A view from webmaster’s desk
12 May 2008 at 10:48 | Published by: JJM | Views: 6586 | News search
“Server not responding. Please call our helpdesk on weekdays at 8–16 o’clock,
or on Saturdays between 10–12 o’clock.”
The first round of Nations Cup was played with traditional paper scorekeeping,
because of problems in third-party computer systems. The database crashed again
on Sunday for some 15 minutes... enough to inspire us to search some other company to work with,
and to use a second server as backup.
Fighting technical problems in the scorekeeping system, we had less time and energy for webcams
and website maintenance. Nevertheless, we managed to get 3 webcams for most of Saturday,
and 6 webcams for the cup rounds of Sunday. Some video clips recorded from the webcams
will be published later.
Cheap USB webcams are not perfect for outdoor use, of course.
In cloudy weather they worked just fine, but in sunny weather the automatic light control
made the picture too bright to see anything. We had to adjust the light manually for each webcam...
but some of the cameras had a funny habit of losing the manual setting after 10 or 15
minutes, returning to automatic settings. In future we try to avoid such camera models,
whose software has this bug with manual settings.
The complex playing system of Nations Cup is not easy to follow. Even less easy
when using a new scorekeeping system with live results hole after hole.
There is much need for improvement in the Internet version of the scorekeeping system
— no automatic scrolling, and links to different scores and statistics must be more easily available,
all the time. Also the question, how to sort the results live when players and teams have
played a different number of lanes, is something new that needs to be studied further.
We organizers of the competition looked for new and exciting challenges. We also found them —
many more than were expected. This is one of the reasons why Nations Cup is arranged every year...
to learn how not to do things.
Yes, we did get the “bluescreen” in some of our computers
during the competition.
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