For all of last week, I ran my one-person company, Poker Copilot, from a boat, while I sailed in the Adriatic Sea.
A friend of mine had a week’s free access to a 41 foot cruising yacht in Croatia. At very short notice he asked me if I wanted to join. The only major expense would be the last-minute peak season airfare from my home in Barcelona to Dubrovnik. My answer: “Hell, yeah!”
But there was a problem. I’m running a one-person software business. And no matter where I go for holidays, I like to spend at least an hour a day answering customer emails, making sure the discussion forum has no unanswered messages, analysing any crash reports, and responding to issue reports. And I was going to be on a boat for a week. As it turned out, the problem was solvable.
The first issue was Internet connectivity. Croatian Telecom sells a prepaid SIM card package aimed at tourists for €7. Load up some credit, and a daily 3G unlimited data connection cost only €1.50 per a day. We were within good 3G range almost the entire time. I used my iPhone as a “personal hotspot”, aka tethering, and could work on my MacBook Pro from the boat, while at sea. The bandwidth wasn’t good enough for big uploads, but it was great for emails and surfing.
The second issue was power. For the whole week we never docked where there was AC power for the boat, so we had to rely on the boat’s battery. That meant I couldn’t recharge my MacBook Pro, which requires mains power. Mindful of this, I rationed the computer’s power over the week. This meant that I couldn’t do any programming, as that rapidly drains the battery. Astonishingly, with careful usage, the battery lasted all week. If desperate I could have taken the computer to shore in any of numerous small harbour villages and charged it.
The third issue was seasickness. While my friend was skippering, I’d go down to the cabin for an hour to do my work. I discovered that while sailing, working in the cabin makes me feel queasy. Even as I write, the memory of working in the cabin is bringing back the queasy feeling. The solution to this would be to do the work before setting sail in the morning, or after anchoring in the evening. Instead of hiding in the cabin while sailing, it is much nicer to be on the deck, enjoying the beautiful Dalmatian coast.
I wish I could describe how blissful it is to start the day by waking up on a yacht, having a coffee and some breakfast, then diving straight off the yacht into the clear and calm Croatian waters. And to be able to run a business at the same time? Superb.
If you turn on player names in Poker Copilot’s HUD, you’ll see the player name for each player, with a white underlined bar:
As of the next update, tournaments will use this white underlined bar to show each player’s M-ratio. It works as follows:
A green bar indicates an M-ratio of at least 20:
If a player’s M-ratio is less than 20, then a segment of the line will be coloured. The M-ratio determines both the colour AND the amount of the segment that gets coloured. The colour is the same colour used to show the M-ratio stat. The amount of the bar coloured is your M-ratio divided by 20.
For example, if your M-ratio is 15, then 15/20 (75%) of the bar is coloured in yellow:
As a player’s chip stack gets small, relative to the stake level, so too does the M-ratio, and hence less and less of the bar is coloured.
The idea of this is to make it easy to quickly determine relative stack sizes in a tournament.
Poker Copilot 4’s Dynamic HUD was causing some people to get warm laps.You know the problem; you have your computer on your lap, you are running some software that pushes your computer’s CPU, and it therefore gets so warm it is uncomfortable to have on your lap.
This seemed like an optimising situation “for experts only”. Excellent! Us programmers love the chance to do some necessary optimisation.
The next rule is:
3. Profile before optimising
I used Java’s excellent VisualVM tool to do this. I discovered the screen scraping code was taking way too long, and making the CPU do way too much work So, over the last few days, I took my easy-to-read, modular code and squeezed every bit of performance out of it that I could. Now I have hard-to-read, compact code. Usually that’s bad. But when it improves the speed of the screen scraping code by 15 times, it is good.
Last night I tried playing online poker with the optimised Dynamic HUD, while my MacBook Pro was on my lap. To really beef up the test, I did this on a hot summer’s night in Barcelona in a room with no air-conditioning. The Max§cBook Pro stayed pleasantly cool.
