Tag: Update

Blog Posts

News and Updates

 

Hello, y’all.

I know that I have not posted any posts here in a long time, even though there has been some new releases of the Stats Page, Graphs, Reports and API sites since my last post. Even though development has been continuing, I haven’t had a lot of time to write out posts detailing those updates. Instead, I have been including change logs in each of the project’s Git repository.

Another bit of Stats-related news is that version 1 of the Stats API will be turned off at the end of this month, January 31, 2023. If you are currently using Stats API v1 and want to use Stats API v2, I would highly recommend that you review the “Wait Wait Stats API v2.0 Changes” document for information on migrating to the new API version. After January 31, 2023, calls made to the Stats API v1 endpoints will return an HTTP status code of 404.

I also made the decision to deactivate my Twitter account and have set up my own presence on out in the fediverse by running my own Mastodon instance. If you are part of the fediverse, you can follow me at @[email protected]. I have set up a bot account on my instance, @[email protected], that regularly scrapes the Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! podcast feed and publishes a new post when a new episode appears.

One last bit of news, I will be publishing new posts and updates on my new blog at blog.linh.social. I will be keeping this site up and running for the foreseeable future.

Blog Posts

Stats API Updates: Clean Up and Panelist Bluff Statistics

 , ,

Ever since publishing the Wait Wait Stats API, I have been working on some of the technical debts that had been accruing throughout the development and release process for both the API and the underlying libwwdtm data access library. One of those items in the technical debt list was to refactor the libwwdtm modules and make the code easier to manage and maintain. Instead of having every function related to a module reside in one code file, those functions are now broken up into core, details, info and utility sub-module under each major module (guest, host, location, panelist, scorekeeper and show). Once the libwwdtm code refactor was completed, it was time to update the Stats API to make use of the refactored modules and make the code a little bit more readable. After doing a thorough set of regression and performance testing, I unleashed …

Blog Posts

Slight Change of Plans: Wait Wait Stats Page Version 3.3.5

 , ,

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

 , , ,

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

Just a Few Site Updates for Version 3.2.2

 ,

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

 , , ,

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 …