20,693.69 Zimbabwean dollars, that is:
I was flicking through the list of nations and currencies my payment processor, FastSpring, supports. It is an impressive list. It includes a disputed “non-self-governing territory:
A place I’ve never heard of:
And is sometimes in languages I can’t read:
To the customer it appears to be a part of the official Poker Copilot site. Actually it is served up on FastSpring’s secure servers:
Two obscure bugs turned up today.
First, someone played a PokerStars hand that was cancelled, because no-one coughed up the big blind. In a year or more of Poker Copilot, no-one previously reported this. Finding it was a stroke of luck and some good detective work from loyal Poker Copilot user Jonathan.
Second, if you stayed in a tournament until the stakes got crazy high, like hours and hours, then some of the summary screens couldn’t cope with the combined total of chips won/lost. Like 250K/500K crazy high. (For my fellow geeks, some summed values were too big to fit in a Java int.)
Both bugs have been located and eliminated. It was deeply satisfying.
The next update will contain the fix.
Two thoughts:
1. If there was a formal spec of the poker room hand history files, it would help me detect these razor-thin edge cases earlier.
2. When creating software that depends heavily on an informal interface with other rapidly-changing software, bugs will never stop appearing.
Poker Copilot 2.13 is now ready for download.
This is a bug fix and stability update. There are no significant new features.
What’s New?
What’s Fixed?
Update Instructions:
Now you’re done and ready to hit the tables.
Loyal long-time Poker Copilot user dbtoots89 uses the new filters to find a surprising leak:
Since starting my heads up journey, I always assumed that a majority of my losses came when I was out of position. When I am out of position, I am out of power. I am first to act so I don’t have the advantage of knowing what my opponent does on every street. I checked my Copilot and found something extremely surprising. I am winning when out of position and losing when in position.
Short Summary: No Update in almost 3 years. Dead Blog. They Failed.
In a forum comment, I read of iClip, a Mac OS X utility that allows you to have multiple items in your clipboard. Sounds good. Sometimes I wish I had such a thing. So I type iClip into Google and see this as the top Google result:
So far, so good.
I go to the site, it’s nice, stylish, polished. All good signs that this is a strong company. This bit jumps out at me:
Let’s see: 40,000 users times $30 a copy…more than a million dollars in sales. Yep, that’s reassuring.
Let’s download this sucker, I think to myself, and go to the Download page, where I see this:
Hmm, the newest version is almost three years old. No update since the days of Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4). That’s worrying. This could be a dead product.
Lesson: if you are going to have a date in your version history, you better release at least yearly.
Does it work properly on Snow Leopard? Maybe the blog will tell me. There’s a blog link in the main navigation bar.
Okaaaaaay. Not much of a blog. Never got past the first test entry. This site seems dead. I’m outta here.
I didn’t even bother downloading.
From Patrick McKenzie’s very long blog post/manifesto:
I have come to the conclusion, over the last three years, that working hard is overrated.
Although I’ve never met Patrick, he was a strong influence on my decision to launch Poker Copilot.
You asked for a place to discuss Poker Copilot. I listened. Discuss Poker Copilot.
I’ve been using FogBugz for Poker Copilot issue tracking. It has discussion forum software built in. It’s hosted by Fog Creek Software themselves, so I can trust them to keep the software updated when security flaws are detected. I’m using the free Startup edition, so it costs me nothing. It has spam and abuse detection built-in, which is a big, big plus. The search works pretty well and has no user-unfriendly Captcha. The design is simple and uncluttered.
That’s the good points.
You can’t use any kind of mark-up in your post. That, for me, is the bad point.
For free, I’m willing to accept a 90% solution.
So go post something illuminating!
Loyal Poker Copilot user Dorey detected that two of the Poker Copilot stats were suspicious:
Dorey went above and beyond in helping me locate the problems. These are now fixed and will be included in the next update. Historical values won’t be corrected, but hand history files read after you update will be correct. If you need correct historical values, then you’ll need to reset your database after updating.
Ongame Network’s Mac client is different from the other poker rooms. My attempts to create a working HUD are going nowhere.
Attempt 1: Querying the Accessibility API. The technique Poker Copilot uses to track table windows does not work with Ongame. I use Mac OS X’s Accessibility API to ask an application where its windows are, what size they are, and the text in the window title. Ongame’s software freezes software that uses this technique for roughly 30 seconds at a time.
Attempt 2: Querying the Windows Server. From Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) onwards, it’s possible to ask OS X directly for a list of all windows, including location, size, application name, and window name. This technique works for Full Tilt and Poker Stars, but in Ongame only the first letter of the window title text is returned.
I don’t know whether Ongame has intentionally made it hard to track this information, possibly as a counter-measure for poker-playing bots that use screen-scraping.
I am at a dead end. Unless a flash of inspiration strikes, Poker Copilot won’t have a HUD for Ongame rooms any time soon.
Today is a public holiday here in Germany, to celebrate the Day of German Unity. It commemorates the day in 1990 when East Germany and West Germany officially united.
A much more significant day to celebrate this would be November 9, the day in 1989 when the Berlin Wall was breached. I love quizzing Germans of their memories of that day. They range from “I was too young to care”, to “I went to see my grandparents for the first time in my life”.
Unfortunately, November 9th has other significance in Germany:
So it would be an unsuitable day of German celebration.