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.
Some of you have been trying Poker Copilot 4’s “Dynamic” HUD for Rush Poker and Zoom Poker, and are always getting this message: “Window too small to track”. Until now I’ve been unable to reproduce this problem.
Today I used Parallels to create a fresh install of Mac OS X on a virtual machine. Happily, on that virtual machine I reproduced the problem. I saw “happily” because the first step to fixing a problem is being able to reproduce it. Now I have a situation in which I can add a load of diagnostic information and run Poker Copilot here in the lab to track down and fix the problem.
If you’ve used Poker Copilot 3 with Winamax successfully, and you’ve now upgraded to Poker Copilot 4, your “preferred seat” settings will have been reset. This was unavoidable, due to a subtle technical reason. (Read: I made a mistake in Poker Copilot 3). As a consequence the HUD panels will show on the wrong players.
Here’s how you can fix this:
First, in Winamax, select from the menu “Tools” -> “Options”:
Then select “Game” -> “Options”, and make sure Preferred Seat is set to “Top”, “Right”, “Lower”, or “Left”:
Now in Poker Copilot, open the Preferences, select the “Poker Rooms” panel, and set the Winamax Poker preferred seat to match:
Now, you should find the HUD panels in the correct place for all Winamax tables.
