Back in the code playground ...

It's been a very long time since I wrote anything substantive on this blog. Even the rolling scores updates have been far too few, gaining me a not insignificant amount of complaints from my fellow rollers, well deserved of course.

The reasons for my absence have been many, and all totally uninteresting to you dear readers. Well all that is except one. My current project at work which has been most consuming for me. It has been on a crunch timescale since day one, and client extensions have not helped. However, the interesting point is that it has finally got me back to, officially, coding at work.

Like a long lost friend with whom I have been reunited, coding and I have had much to catch up on. But, also like seeing a close friend after a long break, most has stayed the same and the familiar rhythm of friendship is soon resumed.

This has all been helped by some great personal projects that I am also undertaking in my, somewhat limited, spare time. One of them I cannot speak about just yet, expect more some time in the summer. The other though, might have come to your attention tonight if you read this blog via a feed reader like Google Reader.

If so you may well have notice an auto generated post for the latest rolling scores. It was a test, and a nicely successful one at that. I have finally admitted that I am never going to be organised enough to keep up to date with adding the rolling scores to the nasty spreadsheet I have and generating/posting the graphs to my blog. So instead, like any good developer, the desire to be lazy is the mother of invention.

I have written a little web app which will allow me to post the scores from my mobile phone, on the lane! It then saves these in MySQL, generates and posts the blog entry which includes 2 links to on-demand generated graphs of the 3Game Weekly Averages and the 4 Week Moving Averages.

The latter will be a little different from how they were before as they are now a true moving average of the raw data, rather than a moving average of the 3 game averages.

It's taken about 5 hours work to put together so far, most of which was learning the API's for JFreeChart and ROME. Obviously this is not the end. Time allowing it will eventually allow for some analysis of the scores, e.g. lowest deviation etc. Plus access to the all important, and embarrassing to me, raw data.

All going well the first live post should come after tonight's games, which are doubly important as we have decided to reset the no-show average to our personal 3 game averages from tonight. Not looking good for me, the current no-show is 120 and I've been scoring under that for some weeks (mostly the reason we are resetting them). Ah well, enough of these warm up games, on with the real deal ...