:

[Customers must note] that adding other players' hand histories ... may result in permanent closure of their accounts.

So there you have it. Use Poker Copilot with Full Tilt, but don't add other players' hand histories.

Over at PokerStars, we also are on the list of approved products.

The Power of Crowdsourcing

Yesterday's Early Access Program (EAP) release was a disaster. While fixing some bugs last week I inadvertently added some multi-threading problems. These are the one-in-73 type problems: you might use Poker Copilot 73 times and only see the problem once, because they are subtle timing problems.

On the other hand, the release was very successful because it quickly revealed these problems. I fixed them late last night, added some checks that will make it harder for such problems to happen in the future, did some smoke-tests this morning, and have now released a new EAP build (#23).

That's crowdsourcing at work. Thank you EAP community!

Poker Copilot 2 Early Access Program Update

For the curious, the brave, and the desperate, Poker Copilot 2 early access version build 22 is available at http://pokercopilot.com/eap.

What's changed:

• improved stability. I hardened the HUD code this week as a result of some stress testing.
• bug fixes
• more stats on the Advanced Dashboard
  

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

There's now only one known crash-causing issue. I've added special information to the crash reports to help me track it down.

Why Poker Copilot Doesn't Use MySQL...

Loyal customer KeithX asks:

Why doesn't Poker Copilot use MySQL or (shudder) Postgres?

There's two main reasons:

1. User Experience
2. Speed

User Experience

Consider iTunes. iTunes is, fundamentally, a database with lots of data. The data is in the form of thousands of files that encode sound frequencies. In my case, iTunes has 13 Gigabytes of music in 2517 files. Plus 920 Megabytes of podcasts. Plus 14 Gigabytes of TV shows.

iPhoto is, fundamentally, also a database. This time the data is in thousands of files encoding photos.

In neither iTunes nor iPhoto is the end user expected to first install an SQL relational database system. The database is hidden from the user and managed so that the user simply sees what's important.

I aim for Poker Copilot to have the same seamless experience one finds in iTunes and iPhoto. The complicated database management is hidden from the user.


Speed

Using an embedded database engine - which Poker Copilot does - has the potential for greater speed than a separate database server like MySQL or PostgreSQL. To get all technical, communication between a piece of software and a database server involves (in common scenarios) creating a TCP socket connection, encoding the query in a standardised manner, sending the query over the socket, retrieving the results over the socket, decoding the results, and disconnecting. Often the overhead of connecting and communicating is the most time-consuming part of the process. (There are ways to speed things up somewhat, such as connection-pooling and client-side query caching.)

An embedded database engine, if engineered for speed, can operate faster.

Poker Copilot uses a Java-based embedded database engine called H2. It is open source, offers high performance, and uses SQL. It can be configured to offer high concurrency.

Poker Copilot World Domination Continues

Some Poker Copilot firsts this week:

• my first sale in Thailand
• my first sale in Venezuela
• my first two sales in some unlikely-sounding place in Canada called Saskatchewan

(Sorry Canadians, if that sounds condescending. But hey, you guys probably don't know where Waikato is in New Zealand is, right? Happens to be where I was born. Peace...)

Compliment

This is the best compliment I received in years:

Steve is like the Lucky Luke of software development

Lucky Luke never made it to New Zealand, so I didn't know at first what this meant. Clarification is here. It brought a smile to my face.

Poker Copilot + Full Tilt are Friends Again

There's a new Poker Copilot update that resolves the problems Poker Copilot has with the latest Full Tilt update. You can download version 1.81 here:
http://pokercopilot.com/download.html

Many thanks to Alex for helping me eliminate several possibilities. Many thanks also to Afsheen who spotted the clue that gave me the breakthrough and gave me what I needed to reproduce the problem.



A Technical Explanation
The recent Full Tilt update started writing empty (zero-length) summary files. As far as I can tell with limited information, this happened when you played a tournament over midnight. It would result in two summary files, one of which was empty.

Poker Copilot tripped up on this empty file, and stopped reading any more files. The thread which handles turning files into a collection of parsed games stopped, and there wasn't enough error handling in place to detect that the thread stopped.

Notably, Poker Copilot 2 does detect this situation in its error reporter.

Lessons I Learnt

1. When your software relies on another oft-updated product, it must be defensive to a level verging on paranoia. Assume nothing that holds true now will hold true in the future.
2. The first step in solving a problem is being able to reproduce the problem. All first efforts should focus on being able to reproduce the problem.
3. Customers get annoyed when the day after they buy Poker Copilot, it stops working. And rightly so.

