I thought things were running smoothly… too smoothly.
A problem occured today whereby at least one user was unable to delete items from his Chaser Log. Running the same code at home with a current copy of the database showed no problems. But when I logged in as him on the real system I got the same symptoms.
I didn’t come to any demonstrable conclusions as to why there was a problem but decided that 2 things were needed. A fix now and a better fix to come in a few days. The current fix sloves the issue that recent chaser log entries could not be deleted.
The problem only occurs for users with huge ( I mean absolutely enormous ) chaser logs. For a start it takes an age to download tens of thousands of entries and the amount of ram a browser needs to display such a large webpage makes the Italian sovereign debt look small!
Now when you select Chaser Log you will be displayed the log for the current year only. i.e. 2011 at present. This massively reduces the amount of data that gets downloaded and so is much faster. I’m banking on the vast majority of chasers wanting to see the current year’s entries more than something deeply in the past. Also the log is display in reverse order to before. i.e. the most recent entries are at the top.
There is a link “Show Complete Log” which will take you to the original chaser log pages. It will be as slow and as unwieldly as before. The result is no overall change in functionality, you can still see your entire chaser log, you just have to click and extra button.
I am hoping that this split will be an improvement for everyone not just those with brontosaurus sized logs. But this is a kludge. It’s temporary so that everyone can continue using the system whilst I spend a few days coming up with a nicer solution.
THERE MAY BE BUGS! No, how can this be? There may well be bugs in this as it was done in a hurry. So please email them to me at mm0fmf_sota AT intermoose.com and put the word DATABASE in the subject. Don’t put bug reports on here, if I have an email I can ensure that as each email is dealt with then each bug is dealt with. By all mean discuss the changes on here and make suggestions here. Just make sure you mail bugs to me directly.
I’m out tonight and tomorrow so it may be Monday before I respond to mails etc.
Thanks for your fast reaction enabling the top chasers to do maintenance of their chaser log.
But this is a kludge.<
Unfortunately I need to agree with you, Andy. Just think about someone trying to do log maintenance at the morning of 1st January… The poor fellow would receive a blank table as he has not made any QSO in the actual year yet…
The right solution might be prompting him/her to specify the year or an interval to be maintained. Of course the latter case might come to the same result as before supposing that the specified dates cover ten thousands of QSOs… Thus you’ll need to warn the users for self-restraint, that is the longer interval they specify, the longer the filtering and displaying takes, that is they should work in multiple steps on smaller chunks of their chaser log. (Of course this warning does not apply for those who establish only a few hundreds of QSOs per year and/or their total log does not exceed the 1-2.000 QSOs magnitude.)
Another idea: Do you let us to delete the QSOs one by one or you provide opportunity to mark more that one QSOs to be deleted and you execute the maintenance in a single step? The latter solution demands less file opening, closing and reindexing that is processing power compared to the first. That is, it would provide faster server responses.
In reply to MM0FMF:
OK except the dates need to be up the other way. ie first date at the top and todays entries at the bottom as the full log is displayed.
Damian M0BKV
But this is a kludge.<
Unfortunately I need to agree with you, Andy. Just think about someone
trying to do log maintenance at the morning of 1st January… The
poor fellow would receive a blank table as he has not made any QSO in
the actual year yet…
You’re quite correct Jóska. This is simply a “band-aid” as our left side of the pond colleagues would say. Something to get the immediate problem sorted and to buy some time for a better solution to come along.
I was thinking of adding a drop down to allow you to select “last 12 months”, i.e. today that would be 13/11/2011 to 12/11/2011, then each year, 2011…2002 then finally all my log. That should give sufficient control I think. I need to do something no matter as people with very large chaser logs will have problems deleting entries pre-2011 right now.
Really? I thought this would be more useful for the last year. Anyway it’s no big issue to change it back. I may put an Ascending/Descending option when I expand it. I hope to get some time to do somthing with this next week so I’ll default it back to the old order then.
In reply to M0LEP:
I quite agree, latest enties at the top is a good idea… having your point total at the bottom isn’t, surely they can be on the same row rather than at opposite ends of the list
So here’s the first pass at a proper chaser log split into user selectable pieces…
Chaser log now has the ability to display your log in 12month chunks. You can either select a complete year (i.e. 2009) or the last 12 months.
Chaser log has an option to sort ascending (Jan-Dec) or descending (Dec-Jan)
Overall display has been tidied a little.
Score for each period is displayed at the top.
If you want to see the original chaser log display then the “Show Complete Log” button takes you to what we had last Friday 9-11-2011. This will be tidied up in the very near future but will remain functional.
Other bugs/features fixed in the process:
The G0NUP CSV upload duplicate bug has been fixed. Kevin G0NUP knows what this is.
