Hi!
It doesn't need to be included in the distribution. In fact, since I first opened the bug report in gentoo bugzilla I've already sent a new version of the ebuild with some enhancements. Soon enough the ebuild will be available in the gentoo portage system and every gentoo user will be able to use it. Till then you could post a link at the mattricks homepage to the gentoo bug number. The link should be to: http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57671
OK, sounds cool. We'll include the link for now then.
1 . Under Linux folders starting with a dot are hidden by default. Initially Mattricks puts all files downloaded from the net on the home dir. However that can be changed and I chose to put them in a hidden dir (.mattricks_catalog). But still there is a Choices directory in my home dir. What's this all about?
This is the standard behaviour of the Choices system. The idea is to keep all preference files in the .Choices directory instead of having lots of .files in the home directory. I really do not know the background of Choices, but you could check out http://rox.sourceforge.net/choices.html for more info.
What is clear is that Mattricks should probably check if there is a download directory set and otherwise notify the user.
2 . In summary tab I have in the league position line: 3 9 15-15 17 I understand this is the league line of position, games played, blablabla but couldn't you parse it and explain each number? It would be easier to read. :) Unfortunately I'm a Lisp programmer, not python so I really have no clue on how to do that.
Agree, this is some old code from before the league page. It is by the way identical to the information in the HT league tables. It is most likely to be removed or remodeled when we change to XML:s only (more on that on the next question).
3 . How have you asked for permission to access this hattrick data? Looking at the code I could figure out (I think...) you're not parsing the HTML pages on the net...
There is something called CHPP (Certified hattrick product provider) which all applications that accesses Hattrick must be. For fetching files traditionally there's been an HRF-file that contains most data, but now there is a change towards XML. Almost every page on HT also has an XML-interface, so that is what we fetch now. The HRF will cease to exist on Oct. 1, so before that we must make sure that all data we present is from XML:s.
4 . This seems to be a bug in comparisons tab. I have the following line in assessed value for a player: Assessed value: +40000 (103 000 Euro -> 107 000 Euro) if it is +40000 then the final value should be 143000 Euro. This happens for all assessed value values. :)
HTs internal currency is one tenth of a Euro (and happens to be identical to the Swedish...). So the value provided is in HT-currency (40000). Then we generate a "printable value" which is the 103 000 Euro and 107 000 Euro. We could do this to +40000 as well, but as the code is right now it would lead to, e.g., Scoring: +Disastrous (Passable -> Solid) which would make less sense...
We will need to remake the comparison for XML:s, so it may be improved then.
5 . How are you computing the number of 'ideal' economists? (in the Economy tab) I don't need a detailed explanation, just a vague explanation of your heuristic since I have 2 economists employed and mattricks tells me I should have 0.
This is a formula obtained from Berglunds HT-Tools (http://ht-tools.sytes.net/ekonomer/ in Swedish). If I remeber correctly the income is 0.03*sqrt(economists)*money, rounded in some way I cannot remeber, if you have a positive balance.
I'd say it is working quite well. So far I haven't found it to fail (maybe except for rounding, so +/- 100 Euro).
6 . The line up selection tab is for me a huge confusion. I guess it is for the computer to choose the best team and for that I click the 'Let the computer pick a team'. But then I have a Change date button, a 'Use manual formation?' tick button and lots of buttons, one for each position that I don't understand but as far as I can tell they all seem to be ignored when we let the computer pick a team. Can you explain how this works?
The automatic selection, not only selects players but also tries to pick a good formation for you. Sometimes you know what formation you want and which players to move. For example myself plays 3-4-3 with a winger as a forward, a central defender as extra inner midfielder, a winger towards the middle, and two defensive wingbacks. I can enter the repositioning and get the "best" team based on that. The date change is for using player data from a different date (which is maybe not very useful here).
I should maybe clarify that I select my own lineups. :-)
7 . The game predition tab is not straighforward. As far as I can tell, (I don't know what the paste values are for since I don't know where mattricks will get the values from. But after choosing the values I have some nice statistics. :)
You could copy the text with the team grades from the Hattrick match report page and paste them. However, at the moment I do not believe it is working, since the very low, low, high, and very high subgrades have been introduced.
Nothing more to say but the match viewer is pretty good. :D Oh, you said you're hardly a linux user... are you developing this under Windows?
Yes, I am, but Ragnar, who is the main developer, is using Debian I think. However, he's been having a timeconsuming project for some months now, but he believes he'll be more active after this weekend.
I'd believe that most of the other contributors use Linux, but I do not know for sure.
/Oscar