Year: 2014

Blog Posts

Year in Review: Wait Wait Stats Page and Other Happenings

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The past year has been a fairly busy year for me in the world of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! in terms of the Stats Page and attending live tapings of the show. At the beginning of the year, I posted a preview of version 3.0 of the Stats Page, something that had been in development starting in the latter half of 2013. Version 3.0 brought a set of huge changes to the site, including a completely rework of the site’s code and a full redesign of the actual site itself. Prior to version 3.0, the site had been rendered as one monolithic page containing one large table for each year of show data. The site’s code, which had been and continues to be written in PHP, was also an unwieldy monster and made it difficult to update and maintain. Version 3.0 allowed for a …

Blog Posts

Slight Change of Plans: Wait Wait Stats Page Version 3.3.5

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As mentioned in the last blog post about upcoming developments for the Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Stats Page, version 3.4.0 would be introducing both a new set of stats and graphs. In addition, version 3.4.0 would also include the descriptions that judge and scorekeeper Bill Kurtis uses to introduce himself at the beginning of each show. Due to unforeseen complexities of feeding the queried data into the appropriate graphing functions, I will be releasing version 3.3.5 this weekend that will include Bill Kurtis’s descriptions in each of the show’s infobox.

Blog Posts

Working on Wait Wait Stats Page Versions 3.3.0 and 3.4.0

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For the past month, I have been working on making a number of changes and updates to the Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me! Stats Page to make working on the site’s code a bit easier to manage. The changes won’t change the user experience of the Stats Page in any meaningful way; though, it does optimize how the panelist charts pull the required data and when it is rendered. Although the update will not include any new features (more on that in a bit), the version bump a few, significant behind-the-scenes updates. The biggest updates come from updating the code framework, Silex, to the latest and greatest version, optimizing the code that generates the HTML code, and finally, breaking some of the larger code blocks into separate modules for more efficient code review and fixes. Version 3.3.0 of the Stats Page should go live sometime during …

Blog Posts

Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me! Taping in Seattle

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Note: I had written this post a few days after going to the Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! taping at the Paramount Theatre in Seattle back on September 18, 2014. Unfortunately, it got stuck in the blog submission queue and didn’t get published until today. When I heard that Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! was coming to the Paramount Theatre in Seattle, I knew that I had to find a way to get tickets to the show and go to the show. I decided to reach out to my Wait Wait contacts in Chicago and was able to pull the trigger on getting a pair of tickets as an insurance policy. Fortunately, my contacts came through with a pair of tickets, as tickets to the show sold out extremely quickly. Once I got confirmation, I promptly put in my request for a few days …

Blog Posts

Just a Few Site Updates for Version 3.2.2

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Over the past several weeks, I have been testing out a few minor updates to the panelist statistics presentation and adding a few additional statistics. When the latest version of the site was launched, each panelist had their lowest, highest and average score listed in their stats information box (as shown below).   The updated panelist stats information box not only uses more common statistical names (min, max and mean), I have now included the population standard deviation of the panelist’s scores and the sum of all of the panelists scores. The other minor addition to the site is the search page that allows you to search the site by way of a customized Google search. The link to the search page is found in the upper-left corner of the page and can also be reached via this link.

Blog Posts

New Graphs Are Now Here on the Wait Wait Stats Page

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In the previous Stats Page update blog post, I mentioned that the next version of the Stats Page will include changes to the panelist graphs to improve how they look and to make them more interactive. Below is a current example of the two graphs that are currently generated for each of the panelists, one showing the breakdown of the panelist’s scores and the other showing the panelist’s scores over time. The charting library used to generate the graphs have some serious limitations, including poor font rendering and the graphs are static (a scheduled job generates the graph image files on a regular basis). The other problem with the graph showing a panelist’s score over time is it becomes harder to read as more data points are added. To solve all of the problem with the current graphs, I went back to the drawing …