I think I’m quite a gracious loser. I had plenty of practise on the basketball court, that’s for sure. Over the years I’ve refined my gracious losing to an art form.
Last night I discovered my winning could be somewhat more gracious. I was playing some home poker with a few friends and we had a hand almost directly out of Rounders. That scene, you know, where Matt Damon has a killer hand, thinks he can’t lose, and thinks he is extracting every cent possible out of KGB, aka John Malkovich. But then it turns out that Malkovich’s hand was one better and he had actually been slow-playing Matt Damon.
So my Russian-accented friend Anton shows his full house aces full of twos, expecting me to muck. Instead I taunted him (“a full house? what could beat a full house? a better full house maybe? but what could be better than aces full of twos?”), until he demanded I show my cards, a full house Aces full of kings. He was not a happy Russian speaking player.
I think he’ll come back next week. After all the beer was free, there is not much else to do on a Tuesday night, and he’ll be dreaming all week of getting revenge.
And by then hopefully I’ll learn to be a more gracious winner. The type who doesn’t brag on the Internet about taking his friend down in a low-stakes home poker game.
For me, the worst-case scenario is that online poker remains in trouble in its American home. This destroys the world-wide poker boom, even in the many countries where it is explicitly legal, people find other ways to satisfy their card-playing desires, and Poker Copilot becomes irrelevant.
A better scenario is that the American authorities decide a popular activity like online poker can’t be shut down. It will keep raising again, and the best approach is to regulate it.
I’ll be following events closely in the coming weeks to decide the best course of action. Or inaction.
An event like this was high on my list of potential business threats. I made sure to save well so that I have a safety net.
It’s time for one of my periodical “why you can’t rely on Poker Copilot” articles.
When I have the chance to steal the blinds, I often find myself using Poker Copilot’s “Folded big blind to steal attempt” statistic for the player on the big blind. And each time I do this, the little mathematics pedant who resides in my brain nags me, “do you have enough data?” So I do I? Probably not.
Based on a load of data I have, on 9-player ring game tables, a player has an opportunity to defend the big blind against a blind steal attempt on roughly 1.26% of all hands played. On tournaments with 9-player tables, it is slightly higher, at 1.66%. That is, after you’ve played any given player 500 times, you are most likely to have seen 6 to 8 times how this player acts when he has the opportunity to defend the big blind against a blind steal attempt.
Eight times after 500 hands. Let’s assume that our opponent, Phil, in the long run (100,000 hands), defends the big blind exactly 50% of the time. What’s the likelihood that our data would show this after 500 hands against Phil? Roughly 71% of the time it would show between 35% and 65%. That is, 29% of all players that you’ve played about 500 hands against would show either a deceptively high or deceptively low value for “Folded big blind to steal attempt“.
So what’s the advice here? Always check the denominator before making an important decision based on Poker Copilot’s statistics. If the denominator is low, then the statistic is not reliable for making important decisions.
Proxy icons: in a document-based application (like Finder, TextEdit, Preview, Pages…), after a document has been saved, a proxy icon for the document appears in the title bar. It represent the file itself, and can be likewise manipulated:
click it for a few seconds and drag to another application to open it, or to the desktop/Finder if you want to copy/move it, etc…
⌘-click (or control-click, or right-click) it to view the path menu, useful to open the folder or any subfolders of the file in the Finder.
and
In any Finder window or Open/Save dialog, you can hit Command+Shift+G to get a location bar from which you can directly type in the directory to go to. It even supports ~ for home and tab completion.
and
You can increase or decrease your volume by quarter increments by Pressing:
Option + Shift + Volume Up/Down
and
While Cmd tabbing between applications, without releasing CMD, you can hit ‘Q’ to quit or ‘H’ to hide the selected application. Works great with the mouse to get rid of a whole bunch of applications quickly.
The bevel won’t go away and you can repeat this for as many applications as you like as long as you’re holding CMD.
it might help if most authors realised that the person who cracked their software is more likely a bored 16 year old Chinese male than a future terrorist.
and
What are the commonest mistakes software developers make related to security?
In no particular order:
Depending on commercial protection schemes for security.
Directly comparing the license string entered with the correct one.
Not using some sort of encryption/obfuscation (XOR isn’t *good* encryption).
Using a single simplistic registration function that is easy to isolate.
Displaying message boxes with helpful strings sending the cracker straight to the protection code.
Not integrity checking against patching.
Not updating the software once a crack is discovered in the wild.
Worth reading, especially if you are – or want to be – an independent software developer.
Software developers are in an eternal battle with software crackers – those who blast through the software license system to distribute “unlocked” copies of your software. For independent software developers this is no abstract topic – our personal income is directly affected by the quality of our software licensing system.
Yesterday I fired up XCode 4 for the first time. I needed to write a small utility for Archimedes in Objective-C. It was just pure frustration. Even though XCode 4 is a big improvement on XCode 3, it is still some distance behind the state-of-the-art software development IDEs. I found myself wishing there was a viable alternative for Objective-C development.
The JetBrains team – who bring joy to Java and C# developers every day – seem to have heard my wishes overnight. Today I received this e-mail:
This is a short notice to inform you that we’ve just opened the Early Access Program for appCode, a new Objective-C IDE. You are welcome to download it, try and let us know what you think.
Yes! I gave it a work-out and have concluded that already in this early stage of development that it is what XCode 4 should have been.
This is music to my ears:
We are very much looking forward to your feedback to help us create a tool you would enjoy using daily.
After a few months in the middle east, I’ve returned to Germany. I’m dusting off the equipment in my home office. Have you ever turned on a computer after it has been off for six months? Every software product I start up wants to be updated. Apple updates alone were over 2 Gigabytes. It seems I’ll be spending some time getting my Poker Copilot development studio up to date.
After solely using a 15 inch MacBook Pro while in the middle east, it is pure bliss retuning to a 24 inch iMac with a second monitor. It is also bliss having fast, reliable Internet again.
Now I’m back, I can hopefully start making some good progress on Archimedes.
it shows how HUD-dependent i’ve become thanks to you and your bloody Poker Copilot. Now I’m addicted! You came quietly with a fantastic offer and said, “Here ya go online NLH player with a Mac, the first one’s on me.” I tried your drug and now i’m hooked damnit! Curses on ya!!!
Over the last few months I’ve been based in Beirut. Not a great place to run an Internet-based business due to the lousy Internet in Lebanon. Not to mention the many fun distractions in Beirut that keep me from working too hard. Yet during these few months my sales have risen roughly 25%.
I’ve made many small tweaks to Poker Copilot over these few months that I haven’t announced because they are not interesting to most people. Who they are interesting to are brand new Poker Copilot users. Except they don’t know about them. These tweaks are all in response to my most common support problems.
I’ve been relentlessly taking note of my top support requests, and making small changes to make the problem go away. What I want is for first time users to have the smoothest possible experience. Some claim that the first couple of minutes of a person using a software product are the most important for making a buy-or-don’t-buy decision. The theory goes like this: If the software causes pain, many people will simply quit using it and never try again. If the software causes joy, then those some people will continue using it, fall in love with it, become accustomed to it, and buy it.
Is the 25% increase in sales due mainly to these tweaks? Hard to tell. It is far from a controlled experiment. There could be many other factors at play. Seasonal variation. Increase in poker playing. Increase in Mac sales. Better Google ranking for the Poker Copilot website. Dumb luck. One of the new features I’ve added (player icons, status bar info) in recent months appealing unexpectedly to many people. All one can do is guess.