Awards page is more centred but still squiffy. (Damn you Microsoft!)
Bugs not fixed yet:
The OZ4RT CSV upload duplicate bug is not fixed. John OZ4RT knows what this is.
If you don’t know what the G0NUP and OZ4RT bugs are then you have no need to worry. As Kaa sang in Jungle Book:
Trust in me, just in me
Shut your eyes and trust in me
You can sleep safe and sound
Knowing I am around…
Please give this a test. It should be an improvement over what we had. Probably more tweaks needed still. As usual bugs in an email to mm0fmf_sota AT intermoose.com and comments can go on here.
Hi Andy
Any chance of an EDIT LOG button? This to enable me to change my blunders without having to export to a CSV and then import.
I must say that the SOTA site is generally very easy to use.
Regards
Well an edit option is quite involved. A lot of existing stuff would need to change to make it work. So it’s not exactly high on my priority list due to all the changes needed. This is especially considering you now can download just the offending activation in its own CSV and edit that. One day perhaps but not anytime soon.
Things to work on are:
chaser log confirmation maker
N7UN activity reports for association managers
support for non Roman characters (Korean, Cyrllic, Chinese etc)
integrated log on with sotawatch
clean up full chaser log
sort options for activator log
clean up activator log
OZ4RT(*) CSV dupe fix
awards page cleanup
plus others I don’t remember right now
Andy
MM0FMF
(*) I’ve started naming bugs/feature request etc. after their discoverer much as comets are named. It helps me track all of these things.
I’ve finally got the centering sorted. It’s obvious now I know the fix.
Activator Logs display centred and cleaned up a bit. No other changes yet.
Awards display centred. No other changes.
List All summits association order fixed. This came about from splitting the way the database viewed some US associations. W4 and W7 were always made up from a number of distinct associations. However, they were all lumped under W4 or W7 on the database. They’ve now been split out into their own associations in the database. This makes the awards display accurate results for those who have worked a few US activators.
Oh! There’s one other small change. The confirmation star is back.
Before you all go mad and shower me with gifts for bringing it back there’s a catch. This is the old confirmation code which can result in the database throwing an exception. You’ll know if this happens as you get a page full of prgrammerese in red. It’s possibly viable again now that the chaser log doesn’t show your whole log.
The confirmation code checks in real time so it’s a large load on the database engine. If too many people try it at the same time and they have a large log then you may get the exception. Count to 100 and hit F5 and it should work next time. If it starts failing too often then I’ll have to turn it off again. I tried it on a few chasers results which would push the system a little (G4SSH, S51ZG, HB9AGH, DJ5AV) and it was OK. If it works for those uber-logs then it should work for everyone!
Confirmation checking only happens on the shortened results, i.e. last 12 months or a distinct year. It is turned off on the full log, that is almost guaranteed to fail for most of you now. We’ll just have to see if this will remain viable. If it does it saves me having to properly fix it.
I’m off out now to get my ears bent by some damn fine Texas Blues Guitar as espoused by a damn fine Texan, Buddy Whittington. So if it all goes horribly wrong you’ll have to wait till tomorrow for me to fix it. I’ve got the same updates minus the confirmation star already uploaded so turning it off is easy: just in case.
EDIT:
It’s working now for those of you who saw an error message about “SOTA-noconfirm”. That was me not thinking.
As the * is back now one may be interested to check why some QSOs are not confirmed checking the activators log.
For this I’d like to make an improvement suggestion:
If possible please make a “show log” button on the activation list of SOTA activators so one can check a specific log. Turning show all QSOs on makes it not very handy for many active activators like G3CWI and so on.
If possible please make a “show log” button on the activation list of SOTA
activators
Done.
If you are logged in and you view the Activator Roll of Honour you can click “View” for any activator. This will show their logged activations as before. A new link, “Show log”, is available for every activation. Click that to see just the log for that particular activation.
If you are logged in and you view the Activator Roll of Honour you can
click “View” for any activator. This will show their logged
activations as before. A new link, “Show log”, is available
for every activation. Click that to see just the log for that
particular activation.
This really is a nice touch to the database, Andy! It saves shed loads of scrolling up and down. Many thanks…
At the risk of being hung, drawn, quartered and then boiled in oil What is the chance of an additional column next to the number of qso’s column, keeping a running qso total made by activators, maybe in the same way the running total of points accrued works?
There may well be bugs in this as it was done in a hurry. So please email them to me at mm0fmf_sota AT intermoose.com and put the word DATABASE in the subject. Don’t put bug reports on here, if I have an email I can ensure that as each email is dealt with then each bug is dealt with. By all mean discuss the changes on here and make suggestions here. Just make sure you mail bugs to me directly.