Championship Manager 2010 for the iPhone Review

I often pass some time while traveling playing a game or two on my phone. Being a football fan I was interested to see that a version of Championship Manager was available for the iPhone.

Early impressions of the game are good. The interface is polished with plenty of options and buttons to press. The game also features a pretty complete set of teams and players with all the usual statistics that you would expect from a football management game.

The key part of a football management is the match interface. Choosing your formation and assigning players to positions is incredibly easy with the touch interface. The actual view of the match is top down and feels really cramped on the small screen. Reading the text commentary is simple, but watching the tiny dots running around on the pitch is very difficult to follow. You cannot help but feel detached from the action.

Post-match you are often treated to a press conference where you pick a journalist who asks you a question. You then pick an answer from a number of options, trying to balance the happiness of your players, board, fans and the media. Different answers will improve your standing with some and reduce it with others. Oddly along with the text of each answer the game shows you the exact effect the answer will have. A really manager has to guess at how their answer will be interpreted, they don’t have a help set of red and green numbers.

Save BBC 6 Music

I’ve been a regular listener to 6music since about six months after it launched. Below is the email I’ve sent to the public consultation on the future of the station, as it has been proposed that the station be closed to save money which can be spent on making other programs.

Dear Sir/Madam,

I have been a regular listener to BBC 6 Music since about six months after it launched. Apart from the Today Program and a few comedy shows on Radio 4 it quickly became the only radio station I listened to. It provided the sound track to much of my University life and and introduced me to a wide range of new music that I would have never found otherwise. It has been tremendously influential and substantially shaped my taste in music.

I believe that closing 6 Music will prove to be a huge mistake and a massive step backwards for the BBC. If the BBC is to stand for excellence then closing a radio station that is staffed by people at the forefront of music seems to go against that. 6 Music’s track record of finding a promoting new bands is something that BBC should be extremely proud of.

I believe that neither the BBC nor commercial stations offer a suitable replacement for 6 Music. Although 6 Music is associated with Radio 2 in style they are widely different. Although some assurances have been given that the best of 6 Music will be relocated to other stations I cannot see how this can be done during the peak listening hours without alienating the listeners of Radio 1 and 2. 6 Music is by it’s very nature targets a niche audience, but its influence stretches far beyond its reach.

The fact that 6 Music is only available on DAB rather than FM radio is a key factor in its limited audience reach. It is probably the most well known of all the digital-only stations and key driver in transitioning people away from the antiquated analogue radio infrastructure. I own three digital radios which enable me to listen to 6 Music throughout my house. DAB certainly has its critics and loosing such a jewel in DAB radio’s content reduces rather than increases the incentive to go digital.

I strongly believe that 6 Music is excellent value for money and I urge the BBC Trust to reject the recommendation to close it.

Yours Sincerely, Andrew Wilkinson

Feel free to use my letter for inspiration, but please don’t copy it wholesale. That will not help to save the station that we love. Find details on how to response here.

Naming Screen Sessions

I develop a number of Django-powered websites at work, and usually I want to leave them running when I’m not working on them so others can check out my progress and give me suggestions. The Django development server is incredibly useful when developing, but it’s not detached from the terminal so as soon as you log out the server gets switched off. One alternative is to run the website under Apache, as you would deploy it normally. This solves the problem of leaving the website running, but makes it much harder to develop with.

A third option is the GNU program Screen. When run without arguments screen puts you into a new bash session. Pressing Ctrl+d drops you back out to where you were. The magic occurs when you press Ctrl+a d. This drops you back out, but the bash session is stilling running! By typing screen -r you’ll reattach to the session and can carry on working as before. You can leave it as long as you like between detaching and reattaching to a session, as long as the computer is still running.

It is possible to run multiple screen sessions at once, perhaps with a different Django development server running in each. Unfortunately screen will only reattach automatically when there is just one detached session. If you have more than one then you’ll be confronted by a cryptic series of numbers that uniquely identifies each session. You can reattach to a specific session you can type screen -r <pid>.n To make things easier to reattach to the session that I’m working on I give these sessions name so rather than a cryptic series of numbers I see a useful set of names. To do this you just need to type Ctrl + A : sessionname name.

There are plenty of other useful things that screen can do, but named sessions is by far and away the most common one that I use.

Where GitHub (Possibly) Went Wrong

While on my delayed train this morning I was listening to episode 80 of the excellent Stack Overflow podcast. In this episode Jeff Atwood was complaining to Joel Spolsky about his problems with GitHub.

GitHub is a social coding site, along the same lines as Sourceforge or Google Code, but focused entirely on the distributed version control system Git. Where GitHub differs from the other project hosting sites, and where I think Jeff’s confusion comes from is that with GitHub the primary structure on their site is that of the developer, not of the project. They treat every developer as a rock star, who is bigger than the projects that they work on.

GitHub makes it incredibly easy to take a codebase, make your own changes and to publish them to world. What GitHub fails to do is to encourage people to collaborate together to push one code base forward. What I’m not suggestion is that branching is a bad idea. Branching code is a useful coding technique which can be used to separate in-development features from other changes until the code has stabilised again. What GitHub focuses on is the changes that an individual developer makes, not the changes required for a particular feature.

Searching Stemmed Fields With Whoosh

Whoosh is quite a nice pure-python full text search engine. While it is still being actively developed and is suitable for production usage there are still some rough edges. One problem that stumped me for a while was searching stemmed fields.

Stemming is where you take the endings off words, such as ‘ings’ on the word endings. This reduces the accuracy of searches but greatly increases the chances of users finding something related to what they were looking for.n To create a stemmed field you need to tell Whoosh to use the StemmingAnalyzer, as shown in the schema definition below.

from whoosh.analysis import StemmingAnalyzer
from whoosh.fields import Schema, TEXT, ID
schema = Schema(id=ID(stored=True, unique=True),
                       text=TEXT(analyzer=StemmingAnalyzer()))