a new look for 3rdpartyeve.net

Posted by devedge on

About 10 month ago 3rdpartyeve.net was launched, and shortly before the EVE Online Fanfest it became listed on the official fansite list.

During those 10 month a few people told me at the forums that they dont like the look, but since i’ve been quite busy with other stuff i kept pushing the issue to the future. During fanfest, where everyone could read 3rdpartyeve.net on my fanfest badge, quite a few people approached me, and told me how much they like the idea of the site, but how little they liked the design.

Well, i made some promises there, and i took a few hours today to improve (hopefully) by replacing the old design by a Twitter Bootstrap based one

I hope you like it, and don’t forget to add your latest projects ;)

EVE Online Fanfest 2012

Posted by devedge on

It’s almost time for the new fanfest! For me this year will be the first year that i actually will make it there, and i can’t wait to see it.
Besides having heard about the new location (pictures are awesome) and all the activities arround the fanfest, what i really look forward to is the roundtables & presentations, from what i heard there will be a few quite interesting ones for us 3rd party dudes. Also i’m looking forward to meet some of the other 3rd party devs over there, its not like so many of us are in one place every day!

More Information about the fanfest

microphp manifesto…

Posted by devedge on

i just read funkatrons blog post,
and was a bit sad that there was no option to comment on it..

While the author is right an a few points about the complexity of modern PHP frameworks,
his comparisations are a bit off.

First, his cloc comparistation of Epiphany or slim vs symfonys http kernel totally ignores that symfonys kernel can do more out of the box, and has to do a bit more cause it integrates in a larger framework – obviously something simple needs less code, but it can achieve less aswell.

I can remember Rasmus Lerdorf speaking against PHP Framworks, and giving a hello world example for it – and he was kinda right, if you write a hello world script, you don’t need a framework. The same can be said about those microframeworks – they allow to do small tools, websites or jobs quite quick, but they lack when its about larger applications, and they get pain in the ass when working in a team. Also while the code can be quite readable and organized you often end up with a more throw-away-and-rewrite approach over reuse of code.

he writes he wants to do less code? slim framework, wrong approach. (he is right about the maintaining part though.

What stupid name is kingboard, sounds like something from wow..

Posted by devedge on

A few days ago someone linked me a thread on failheap where a few guys where talking about kingboard. The discussion was mostly “has anyone ever heard of this? No? What a stupid name…”

Now I don’t really expect many people to have heard of a software that’s not even beta yet.

Well the name is a mix of king23 and killboard, king23 being the php framework kingboard is based on.

Now about a release of the software.the source its actually public for quite a while now, and a first beta release package should be there soon.
My last goal was xmas but Karbowiak is kinda pressuring me to go faster, so we might see at least a beta package a bit earlier – both dates depend on my rl, so no promisses made.

If you want to run kingboard (beta) for your corp,alliance or character you should familiarize yourself a bit with running and maintaining mongodb. If that sounds like a stupid name to you, and you don’t have the slightest idea what mongodb might be you probably better wait for evsco hosted kingboard.

Regards,
PP

EVE: Supers Do Die! 0.8 – now with notifications!

Posted by devedge on

i just released 0.8 of EVE: Supers Do Die!
the new version comes with the ability to have a service running that checks
every 15 minutes for new super kills and creates a notification if it finds one.

to enable the notifications, start the app, press your menu key, and then choose
notification service and then start.

atm its fixed setting to check every 15 minutes (future version will have that configureable)
so it wont drain too much of your battery (application should only draw while checking)

Kingboard: now more incremental

Posted by devedge on

The way that pilot/alliance/corporation/general stats where generated wasn’t exactly what i would call optimum. MongoDB does not allow to split up map/reduces over several processes (yet) (except with several server instances), so a map/reduce can take quite long.
So far Kingboard was caching map/reduce results to avoid it to have the high runtimes with large amounts of killmails (i tested with up to 6mio killmails).
This would have caused everyone who actually had a cache miss (expired / not in cache yet) to have unacceptable high wait times.
Now the refresh of the cache could be asynchronous to the request (deliver expired cache while triggering refresh) – but the initial miss would still be there.

Another solution to the problem would have been to autogenerate the stats regulary, however to do that for all sorts of stats by allways map/reducing the full data.. well that gets quite slow too.. so stats would have been generated every two hours or so (well maybe one)).
Thank god MongoDB 1.8+ allows for ‘reduce output’, which basically means the result of a reduce saved in a collection will be auto reduced with the result of an reduce. That makes it quite easy to do incremental map/reduces, you only map the new data, reduce it, mongo takes the old stats reduces the old stats + the new stats, and tada you have the result. With this the run times of the map/reduce get quite manageable, so in my test install im generating all stats every 3 minutes atm (could go as small as every 5 seconds if i wanted to).