Grant, Mike, Beatriz, et al:

Just wanted to say thank you for the great service I've been getting from
the USCF lately. Every tournament I've submitted lately has been rated in
about two to three weeks (very good, considering the volume you undoubtedly
get) and all the new memberships and renewals I've sent in has been
processed in a timely manner. (Usually getting their cards/numbers in about
the same time frame -- I've been following up.) Considering the big cut in
personnel a few months ago and no let up in the workload, I imagine it's
been hard to keep your ducks in a row, so I'd just like you all to know that
there's at least one satisfied customer out there. You and your staff are
doing a great job.

Best Regards,

Matt Nemmers
Webmaster/Director At-Large,
Iowa State Chess Association
www.iowachess.org

I tried looking up a couple events I thought should have been rated
already, but the uscf web page shows as below.

---------------------------------------------------
Events Received / Rated Search

This page is currently undergoing maintenance.
We hope to have it back up soon.
We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused
---------------------------------------------------

Any idea when it will be working again?

Marty

"Martin Wilber" wrote in message
.net...
I tried looking up a couple events I thought should have been rated
already, but the uscf web page shows as below.

---------------------------------------------------
Events Received / Rated Search

This page is currently undergoing maintenance.
We hope to have it back up soon.
We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused
---------------------------------------------------

Any idea when it will be working again?

Marty

Marty -

Try this: http://msa.uschess.org

You'll have better luck there.

Regards,

Matt

"Matt Nemmers" writes:

I tried looking up a couple events I thought should have been rated
already, but the uscf web page shows as below.

---------------------------------------------------
Events Received / Rated Search

This page is currently undergoing maintenance.
We hope to have it back up soon.
We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused
---------------------------------------------------

Any idea when it will be working again?

Marty

Marty -

Try this: http://msa.uschess.org

MSA has events after they're rated, but not those that have been
received but not yet rated. We're in the process of testing a
new program for logging in events received. We still need to develop a
new web app for searching that data and then set up an automated data
transfer process like the one we have for the MSA data. That's not the
highest priority task on the list, so I'd estimate 3-4 weeks before
we get it done.
--
Mike Nolan

Let me first add my voice to Matt's. There's some mighty fine work
being done at USCF these days.

When an understaffed organization can complete app development on "not
the highest priority" project in 3 to 4 weeks, we're talking super
heroes. Mike, you'd better be careful or we're going to start
expecting web entry of tournament results with full validation in,
what, maybe 6 weeks?

On a related topic: Last week I checked the MSA several times during
the daily update (it ran around my lunch time). My browser timed out
(after 60 seconds) when I tried to view something that pulled up cross
tables (tried a couple of different approaches). I assume that during
the update, the data have to be locked. That's fine, but I wonder if
it's possible to schedule the job to run in the early morning hours
when fewer users would run up against it?

Keep up the good work.

TR


(Mike Nolan) wrote in message ...

{snip}

MSA has events after they're rated, but not those that have been
received but not yet rated. We're in the process of testing a
new program for logging in events received. We still need to develop a
new web app for searching that data and then set up an automated data
transfer process like the one we have for the MSA data. That's not the
highest priority task on the list, so I'd estimate 3-4 weeks before
we get it done.

(TR) writes:

When an understaffed organization can complete app development on "not
the highest priority" project in 3 to 4 weeks, we're talking super
heroes. Mike, you'd better be careful or we're going to start
expecting web entry of tournament results with full validation in,
what, maybe 6 weeks?

I'd still like to see online reporting in alpha or possibly even beta
testing by the end of the year, but I think that's a bit optimistic.
I'm still trying to determine just how much work it will take to do it
so that I can give Grant a project cost and time estimate.

On a related topic: Last week I checked the MSA several times during
the daily update (it ran around my lunch time). My browser timed out
(after 60 seconds) when I tried to view something that pulled up cross
tables (tried a couple of different approaches). I assume that during
the update, the data have to be locked. That's fine, but I wonder if
it's possible to schedule the job to run in the early morning hours
when fewer users would run up against it?

Yeah, it runs REALLY slow during the crosstable update cycle.

Right now the schedule of when things happens is roughly as follows,
though the running time of each step varies quite a bit, which is why
they're spaced out a bit.

A note on terminology: WIS is the in-house version of MSA, a web-based
information server for member data that will eventually be the primary
member data lookup tool for all staff other than those who are updating
data.

5:00AM - 5:30AM Transfer data from legacy systems to Linux system
6:00AM - 7:00AM Update PostgreSQL data from legacy data
7:00AM - 8:00AM Update WIS and MSA member data from PostreSQL
8:00AM - 11:00AM Update WIS crosstable data
11:30AM - Noon Transfer crosstable data to MSA site (if needed)
12:30PM - 2:00PM Update crosstable data on MSA site (if needed)

We can't start any earlier than about 5AM, because when the USCF schedules
a ratings run, it is a batch job scheduled to run overnight and generally
finishes somewhere between 4AM and 4:30.

Normally Nancy only runs ratings once a week, usually about mid-week.
However, any time they do crosstable corrections I do a crosstable update
cycle on both WIS and MSA.

Recently it seems they've been doing corrections nearly every day, some
of that may be a result of an increase in reports of crosstable corrections
from people looking up their records on MSA. (I get copied on the MSA
feedback mail, I think we're getting 2 or 3 reports of crosstable problems
every day, though half of them are for late or missing tournament reports.)

As you will note, the longest time blocks are for updating crosstable
data either on the in-house system or on the MSA system at the ISP.

That's because data limitations in the current legacy data structure
make it impossible to track new events or corrections. Therefore, when
they update ANY data, I have to delete and reload the entire year, and
that takes several hours, even at 200 or so records/second.

Member data updates are handled differently, I update and re-insert each
member record as a separate transaction. This means a search for a
specific member record could come up with 'no data', but the window for
each transaction is only a few seconds long.

BTW, in case anyone noticed, MSA didn't get updated today (Tuesday).
I'm not sure exactly what went wrong but it appears that the first step,
the batch transfer of the data from the legacy systems to the Linux box,
didn't take place as scheduled this morning. And when it doesn't run,
the rest of the steps have no data to process.
--
Mike Nolan

MSA is a great tool and it is the main page I use on the USCF website.
It is great to see progress in the online area even when the USCF has
problems elsewhere.

I know there are a lot of people for whom the magazine is a top
priority, but improvements to the online system are my main interest. I
am looking forward to the day when tourney results can be sent in
electronically and updates can occur in hours not weeks.

Marty