All posts by kobaan

How everything started – QBO ROS Teddy Robot

I was watching this company the corpora a lng time all ready as they announced to release an open source robot platform, quite capable in all sorts of things, using the relatively new ROS robot operating system at that time back in 2010.
The main ROS target the PR2 robot is still a 500.000 USD machine and far from private reach.

Then a few years of development later in november 2012 the corpora finally finished their assembling and launched preorders for their QBO platform, and in addition published the sources dor hard and software on github.

QBO announcement on ROS website

So I started sourcing all the required parts, and at that time still thought of 3D printing or vacuum forming the needed chassis parts by myself.
It turned out it would be still to expensive so I further drilled down the costs for some parts. Cheaper but bigger sonar, waiting for used parts on eBay and so on.

PK Trader Fixing

Hi Folks,

as you might have noticed, PK Trader wasn’t able to track any stats the last few days,
since PerBlue decided to relaunch their website with heavy use of Ajax.

Meanwhile I converted most of my background job scripts to simulate Ajax mouseclicks
to gather the relevant tradepost / hats and rankings data.

So far only city updates and user profiles remain broken,
all other stats should start plotting again within the next hours.

Please let me me know if you still see something wrong on the site.

Thanks,
AngryMinotaur/HappyMinotaur

PK Trader moved to bigger machine

Hi folks,

I’ve been rather busy with my baby son recently, and PK Trader had some hick-ups lately, but everything seems to run fine again.

PK Trader has gone through a lot of changes.
The webserver and database have finally moved from an old mac mini 1,6GHz to my big iMac 3,4Ghz,
resulting in a huge boost for the background price plotting, chain calculation, page compression, graphics compression and finally page delivery time.
(Before an hourly price update took 50 minutes, and plotting some graphs could not be done in realtime or even within one hour. So I had to pre-generate them in background and did only update them once a day. Now an update cycle is completely done within 10 minutes. Realtime plotting works for most items.)

All webserver database and scripting software is up to date again, (there have been troublesome changes in configuration though), even in the php language I used for scripting.

PerBlue changed their id tags within the tradedata page, resulting in prices not being updated in my database for about one week. (Always be skeptical if you see no price changes for all items on the frontpage. Should be fine again now.)

The PK City Directory subpager is now working correctly, and now showing all the cities in the DB not “all-1” 😉
US states could not be changed recently, always showing cities of Alabama for US, thanks to Scott for reporting this. It’s now fixed.

Greetings,
AngryMinotaur/HappyMinotaur

PK Trader update for fire metal

Please be patient with PK Trader updates, as my son was born last week, daily business needs to settle down a bit before I’m back on making up to date changes in PK Trader. BTW writing this is tough, holding a baby in my arms 😉

PK Trader was updated for the recently introduced fire metal, created from the also new ash feather.
As well as some swag updates.

PK Trader – Kingdom updates

Updated PK Trader statistics for the two newly introduced kingdom hats.

 

  • Monolithic Hat – for the kingdom with most monoliths destroyed
  • Crystals Hat – for the kingdom with the highest crystal production


Both can be seen on the PK Trader Development page for either
PK Web or PK Mobile.

By the way: Madison, the developer city and biggest in PK Web just got destroyed. If you search for a big tradepost now, you may want to visit München in Germany, post in german chat for invitation, they all understand english.

PK Trader Web – Rankings enabled

Hi Folks,

just a short notice:

I finally managed to record the PK Web ranking statistics for kingdom influence, kingdom conquest, city development and of course the weekly hat statistics into my database.
Plotting for those values will start as soon as there is enough data available.

Further I fixed some minor errors and mix ups between mobile and web data.

I also did get some requests to move over to the new gold values which in my eyes should be no longer a problem as prices start to stabilize, lets still wait if halloween might mess this up.
For the new gold values, it should also be possible to plot long time graphs as requested.

And as you may have noticed, the database moved to a much more capable machine which speeds up things a lot.

Regards,
HappyMinotaur/AngryMinotaur

PK Trader Updates – Food on Sale

Big change in PK – Food is now an official resource

The latest change to Parallel Kingdom introduced the possibility to sell food for gold in a tradepost.
This makes food a new available resource which is not any longer calculated through the cost to create refined oil from crude.

I’m not sure how well this will work as I expect a lot of food to player transfers for dummy gold amounts, making this value much more unpredictable than the former artificial calculation, so I decided to stick with the old one for now.

I try to incorporate the new food value on the front page as soon as I have more stable data.

Other updates:

  • PK Web Data is now recorded automatically without the need for manual fixing, via the new public available URL: http://parallelkingdom.com/TradeData.aspx?WorldID=2
  • Added some more cities to PK Web City Directory.
  • Charts are now rendered with tags [mobile] or [web] to better identify what you’re actually looking at.


Some fixes:

  • PK web chart overview, now renders correctly even if monthly and quarterly data for Tops and Flops is not yet available.


Soon coming feature:

  • Comparator will be extended soon to support drop trade calculation between PK Web “Horizons” and PK Mobile “Legends”