6 posts tagged “soccer”
FoxSoccer.TV used to use Vividas as the platform, and while it wasn't spectacular it worked. It didn't work well, but it worked.
Then, come August they shut off the service and replace it with a countdown to August 15th. All new things, and now it is hosted by RayV.com. I was very hopeful that this would yield a better user experience, and bring in many improvements.
I wouldn't really know, because they completely removed my access. After complaining, many times, they gave me a 2 week account and assured me that I would get my original access restored before the 2 weeks was up. This was at the end of August.
I still don't have access. Their support is absolutely terrible. Every email about my account yields, "We'll restore your access in a few days". This has been going on since September 7th. A full month of "in a few days" and I still have no access.
The part that is chafing is that for the 2 weeks that I had access, there were no really decent games going on anyway (I missed the FA Community Shield, and it was in the season opener of the EPL). The games that I did catch were of fairly low quality, anyway.
Vividas and RayV video streaming was pretty similar. The user experience for finding a game was the same, but the new design is quite ugly.
All in all, you're paying for a service that will give you the worst support I've ever experienced and it is significantly reduced from Setanta-i. Setanta-i is $14.99 a month, FoxSoccer.TV is $14.95. The other thing is that the "Season Pack" expires May 31st, and it isn't prorated if you subscribe now. This makes very little sense.
Apparently that extra 5¢ goes towards crafting a user experience that isn't absolute garbage.
So, if you're looking for a TV over IP provider for watching soccer, pick Setanta-i or just grab torrents.
To content producers, really think about using RayV's services. Their claims of 24/7 support are greatly exaggerated, as all my emails require at least 24 (usually 48+) hours to be answered. The answers are also out of context most of the time (asking me for the same information, etc.) I will certainly never subscribe to any RayV service again, just because the terrible support.
Perl is a superb language and I'm quite fond of it. It has a powerful OO system with a moderately insane API into it, but Moose takes care of that.
Catalyst takes care of the migration from cgi-lib.pl and CGI.pm into the modern era of actual frameworks.
DBIx::Class is unrivaled in the realm of ORMs. The power of chained result sets and (albeit needing to be refactored) power of SQL::Abstract is second to none. It makes everything fantastically simple to build.
My rec indoor soccer team is shuffling players, and we try to keep several slots open for part-time players and we needed a simple way of managing the roster. There was a Japanese utility that one of the managers pointed out to me, and it seemed like a great fit. After a weekend of hacking, and at first building an overly complicated system, I came up with a roster app. Searching for a name yielded nothing, so it's called Roostermatic.
ROOOOOSTERMATIC. Come on, say it with me.
If you have any sort of a rec league/volunteer-based squad for team-play then go over there, use OpenID to login and you can then create a team and manage your upcoming games. It was a very quick application to write, and the UI took by far the longest time, so please send feedback.
I'm hoping to integrate it into some other apps, but for now it's a good game management app with an Atom feed for upcoming games.
On more technical notes, it's built-up using Catalyst::Controller::REST which means it is REST-based. It requires authentication for most things and I haven't hooked up a webservices auth method yet so it really only operates cleanly in the browser. If I get interest in an API (especially for adding games, since I figure a lot of people will use a scraper to inject games) then I'll get around to it.
It makes usage of Template Toolkit, and sadly not that much Moose. There just wasn't a lot of need for it since the biggest part was validation. That's where DBIx::Class came in so nicely, writing a conduit for Data::FormValidator and the schema classes is a piece of cake. I didn't use anything on CPAN because I have a crazy system that croaks on error with an object that can then be used to populate form stickiness. It's heavily dependent on my TT style and isn't very suited for general purpose consumption, but I'd be happy to share if folks are interested.
I'm using MySQL for the backend RDBMS. Our application stack currently has MySQL Replication going on and I rarely feel like futzing with Pg on an admin/architecture level so MySQL constantly wins that battle. I do prefer PostgreSQL in all other facets and earnestly hope that replication is someday as easy as it is in MySQL.
It's running on a rather complicated app stack that consists of nginx, varnish and external FastCGI. I've nearly given up completely on Apache and find the alternatives much better suited for modern deployments. I have another entry pending that describes the service layout which I hope everybody will find informative... but it's not ready yet, so hang tight.
I was very saddened to see a posting on SoccerTV.com that they're closing up shop after selling their assets. It's a very nice and easy way to just view what upcoming games are going to be on. I only get Fox Soccer Channel, so it isn't that big of a deal but some of my friends have other channels (Setanta, GolTV, etc).
So, I did some quick Christmas hacking, and with the help of Web::Scraper (thanks Miyagawa!) and a quick domain registration I have a new site launched.
Soccer fans enjoy, and let me know what other channels you want me to add in (and I'm adding in more leagues as well) because I want to have a really good single source for soccer lineups.
I Watch Soccer [http://www.iwatchsoccer.com]
Let me know if you encounter any problems. It is running on a pretty limited host, but it is going to be moving to a beefier server soon.
(and yes, there are ads. I do have to pay my server bills... I just want to find the right balance between number of ads and content... feedback welcome)
Last night I played the 3rd Men's League game. It started at 9:30pm, which is a bit late for me but it looked like it was going to be a fun game. I played the first half as keeper, and had fun. It opened up with pure amazement with some of the other players. Two of the starting players proceeded to dance around our team and immediately penetrate our defense like it was a drunk prom date. It was really nice to watch. Their skill was fantastic.
