Tag: Stats Page

Blog Posts

All show descriptions entered

 

I have finished entering in show descriptions for all Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! shows from the very beginning up to the latest show; as well as, going back and cleaning up the description for the earliest shows. The next set of statistics that I will start collecting and entering are the Not My Job and panelist scores for the shows that I have audio for. I will work on collecting Bluff the Listener information as well. The latter will be displayed in the next version of the Stats Page.

Blog Posts

Fifth Birthday of WWDTM Stats Page

 

This weekend marks five years since I have made the Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!: Show Details and Statistics Page (also known as the “Stats Page”) available to the general public. Although the original site was coded and the underlying database had been around for about a month, it was not ready for general public consumption. The announcement of the site was made on my personal blog on 29 July 2007 and the site had been hosted on a server at home. Over the past five years, there have been a lot of data collected and entered into the data, new features have been added (including links back to each show’s page on NPR.org and panelist first and most recent appearances) and the site was mentioned on Peter Sagal’s blog and on his Twitter stream. The site has since been moved to the cloud …

Blog Posts

Development Update: Show Location Code Written

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Over the past week, I have been working on the last remaining pieces of the new Stats Page and its underlying database structure. Well, I have finally finished writing up the code to grab and display the location in which shows are recorded at. I still have not entered any real data for it yet; but, it is ready for when I am able to get that data in. To verify that I have the code working, I wired it up to the test script that I have been using. The following is a snippet from that script’s output. Note the field called “Show Location”. I still haven’t had a chance to work on the web presentation layer yet.

Blog Posts

21 Jul 2012: Paula Poundstone’s winning streak hits five games

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Although Paula mistakenly noted right before her turn in this week’s Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank round that she had won the last three times that she has been on. In fact, Paula had won the last four games that she was on: 2012-03-31 with 15 points 2012-04-28 with 18 points 2012-05-26 with 17 points 2012-06-23 with 16 points Right before she took her turn, she was attempting to do some humble-bragging. After answering five questions correct, Paula had won that round; thus, extending her winning streak to five games. Now, for a little bit of additional trivia about Paula’s five game winning streak: When put in numerical order, Paula’s winning scores is a series of five consecutive numbers: 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18. Paula has now beaten Brian Babylon three times (2012-03-31, 2012-06-23 and 2012-07-19). Paula has now beaten Luke Burbank twice (2012-05-16 and 2012-06-23). …

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10 June 2012 Sprint: Data Access Code Completed

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Over the past couple of days, I have been working on completing all of the PHP code required to query the WWDTM Stats Page database. Tonight, at the end of my two week sprint, I have reached that all important milestone and have successfully written a test to make sure it works. Warning: this following contains a fair amount of programming talk. If you are not a programmer, please ignore the rest of this post ;) The current version of the WWDTM Stats Page code has grown into a real mess and has become more and more difficult to add new features. The primary goal with version 2.0 is to write almost everything from scratch using proper class objects and breaking up code into manageable modules. First, I also decided to move to the newer PEAR::MDB2 database access API from the older PEAR::DB package. …

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Sneak Peek: Database Design for Version 2.0

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For all of the Wait Wait fans out there that also are into database designs, you are in for a small treat. Below is an EER diagram of the recently updated database used to house the statistics and other information for the Stats Page. You can view the diagram in its full-sized glory by clicking on this link. My goal is to get the database data and tables as normalized as possible by way of mapping tables. As you can see from the “ww_showpnlmap” table that I have fields for recording: how many points each panelist had, how many points each panelist had before and how many questions the panelists answered correctly during the Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank round. I don’t have data for every single show or panelist at this point. Right now, there is one additional mapping table that I will need to create …