In August I shall be attending the 6th annual International Science of Judo symposium, where I shall be presenting my research into Attack Rates in Judo as a predictor of victory. As part of the research I wrote a small hack to make the notation faster/easier/better.

It was quick and dirty, but it helped me get through the hours of video footage.

In preparation for the symposium I have been revising the code and making it a bit better, so that I can put a link to it on the poster I have to produce. I also intend on sharing the SPSS data file and possibly my actual assignment so that others can access the data and make their own study of it and compare it to mine. Maybe people can use the code I have written to replicate the research or do it elsewhere and push forward the field open source community stylee. ;-)

The original code, was just a console app, with little/no feedback to the user. Ick. So with this version I decided to created a user interface yet I wanted to stay console based; mainly to simplify making the code portable across operating systems. I am on a Mac, but the code "should" run on Windoze or Linux. It is in Perl as that is the language i wanted to use, no other reason.

...actually that is not entirely true. I am more experienced in Perl code than other languages. Also, the community and resources are amazing. CPAN is incredible and makes life so easy if you have code that is unpredictable. What I mean by that is that if like this code you are making decisions "on the fly" Perl and CPAN make it so easy to magically have the modules you need at hand.

For example, I decided to try using curses to do the user interface. So it's dead simple with Curses::UI I didn't have to learn/do too much to have a menu system, windows and dialog boxes etc.

Also, I love using Perl::Critic and Perl::Tidy to ensure that my code is of a definable quality level. At some stage I might try using Kwalitee as well. :-)

I am using Coda (which rocks) to develop the code and a mix of local SVN server and mainly Git to do the sources control. I am really hoping that Coda gets proper support for GIT soon. Maybe replace SVN with GIT, especially seeing as Git can (with limitations) work nice with SVN servers.

I have been using GitHub.com as a host for the code, so you can pop over and clone the code and take a look for yourself. In fact, I would really appreciate it if you did ( http://github.com/lancew/judo-notator ). Both branches are up there, I am working on the "GuiVer" branch at the moment.

It has been enjoyable and rewarding to be writing some code. I have been adding services and trying to contribute to NoseRub.com too, but this is a bit different as i am starting from scratch and the codebase is simpler.

After I have the code for the GUI aspect done, I have to give thought to output of each match, I am thinking if it is possible to write direct to SPSS format so it can be processed there right away... we shall see.

Anyway, I just wanted to get some of this out of my head and onto the blog to reassure the universe I am still there.

Lance

This week has been rather busy and exciting for me.
Mike (from http://www.thejudopodcast.com ) and I have launched a new website http://martialconversations.com a social networking site for Martial Artists.

The catalyst for this was the launch of the European Judo Unions "community" social network. I had been aware the EJU site was coming since Bath when I had seen some info on it. I also know the British Judo is looking at social networking too, though via FaceBook.

We were really impressed with the vision of the EJU to create a social networking site, though the site itself annoyed me a bit. It was rather... well rough around the edges. And closed to people outside Europe (though I gather this has changed). It was also (obviously) Judo only and also limited to the EJU and it's member organisations, be that implicit or explicit.

So Mike and I said "well hell, lets create our own site and see what happens", so, here we are on Friday and the site has been live a couple of days and all is good. We have a few members on the site and the buzz is starting to grow.

For me personally it's the sort of project I love, working with someone else, working fast and hard. Making it work. It was enjoyable also as it forces me to learn something new. Prior to this week, I had never installed WordPressMU before or BuddyPress. We have pushed out our first Judo specific modification to the software, so I have had to learn how the BuddyPress code works and how to modify it. I love that!

Lance

This week I am doing some interesting things for www.PlanetJudo.com starting with the server move and launching the Spanish language site to the public.

The second part has been making a iPhone friendly version of the site available. Which I have now done... at least a first stab at it.

I have basically done a very lazy hack to make it work, which is this. I created in Dashcode a Web Application that uses the RSS feed to create a iPhone web app. It is pretty easy, there are a few little gotchas, but overall it's nice and easy.

Then I created a little PHP redirect that detects the iPhone browser and when it does it redirects Safari on the iPhone to the iPhone specific site, it is a one liner so that was pretty cool.

Whilst I was getting used to Dashcode I realised I could create a Dashboard widget for PlanetJudo also... so I have done that too. I want to make it a bit shinier, but soon it will be put up on the site.

Overall, I have to say I really like the Apple developer tools, I have played in XCode in the past and liked it, this is the first time I have played with Dashcode and it was really nice to work in, so I shall be doing more with it in the future I am sure! :-)

It is nice to work with these development tools, it is only Wednesday and I get to say I have worked in Perl, PHP, Dashcode this week... what will that list look like by the end of the week, a bit of Scratch no doubt, what else, Ruby, Smalltalk? Who Knows! :-)

What I must do is look at NoseRub again this week and try and add some more services if nothing else.

I have also finally managed to get the TV next to my desk hooked up as a second display for the laptop, the resolution is rubbish, but fine for video, or the iTunes visualizer! ;-)

Productive week so far... nice!

Well after two weeks in Bath and a week on Holiday in Devon, it's time to return to the real world. I need to get some client work done and more client work in the door.

I have quite a bit of work on, partly stuff I have already been paid for and some that is being done "pro bono" and some that is business development stuff.

Anyway, lots of blogging to catch up on over the next few weeks, not to mention 17,000 words of University of Bath assignments to write.

So, if you don't hear much from me, now you know why.

Lance

Hi everyone,
I am now in Bath for two weeks attending the last of my residential blocks for my BSc. in sports Performance (EJU Level 5 Judo coaching course).

As such, I most probably will not be blogging here for the duration of the stay. I will be blogging daily over at www.judocoach.com/blog making the 5th year that I have blogged everyday of my experiences at University of Bath.

I shall also be twittering (of course), so follow me there. Here is a twitter widget: