Astro Eddie

Kappa and new scipt version

2011-07-04T22:37:00.000+02:00

A new server started (again, sigh) and eddie is tracking the stats @ kappa now as well.

Also, we updated the ticker reporter script to work on kappa and fixed some bugs. The new version adds a link to the stats of a player or guild into the profile.

In case you have not received an update notification from the script, I ask you to click here to install the latest version. A change in the structure of the AE pages broke the script for some skins and also broke the update mechanism. Thank you.

Enjoy

No stats the last 4 days

2011-06-07T23:29:00.000+02:00

Hi,

just realized that the stats did not update the last 4 days. A short investigation suggests that eddies IP address is on the block list on the astroempires servers. Nothing we can do technically, I will try to sort it out with the AE staff. Keep your fingers crossed. I will post updates when I have new information.

Feel free to comment here or on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002096791601">facebook</a>.

Update: Big congratz to the AE team and Ikai for responding within 2h to my email, even in the middle of the night. Right now we are unblocked again, just had a successful stats run. Talking with the AE team on further progress.

Perhaps I should invite them to a beer when I 'm over in portugal in 2 weeks

Eddie

Eddie is moving to a new server

2011-03-30T22:32:00.000+02:00

Eddie is finally moving to a ne and better home. We will take him offline during the transition. DNS propagation might take a while, but we hope to back in an hour or so.

Hopefully fixed the stats

2011-02-17T09:41:00.000+01:00

As you probably have noticed, there have been some problem with the stats service. Eddie was showing some screwed numbers. Unfortunately, i was in the middle of completely rewriting the code that does the parsing and did not want to chase the bug in the 'old' version. But, completing the new version took me way longer than expected due to some RL stuff going on. And when i had time AE went down so i could not test..

Sorry for all this, but last night i installed the new version and did an initial import for beta and epsilon. The other servers will be processed in a few hours. To fix the messed up graphs i needed to delete the data for the last 15 days. Unfortunately, this means we now have a gap in the data from 02.02.20011 till 17.02.2011. Sorry for this guys.

There is still a bug in the guild ownership of a player. The player history is correct but not the display above the graph. I hope to fix this soonish...

I 'm still unsure where all this is coming from. The problem comes from the formatting of the numbers, I expect (and until 15 days ago) received them in german formatting, Now i get them in english formatting. It must something on my side, but i have not igured out what is causing this..

Also, AE hast changed the speed limit, parsing is even slower than before. Background: some month ago, they implemented an DDoS preventing that would block your IP if you make more than XX number of request per minute. Haven't talked to the admins yet (guess they have better things to do right now) but it looks like its now XX/2 .. Somehow this system seems not to prevent DDoS through..

Eddie recently joined facebook. Not sure what to do there, right now i will just post the same stuff as here on the blog. Looks like people are more willing to comment there then they do here. And yes, i read the comments here. Sorry for not answering sooner..

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002096791601

Sheduled downtime for hardware maintance

2011-01-29T21:08:00.002+01:00

Due to recent problems with the hardware of the server, our hoster offered a replacement. The move should hopefully not take too long, but Eddie will be offline either today or tomorrow.

Update (2011.02.02): The transition was done yesterday evening with only 2 minutes downtime. Thanks to BK for his work.

Downtime for new version

2011-01-06T21:17:00.004+01:00

We will take Eddie down again for upgrading. Lets hope it works better this time.

Edit: up again, doing some testing

Edit 2: Ok, we had to restart again to fix some small glitches. I ask everybody to reinstall the public Ticker script to make sure it works correct.

So, what has changed? I hope you see no changes, as this would mean that i missed a bug... Still, this is a major update simplifying future development and easing the load on the server. With this change out of the door and more time in RL, i hope to speed up (well, continue, the last year did not see any changes) of the development. Stay tuned.

Enjoy Eddie

Downtime while installing new version

2011-01-04T00:50:00.003+01:00

We are installing a new version on the server right now. Hopefully the little issue we have right now will be solved soon.

Change has been rolled back and last version restored. We will try again soon ;)

Edit:

Just been noticed that the service is down right now. Unfortunately, i 'm at work and can 't look into the issue.

Edit 2:
Up and running again. Note to self: don 't install stuff in the middle of night..

sheduled downtime

2010-06-07T19:57:00.002+02:00

Hi,

i will be taking Eddie offline now for a some time (hopefully not more than a hour) to do a database upgrade. Sorry, but this has been postponed way to long already.

Eddie

Update: Eddie is up again and hopefully all is running smooth.

Ixion started

2010-05-22T22:36:00.000+02:00

Yes, they did it again. AE started yet another server called 'Ixion'. How long will they continue down that road? Thinning out the player base of the existing servers?

For those of you that are starting over there, Eddie did the first scan of the ranking just now and 'Ixion' will be included in the regular parsing just as all the other servers. The web interface will be available for Ixion shortly. We will also update the BattleTicker Script to work with Ixion soon.

Enjoy

PS: and please stay on the old severs ;)

Eddie downtime

2010-05-10T08:31:00.000+02:00

Just realized that Eddie can not be reached right now. As i 'm not the admin, all i can do is inform (wake up? ;) ) the admin via SMS and hope he will respond soon. Sorry for that.

Eddie

current problem with the statistics [Update]

2010-01-24T10:50:00.003+01:00

We are currently (since the last few days) experiencing problems with the job that collects the statistics data. As far as i can see from my logs the problem is that AE is closing the connection on their side.

