Wildfalcon

I spent the weekend helping to set-up and run this year’s Inter-Varsity Dancesport Competition (IVDC), in Blackpool. The organisation has been ongoing for months, and I have been involved in trying to write a technological set of for managing the day. After months of hard work developing new scrutineering software, it was not ready. It was unfinished and totally untested. With two weeks to go till the big event, a much more piecemeal solution was decided on.

I wrote a timetable management program, which lists each event and all of the rounds. It predicts (using a simple mathematical model) how long each round will last, and predicts times for each and every round of the day. When a round is started, it records the start time of the round, updating the predictions for the remaining rounds. All of this is written to an XML file.

Bryan and Fab created a series of solutions for obtaining computerised copies of the recall numbers. The scrutineer’s software only prints the results; it cannot do anything except print. They tried to take the printed results, scan them, and use optical character recognition. This was not reliable enough. They tried to type the numbers in by hand. This was too prone to error, and too time consuming. Finally, Fab found a print driver capable of printing to three other print drivers. This allowed us to set one of the print drivers to print to file, and still produce the paper copies the scrutineer needed.

Oliver created a piece of PHP software. It takes digital photos and presents them to the user, who can reject, or accept the photo. Then, by reading the timetable file, and the timestamp embedded in the photo, calculates which heat of which dance the photo was taken in. It then reads the recall numbers, and discovers which couples were dancing in that heat. A list of these couples is placed on screen to allow the user to select which couple the photo is of. Next to each couple number, several photos already known to be of that couple are displayed, if they are available.

Bryan and Fab had written extensions to Bryan’s Company’s software (which does dynamic signage). At the beginning of each round, as the recalls are read out, the numbers, and a photograph of each couple appear on the large screens throughout the venue. Similar things were to happen with the final results at the end of the day.

All in all, a pretty ambitions set of software to write in two weeks!

Did it work? Well, sort of…

I’m pleased to report that my timetable software worked perfectly. We sometimes missed pressing the button to signal a new round, and there were a few cases where the rounds were marked as started at the wrong times, but the software performed brilliantly. All through the day there were predicted times for the next four rounds, and the start times for the next major events.

We had not had a successful test of the triplicate print driver, and it didn’t work on the day. I wasn’t closely involved with it, but I gather it didn’t work on the scrutineer’s software (which is written for DOS). That pretty much killed anything relying on knowing the recall numbers. This was a big loss. Without recall numbers, all we could do in the way of photos was displaying photos that hadn’t been rejected by the user.

Oliver’s photo software was an even bigger disaster. Not due to the software itself, but due to the fact that the computer it had been set up and tested on, was, by mistake, left in Bryan’s office, in London. We really owe a massive debt to Shamrash, one of Bryan’s employees who got into the office at 6am on Saturday morning, to plug the computer in, and send us the software. At this point we didn’t know the recall numbers would not be available, so Oliver got straight to work, configuring the software to the new network, and the new computer. But it just did not work. To this day we don’t know why. It simply would not let us associate the test photos to test couple numbers.

It was however working well enough to allow good photos to be selected, and bad ones to be rejected. We did manage to get some of the good photos on the screens. There were two small problems with this though. Firstly, the template we displayed the photos in, showed them way to small for anyone to see them, and secondly the template we displayed the photos in, showed them way to small for anyone to see them. I realise that technically this is only one problem, but I thought it was such a serious problem it deserved being mentioned twice! Unfortunately it also required photos to be in a strange aspect ratio, which just does not look good on dance photos. We also suffered the problem of not having any spare person to select which photos were good, and which ones were bad. Reluctantly, we abandoned the idea of having photos on the screens during the day

As for the extensions to the signage software, to display recall numbers and photos, we didn’t get a chance to try it. Neither recall numbers, nor associated photos were available.

It almost worked. I am going to continue to develop my timetable program, and we still have the photos, and the timetable data, so watch this space for a nice event and round based selection of photos from the day…

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