The next update of Poker Copilot will feature these improvements, thereby solving the uncomfortably warm lap problem.
This version won’t auto-update – you’ll have to download it manually.
What’s changed since 4.00
Hand Replayer now shows the number of the hand in the current table – eg 1/67, 2/67, 3/67. This could be the # of hands in the current tournament, the current stake level, the current day, etc.
New “Tournament by Type” screen, shows you tournaments grouped by buy-in and # of players.
Tournaments by Date/Hands by Date now uses a thin line on charts when there are many data points.
Recent Tournaments now has a footer row, showing totals.
You can edit player notes from the HUD. Right-click (or ctrl-click) and select “Player Notes…”
Added support for PMU Poker (French poker room), a skin for PartyPoker.
Substantial performance improvements in the Dynamic HUD.
What’s fixed since 4.00
Fix: Dynamic HUD now works in 10-max PokerStars tables.
Fix: Some Barriere Poker hand history problems are solved.
Fix for PokerStars audit files to handle currency conversion rows
Some people have been emailing with problems getting the Dynamic HUD working on Zoom Poker. So here’s a video demo showing you how to use Poker Copilot with Zoom Poker (best watched in HD):
The most important things:
In PokerStars, use a “Nova” theme
In Poker Copilot’s Preferences, turn on the Dynamic HUD
Poker Copilot turned 5 years old yesterday. On 30th June, 2008, I announced:
Day 30: Launch!
It’s 30th June, 8:43pm, it’s the target launch date, and I’ve made it.
A few minutes ago I uploaded the live version of the Poker Copilot website. Now you can download the trial version. You can also buy Poker Copilot.
Let me just reach over my own shoulder and pat myself on the back. Okay, done. That felt good. Now I can take a break from development for a few days at least. Time for me to fire up this Poker Copilot thing and see if it can’t help me play a mean game of poker.
As a birthday present to all Poker Copilot 4 customers, I’ve updated Poker Copilot to 4.03, and added a new “Tournaments by Type” summary:
Use this Tournaments by Type summary to see which tournaments are most profitable for you, according to buy-in and # of players. Naturally you can drill down into each tournament type to see specific tournaments.
I’m looking for a knowledgeable online poker player who is capable of writing good, 250-300 word articles for my online poker niche blog.
The blog does specifically cover playing poker on Mac OS X so it is required that you are using (or have access to) a Mac for playing online poker, as articles are going to include reviews on poker rooms and software for the Mac.
I will be researching target worthy keywords and you will be in charge of writing an article that targets those keywords. I can assist with SEO if necessary, more important is that you are knowledgeable in the area of online poker and have perfect written English skills.
Required skills: – Excellent English writing – Active online poker player – Knowledgeable about the poker game – Having access to Mac OS X to test the Mac clients of various poker rooms, as well as poker software for the Mac.
If you do a good job, this will likely turn into an ongoing thing, as I need plenty of fresh content to build my blog.
In your application, please state your price for a 300 word article or your per-word rate, example articles would be:
– Review of a Poker Room (for example: Pokerstars) – Review of Mac Poker Software (examples: PokerTracker for Mac, Poker Copilot) – 10 tips for online poker beginners – and so forth…
To apply either send an email to twoplustwo@wildmind.ch or apply for this job posting on oDesk, using the following link:
I couldn’t reproduce this problem on my office iMac. I couldn’t reproduce it on two MacBook Pros. Mysterious. Last night I did reproduce it on a virtual machine. The difference was that I didn’t install Dropbox on the virtual machine.
So the Dynamic HUD only worked if you had Dropbox installed. A complete oversight – I had failed to remove some development code that was recording some information to Dropbox. I removed the snipped of development code, and things started working.
Do note that the Dynamic HUD is still experimental. You may need to try making your window bigger or smaller to get the optimal result. The Dynamic HUD uses screen-scraping, so if a player’s name is obscured or not visible, then the screen-scraper won’t know who is sitting at the seat, and consequently the HUD panel for that player will disappear.