Then I took a shot straight to the throat. Ouch. In hindsight, I really should have sat out for at least a little bit, but I think the part of my brain that can adequately measure if I'm ok was shaken a bit loose, as I got up and said I was fine and continued playing. It hurt. I ended up being very distracted and I think I played pretty bad for a while.
The score was an abysmal 1-7 at the end of the first half, largely in part to me inability to deflect any shots as keeper. In the second half, I jumped in the game to play left wing. Ended up mostly playing fairly defensive, but had a few moments of possession.
The other players were simply too good to really keep possession for long. A good game, and my larynx seems to have survived.
This Saturday's game was incredibly fun, really. The team shows up and we noticed a definitive lacking number of female players. We needed 3. We had 2. Oops.
Well, the other team was quite compassionate and one of their team members hopped over on our team. This meant that every girl on our team was playing the whole game. In comparison with the guys, who had one sub courtesy of a friend of mine who I convinced to swing on to play with us while he was in town, prior to returning to Seattle (thanks Brandon).
It is decided that I'm keeper, since the other guy who also plays keeper isn't there (we're running a skeleton crew here). We get out and start warming up, and it turns out my friend from Seattle has a thunderous boomstick. I'm pretty sure he was leaving smoke trails on his shots. It really does help me to warm up by deflecting a couple of shots before the actual game starts. It still takes me just a bit of time to get my mindset into forcing my body to be positioned in between the ball and a square box behind me. Sometimes doing so hurts. Actually, most times it ends up hurting at least once but the pain is dulled by the excitement of saving the goal. Then if it hurts and still goes in, I am the physical manifestation of insult to injury (see last week: ball to face, then to goal. Ouch)
As the game starts, I'm feeling pretty good. I'm having some good saves and we're having great teamwork. The sweepers did their thing, disrupting the flow of strikers well enough that any shot that was taken was able to be stopped. Then our team curse kicked in, and one of our 2 female team members slips and out goes her knee. Soon as she falls, it's obvious she's not getting back up. Damn. So far, in the last 2 months, we've lost our captain (see: grotesque ankle), his dad (hamstring pull), another player from a twisted knee who is thankfully back, another girl with a broken toe... we're cursed, plain and simple.
We then ended up taking a second player from the other team. So, out of the 3 females on the field, 2 of them were from the opposing team. A great way to end the first half, with a score of 4 to 1 with us leading.
We lost 6-5. Our defense slipped away along with our energy, as having no subs really kills you on the field. I'm still really happy with my performance as keeper. There were 3 goals that I potentially could have blocked given an increase in skill, but none were the embarrassing "Well, I hope nobody saw that... except for these 12 people on the field... and 30 people mulling around... and... ah hell..." type.
Two of those I really should have been able to block, they were pretty slow going in. The first was a low slide and I dove to catch it and just misjudged the angle. As I dove I watched the ball slip just beyond my reach. If I had another 2 to 3 inches, which was easily doable, I would have got it. The second was a case of nearly every player in the key, and one of the opposing players taking the opportunity of a rebounding ball at head height to bonk it in with her head. I stepped out of the key position to allow a sweeper and the forward to come in where the expected bounce was going to be. Stepped right out, ball stepped in. Oops.
The third goal I should have stopped would have been an extreme challenge to stop, but the part that bothered me and why I'm counting it in the list is because I just failed to react to it. The shot was made, and the voice inside said, "No way you can reach that in time" and instead of making an effort I just watched it go in. Shame on me.
All in all, great game and great fun. Many thanks to the opposing team for having such a fun game with us, and letting us borrow their players.
Last night was my foray into a Men's League team. While I'm not over 30, the team is in the over 30 league. The
Being the first game, there were quite a few players who may or may not join the team. This inevitably means that we had the team work of a field of drunken squirrels attempting to parlay a young nut back to their den for a season of lascivious storage. We got our asses handed to us. And hard.
I played keeper the second half, and the first half I was attempting to play the sweeper position. The problem is, these guys had a small degree of strategy to employ. Which means our haphazard style of play was of increasing help to them, and the more we fell behind the more disorganized we became. It was nearly impossible to setup an effective defense against them, as the two sweepers were overwhelmed by their two strikers and center. They were able to take a shot at least 75% of the time they had possession in our side of the field. The funny thing here is that no matter how good you are at keeper, if they go on offense and have a 75% chance of taking a shot and, say, 80% accuracy of a shot going into the goal without impediment and they manage to take 20 shots, you're going to let in a couple goals.
Or 7. Or, closer to 10 in the first half. Luckily I was playing in the second half and didn't let in nearly that many. I gave up 4 goals, 2 of which I simply stopped caring much about. They were good, accurate and kicked fast and strong. It was great practice for the co-ed league, though. The strategies for shots was much different, as in the co-ed recreational league they tend to just blast the ball in the general direction of the goal, hoping that perhaps the keeper might step out of the way (or the power kickers attempt to knock them down). These guys were actively trying to avoid the keeper. Interesting strategy, and quite a bit more difficult to block.
I did have some great stops, but all in all, we got clowned upon with such vengeance that I'm thinking I should have played another season in the rec league before joining. Still fun, but has fewer returns than the co-ed rec league does, aside from honing my keeper skills.