Poker Copilot Update 1.80 Released

There's a new Poker Copilot update that resolves some (but not all) problems with the latest Full Tilt update. You can download version 1.80 here:
http://pokercopilot.com/download.html

This fixes the problem with Full Tilt tournament results not appearing.

With regards to vanishing statistics, Robert had success doing the following:

I also had to re-add the the hand history files for both Full Tilt and PokerStars to get Poker Copilot to recognize them. When I first started Poker Copilot after the update for some reason it looked like I hadn't played any hands at all.

For people still affected by these problems, I'm continuing to investigate.

Update/Plea: If you have these problems and you are a techie, could you please use Terminal to look in your Full Tilt hand history folder to see if there any hidden files/folders or otherwise unusual additions? If so, please let me know.

Full Tilt Update. Broken Poker Copilot. Sigh.

Creating software as a sorta, kinda add-on for other software can be headache-inducing, when there's no official integration involved. There's no well-defined interface between Poker Copilot and the online poker rooms. The hand history files which Poker Copilot uses have no published specification, and occasionally the format of those files changes slightly enough to break Poker Copilot.

And so every time Full Tilt Poker or PokerStars releases an update, I hold my breath, waiting to see if any damage has been done. Full Tilt and PokerStars seem to be in an arms race, so the updates come often. Which means I hold my breath far too often. It's not healthy!

Full Tilt released an update yesterday. Overnight my inbox filled up with "Full Tilt Update Breaks Poker Copilot" messages. So enough writing for now. Time for some fixing.

A Brief History of Poker Tracking Software

James Devlin writes:

...the online poker industry is without a doubt the strangest application of computer science and software development technique to a particular domain that I've ever witnessed or come across...

The whole piece is long, opinionated, and a bit spotty in places, but it's a fascinating read for anyone relatively new to the world of poker tracking software. No mention of Poker Copilot, though. :-)

I learnt a few things.

The Five-Year Gmail Beta Program

After five years, Gmail has finally moved out of beta. Poker Copilot 2 will have a substantially shorter beta period!

EAP: Where's the Poker Copilot HUD Console?

I neglected to mention some changes in today's Early Access Program (EAP) release of Poker Copilot. There is no longer a HUD control window. If you want to change HUD settings you can go to the Head-up Display menu and choose "Head-up Display Options". This is a quick way of getting to the HUD preferences.


Here's why I did this:
1) Poker Copilot EAP suffered from window-clutter
2) Most people will change the HUD settings once or twice, then never need to see the controls again
3) There's a principle in user interface design that says you should hide complexity from first-time users, but make the complex features easily findable as users become confident with the user interface.

The HUD is now always on when Poker Copilot is running. It is optimised to use minimal resources.

Poker Copilot 2 Early Access Program Update

When someone tells me that Poker Copilot won't start for them, I figure that there are others with the same problem who simply give up on the software immediately. Which is why I'm so grateful for people who endure start-up problems with EAP build after EAP build, aways giving me bug reports, until I solve the problem. Thanks Michael!

For the curious, the brave, and the desperate, Poker Copilot 2 early access version build 20 is available at http://pokercopilot.com/eap.

What's changed:

• improved stability and performance
  
• bug fixes based on crash reports
• custom chart by hands is now working

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

I'm hoping that this will be the last EAP version. The crash reports have slowed to a trickle as I've been fixing problems.

Profiling Java Programs on the Mac

Java 6 on the Mac finally gives us the goodness of Sun's VisualVM. This all-in-one Java profiler attaches to a running Java program. It shows threads and memory usage. That's somewhat helpful.

But overwhelmingly awesome is the ability to profile CPU usage and memory usage of any running Java program. Which objects are created the most? Which objects are hogging memory? Which methods are called the most and consume the most processing time?

To run VisualVM on your Intel-based Mac OS X, from Terminal type "jvisualvm".

I profiled Poker Copilot 2.0 and found way too much time was spent rendering the colourful "Mucked Hands Viewer". I gave it some rendering smarts and now it barely registers on the "time used" chart.

I identified other surprising time-eaters in Poker Copilot which I'll be dealing with in the days ahead.

Poker Copilot 1.77: Supporting PokerStars 5xVPP Tables

PokerStars released a new update overnight, which offers 5xVPP tables. To use the Poker Copilot HUD with these tables, you'll need to download update 1.77. You can download it here.