I will try to to contact them, asking humble how we can solve that problem. Here at eddie, we have ~650 - 700 visitors on an average day. So, there is some need for a service like this.

Keep your fingers crossed, i will keep you informed.

Eddie

Update:
They responded quickly (thanks AE team). The disruption was not targeted at us directly, but where meant to fight of some general problems. Hopefully we can archive some progress from here on.

The unpublished interview

2010-01-02T19:54:00.005+01:00

Some time ago ikari approached me, asking if Eddie would do an interview. I did feel astonished as i do not think i contributed much to the game and i 'm certainly not an influential player on the 2 servers i play. But, i hoped that this would stamp some sort of approval on the eddie service. Most unfortunately, the game owners did not like it so the interview got canceled. Since i did spend some time on the interview, i thought why not publish it here.

Ikari sounded rather disappointed about the turn down, Wizard and Xaman did not like the ticker tool, as it is violating the ToS.

Here are the questions and my answers:

#1 - What was your inspiration / reason for making Eddie Stats Service?

There where / are 2 major reasons for the development. At the time i started, i was looking into new (for me) technologies and needed a project to learn them. Also, i was plain and simply missing a few features. I liked to keep track of guilds and players performances as well as tracking which player joined which guild to detect spies. This has proven very helpful in the past, but for understandable reasons, this data is not visible on the servers i play.
Also, the constant bragging of the beta goons how great they are (with no real numbers to back them up) annoyed me ;)

#2 - How much time did it take for you to develop Eddie Stats Service? Youhave any major difficulties making it?

How much it took me? This is a hard question. Source control says the first versions where checked in in august 2007. So, it looks like a long time. But, having a full time job and 3 kids, the time to actually work on the tool is rather limited. And, there is way more functionality than can be seen on the public side.
Difficulties? Defining and implementing the user interface, as my html / css knowledge is still very limited. That's the reasons the site still looks ugly in IE. If someone likes to help improving this, i would gladly accept the offer ;) Accessing the ticker data imposed 2 problems, one is a legal one, considering the heated discussions about scripts on the forum about scripts and the actions taking by the game admins against script users. In the end i decided that this particular script does not provide a advantage for single player but for the AE community in large. Some kind of official 'yes, this script is fine' statement would ease my mind.
The other problems stems from the new languages for AE. Parsing the ticker in
different languages is tricky..

#3 - What future developments do you have in mind for Eddie Stats Service?

Way more than i can implement in reasonable time span .. Top of the list would be to have some kind of import function for the data that is momentarily parsed out of the public ranking pages or via greasemonkey script (from the ticker).
Don't know if that will ever happen through..
Apart from that i like to expand the recent work i did on the battle statistics, including a 'scrolling' ticker, showing the latest XX (last hour so so) tickerreports.

A battle timeline for players and guilds could be helpful too, displaying losses inflicted
and received per day or week. Similar to the sketch [1]
[1] http://faboo.org/eddie_static/battletimeline.jpg

The statistic pages for players and guilds need some work too, in the moment there is no way to select the time range for the graph which is really needed for the server with oldest data (beta). I plan to substitute the graph image with something more fancy done with javascript.

Also, a battlepaste service with debris share calculator has been asked for...

I like use this opportunity to send a big thank you to the creators of AE. You created a great game (perhaps a little to addictive? ;)), that is well balanced and fun to play even after a long time. I hope that providing the eddie services, and for this scanning the ranks pages once a day, does not disturb the game services.

thanks for the interview.
Eddie.

Updated Ticker Report Script

2009-12-11T22:28:00.002+01:00

Just fixed a Bug in the TickerScript, it should now work with the new Helion server.

On the other servers alpha until gamma the automatic update feature provides the new version.
Due to the bug, this feature works not helion, anyone using it on helion only should reinstall it via the link on [1]

[1] http://faboo.org/eddie/helion/TickerScript

Thank you.

PS: there was also an problem with the automatic update on all servers until a few days ago, causing the script to bring up the update notification on each page load on AE. This has been fixed too.

A few minutes downtime

2009-12-04T20:29:00.004+01:00

Eddie will not be available for a few minutes beginning @21:50 server time. I will be cleaning the messed up player histories. See last post for details.

Thanks.

[Update] Cleaning the history for all servers in parallel is putting some stress on the database ;). The process takes longer than expected. Sorry for the delay.

[Update] The service is just starting up again. Took about 40 min to clear and fill the history tables again.

I also used the time to prepare a database for the coming helion universe.

Recent problems with the statistics

2009-11-30T15:02:00.004+01:00

As you might have noticed, the statistics on eddie where broken in the last few days. More precisely, the player history has gone crazy, showing players as unguilded which never left their guild.
For some players, this resulted in a long list over guild changes, when in fact, they never left their guild.. This was caused by a small change in the AE layout [1] and the fact that there is no public export of such data, we have to parse public HTML pages to gather the info.

[1] http://forum.astroempires.com/viewtopic.php?p=1493692#p1493692

Real life keeps me from working on Eddie right now, so i could not fix the parser immediately, showing wrong data. I wish to apologize for the inconvenience. The parser is fixed now (until the next change in the AE layout). There is still some wrong data in the display, i hope to find some time later today and fix that too. But for this, i have to take Eddie offline for some time.

I wish the AE creators would recognize that sides such as Eddie do not harm AE (in act, i believe its helping to strengthen the bounds between the players and the game) and provide access to some statistic data.

Eddie