Just over a week ago, Poker Copilot turned two years old. And it’s summer. And the World Cup is on. So I’m feeling good. And I’m going to celebrate. In style. By giving all Poker Copilot customers between now and July 16th 2010 50% off.
Buy Poker Copilot now and get 50% off.
Poker Copilot 2.49 is now available to download.
What’s fixed:
Update Instructions:
Now you’re done and ready to hit the tables.
Winamax Poker used to be part of the Ongame Network. They concentrate on the French online poker market. Now that the new French online poker laws have come into effect, they’ve left the Ongame Network and created their own software.
Poker Copilot will soon have support for Winamax Poker’s new software. Here’s a screenshot showing that it is already working, and includes the Poker Copilot Heads-up Display (HUD):
There are still a few minor issues. I hope to have these resolved in the next couple of days.
I need to state how nice it is working with the new Winamax Poker software and their development team. The software is many times better than the Ongame Network Mac OS X software. The team is highly responsive to any issues I detect in the hand history files. They have given me a direct email contact to their team. This is how things go: I find a problem. I let them know. The next day it is fixed. It benefits Poker Copilot. It also benefits Winamax because I am incidentally performing some thorough quality assurance.
Since the last day or so, some PokerStars tables have the word “ok” in their description. I don’t know what this indicates. Nor does Poker Copilot. This is causing the Poker Copilot HUD not to work on these tables.
Therefore I’ve made an update that copes with this. This is update 2.48.
Update Instructions:
1. Download the latest version here: http://pokercopilot.com/download.html
2. Open the downloaded file.
3. Drag the Poker Copilot icon to the Applications icon. If prompted to replace an existing version, confirm that you do want to replace.
Now you’re done and ready to hit the tables.
If you play poker online and live in France, you are probably aware of a new law for online poker that start today, June 29th 2010.
I’ve updated Poker Copilot to work with the France-only PokerStars client, also known as PokerStarsFR. You can download Poker Copilot 2.47 now to get PokerStarsFR support.
Here’s what you’ll need to do to make things work:
These instructions are also here.
I’ll see if I can get support for the new Winamax client up soon. Stay tuned.
The new Poker Copilot discussion forum is here: http://forum.pokercopilot.com/
The forum uses new – and hopefully better – discussion forum software. The forum software and hosting is supplied by Vanilla Forums. I’ve been monitoring this for six months to make sure it is under active development. And it is.
The old forum was running on FogBugz. The discussion forums component of FogBugz doesn’t appear to have changed at all since I started using it for Poker Copilot, and it is lacking some useful features – like editing a post or uploading an attachment. I kept hoping things would improve but alas, they haven’t.
Two reasons: time and effort.
I outsource anything I can that doesn’t negatively impact the user experience. I don’t want to have to update operating systems, tune web-hosting software, or install discussion forum security patches. I don’t want to monitor yet another server to make sure it is always running smoothly. I’d much rather pay a reasonable monthly fee to have these problems taken care of for me.
If there is a newly-discovered security flaw in the forum software – or in the systems it is built on such as Apache, PHP, or MySQL – it won’t just affect me. It will affect all the companies being hosted by Vanilla Forums. When there are problems I can be reasonably confident that Vanilla will respond quickly. That’s what their business is about.
Oh and finally, I really dislike software like phpBB. I cringe when I find myself on a phpBB-based forum. It feels like I have stepped back a decade. However I do recognise that there are some highly successful web communities built on phpBB.
Poker Copilot 2.46 is now available to download.
What’s fixed:
Update Instructions:
Now you’re done and ready to hit the tables.
More replayer improvements. Specifically, showing pot odds.
The next Poker Copilot update will show you HUD info in the hand replayer. It’s almost ready!
When I was a greenhorn programmer I felt like a programming superhero.
Every programming task seemed so easy.
Until I started the coding.
Need a form for entering customer addresses? No problems, I’ll have that done by lunchtime. Oh wait…it has to cope with addresses for people who live overseas with different address structures…? AND it has to cope with “care of” addresses…? AND some people in rural areas only have the town pub as their address with a note to ask the publican to “keep this under the bar until you next see Graeme”…? AND some people have multiple addresses because they spend six months of the year in Melbourne and six months in Brisbane…? AND we need to note if something we send to a customer comes back as “undeliverable”…?
Instead of hours that takes weeks.
Now every programming task seems too difficult.
I’ve learnt to spend far more time reflecting and designing than coding. I assume any programming task is pretty close to impossible but that with some assumptions and constraints I can produce something kind of useful to some people. When coding I feel most of the time like I am overlooking big potential problems. Sort of like that feeling you have when you can’t remember if you turned off the oven.
Which is why I love Patrick McKenzie’s Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names article. It captures perfectly how difficult the most common – and seemingly simple – programming tasks can be.
Computer programmers need things to be orderly. But human society is unorderly, full of exceptions and oddities.
The next update of Poker Copilot will introduce keyboard controls for the hand replayer. The controls are based on iTunes, and are as follows:
Things have been a bit slow here at Poker Copilot headquarters recently. I am hoping, however, to pick up the pace and to get some good improvements done over the coming weeks. My aim: