Andy

Update:

Been using the program daily for a few weeks now, and after a few little updates, it's working perfectly!

The surprising thing is sometimes you look at the new data and think "that's not right", but in fact it is, just because that particular combination of players leads to that specific setting, so in many ways, it's more accurate than just charting or "remembering" what each person likes. There'd be no way to chart all the possible combinations of players.

It's been flawless so far. Again, the trickiest part is getting the matrix of players accurately entered. Once you've got that correct, select today's players and the program does all the work.

sorry, the demo page gives me just a blank white screen and in the context menu the flash player 10 says something like "movie not loaded"

Originally Posted by guessi

sorry, the demo page gives me just a blank white screen and in the context menu the flash player 10 says something like "movie not loaded"

Yeah, I'm clueless when it comes to streaming video.
Maybe this will work? http://www.checkcheckonetwo.com/files/FlexiCast.swf
If not clicking it, then right-click (or whatever you Mac-guys do) and select "Save Target As..."

Seems if the video is too long, the browser buffers the whole thing which takes forever. Haven't been able to figure out a better way yet.

alright, the direct link to the swf works
btw: I'm on linux, but ok: MacOSX is a a child of the *nix-universe as well :-)
with the blank html-page: it did not load or buffer anything as I could have seen my ethernet switch blinking during data transfer

definately your project looks impressive, the big challenge is to verify if after all it did everything right, but as you wrote, it seems so :-)

what I maybe missed or did not understand:
the source for all the settings is still single PM5-files, or is there any other datasource involved?
and
after the process you get a PM5-file, do you rely just on the filename (including player names) to find the right one, use it for the show and save all changes in?

Yeah, I wish I understood streaming better, especially for big video files. May be something to do with the capabilities of my host, but I don't really know.

Thanks for the kudos, I'm quite happy that the project gave us the results we are looking for. Truely something that could not have been done without software.

All the data for the mixes comes from PM5 files. As you create more combinations of player, you get more and more data to work with. You need only keep the latest file FOR EACH COMBINATION of players. One player may have several files that they are part of, and each one is significant as it produces information regarding the relationship between that player and several others.

As I said, it was as hard to get my head around what needed to be done as it was to write the software.
Originally, the fles were identified by the file comment, which you can edit when you save the file on a PM5D. Unfortunately, I found that studio manager replaces that comment with something like "[WIN] 2.2.5", which is the type and version of the editor. Not a bad thing to have an idea what version made the file, but really, that info should be data within the file, not part of the comment. So instead I store the info in the file comment and also in the 1st scene's comments, which don't get overwritten.
The filename is just for reference and to help make sure that only the latest combination is kept.
Additionally, I've changed the filename creation a little so it adds "YFC-" at the beginning of the filename to show that it was a file created with the software, not from a console file. The YFC file is only needed once to load onto the console, and then it can be deleted, since you're very likely to make changes to the settings once they're loaded onto the console. Keeping the initial file that was created by software is not necessary.

That is very impressive work Andy. It's good to see someone using computing power correctly.

When I left university Fortran was "it" and the spreadsheet was but a gleam in the eyes of Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston. All of our programming was inputted through punched cards, and we had just seen our first graphical printout - a naked girl represented by a grid of X's and O's and spaces. Not much has changed since.

Everything was horribly noisy. Now we just worry about noise from the desktop fan.
I might have written the first virus - a small pack of punched cards that had to be manually inserted into someones program deck when they weren't looking:

Print off
iterate x=x+1 without end
Print on

We only had 8 seconds of mainframe time a year, so my virus would only run for 8 seconds. Afterwards the victim had no more access (until they could prove that it was not their fault). It would not print, so finding it would mean searching through the deck and reading each card from tickertape individually. Not much has changed since.

It looks as though the Spreadsheet (in one form or another) is still king, and that you are putting it to very good use!