Published by Adam Podolnick
Last year I created a site called shackbrackets as an attempt to build a simple online sporting game. I found that games like fantasy football were too complicated and time consuming for my tastes. I liked the idea of a simple pick ‘em game and was unhappy with some of the implementations out there. ESPN.com’s game, for instance, only had a limited number of college football games to choose from where as I wanted to pick every single game. I also had a grand vision to have pick ‘em games from every single sport and have a meta game where the person with the most points from all them games would win a large prize. I sat down and programmed the site in PHP and a whole bunch of people (well around 100) signed up and played. I was pretty happy with how everything turned out.
A few months ago, I decided to rewrite the site and re-brand it as well. I had originally bought the domain to create a march madness bracket game for the community at shacknews but didn’t have the time to build a site before the championship began. This time around, I wanted the site to be more generic and appeal to a wider audience so I could perhaps make more money from ad revenue and thus give out bigger prizes. I re-wrote the site, using Ruby on Rails this time, and focused on just football (since a post-mortem from last year reveild that those were the games most people were interested in anyway).
Some new features this year:
- Revamped Team News Pages: The news pages grab news from all over the internet now and also aggregates video from a variety of different sites as well. Check it out!
- Personalized homepage: You can now add a team as one of your favorite teams. When you do so, you’ll get a personalized homepage with the news and videos from all of your favorite teams at a url like http://adam.mybrackets.net. (this is still under development).
- College Football now only has games from the AP top 25. People complained that there were too many games for college football so now there will be at most 25 games a week. To add a level of difficulty the picks will be based on the spread. If you pick the team that is favored you are picking on them to beat the spread. Otherwise pick the other underdog.
- I’m thinking about adding the ability to create groups and adding friend to make it kind of a social networking app since it wouldn’t take very long to do
That about covers the changes for this year so go ahead and sign up now! http://www.mybrackets.net
. Aug 01, 2008
Filed under: Projects, Ruby on Rails, ShackBrackets, php
Published by Adam Podolnick
I don’t use the Flash IDE to do any of my actionscript programming so I use the free Flex SDK to compile all of my code.
The other day I was having a hard time getting TweenLite, lightweight and fast tweening engine, to work because I was trying to import the easing functions like this:
import fl.transitions.easing.*;
It turns out that all of the fl packages are specific to the Flash IDE and are not available in the Flex SDK. I’m aware that there are several workarounds to get them to work (here, for instance), but I found that the easiest way to get the easing functions to work is just to substitute the import statement above with the following:
import mx.effects.easing.*;
You will have access to almost all of the same easing functions but you’ll have to check the documentation to make sure of the proper easings.
. Jun 04, 2008
Filed under: Actionscript
Published by Adam Podolnick
The BCS is broken. I think this season, more than any other in recent history (except for maybe 2004), just goes to show how poorly the BCS works. The major BCS Bowls were all horrible match ups. The Rose Bowl featured the Pac 10 champions, The USC Trojans vs. the Fighting Illini. For some reason, the Rose Bowl commission decided to preserve the Big 10 vs. Pac 10 match up instead of picking a more compelling showdown in USC vs. Georgia. I couldn’t really understand this decision before the game and after the 32 point blowout, I still am confounded by their choice. The Sugar Bowl was also pretty confusing. While Hawaii did manage to navigate the regular season and was the only team to do so, I’m not sure they really deserved to be in that game. I think after the shocking upset of Oklahoma by Bosie State people feel obligated to give some of the non-BCS conference teams a chance. After Hawaii’s 31 point loss to Georgia, I think it might be a while before another non-BCS team makes it to a BCS bowl game. West Virginia beat Oklahoma pretty handily in another uninteresting match up and the Orange Bowl featured two really good defenses and two mediocre offenses for yet another boring game.
The National Championship game, on the other hand, was slightly more interesting. The game was exciting and there were lot of big plays by both teams on both sides of the ball. When it came down to it though, LSU was a much better team. What the National Championship failed to do, in my mind anyway, was to crown a true national champion. Ohio State really hadn’t played anyone. Their only loss was to Illinois, a team that was utterly dismantled by USC in the Rose Bowl. As far as I’m concerned, the Big 10 isn’t a very strong conference and Ohio State’s number one ranking was fairly unwarranted. LSU certainly didn’t play the best team in the nation and therefore I think it’s hard to crown them as the national champions.
I’m not even asking for a playoff since I know it’ll be a long time before we get on. I’d just like to see better match ups in these bowl games. USC vs. Georgia would have been one hell of a game. And any of the two loss teams probably could have provided a much better fight than Ohio State did against LSU. I think with a few small tweaks to the ranking system of the BCS we could all see much better match ups which, until we have a playoff system, would keep me entertained enough to be happy.
. Jan 08, 2008
Filed under: College Football
Published by Adam Podolnick
The USC Women’s Soccer team is the new 2007 National Champion!
USC defeated FSU 2-0 to win the Womens College Cup! Congratulations and Fight On!
. Dec 09, 2007
Filed under: Soccer, USC
Published by Adam Podolnick
 The USC Women’s Soccer team will be competing in it’s first ever College Cup this Sunday. USC defeated UCLA in a semi-final match on friday to advance to the final. Read more here. The game will be broadcast on ESPN2 at 2pm EST. I know I will be watching. Congratulations, good luck, and Fight On!
. Dec 09, 2007
Filed under: Soccer, USC
Published by Adam Podolnick
My sister’s dog, Pelle, happens to hate vacuum cleaners. From what I can tell, this is pretty normal amongst dogs. I’ve always wondered what Pelle would think of my Roomba. Would it not bother him as much as a regular vacuum cleaner? Would he attack it the second it turned on? Well today was my lucky day. My sister came over to my apartment with Pelle and I finally remembered to try turning on the Roomba while he was around. This is what happened:
. Dec 08, 2007
Filed under: Pelle
Published by Adam Podolnick
I’ve kind of been on a gadget craze today. First, I decided it was time to purchase an ultra-compact digital camera to complement my DSLR. I wanted something really small and light that I could carry around in my pocket every day. I decided to go with the Canon Powershot SD1000. Not only was it relatively cheap ($175.99), but it was one of the smallest and lightest cameras I could find. It should arrive tomorrow so I’ll write up a review after I play with it for a while.Â
I also was accepted into the Vudu Evangelist program which allowed me to acquire a Vudu box at a heavily discounted rate in exchange for, well, evangelizing the product. Vudu is a  product that allows you to both rent and purchase movies and stream them over the internet to your television over a peer to peer network. I’ve heard very good things about the product so I can’t wait to get it hooked up to my TV. If you want to read more about vudu, click here.
. Dec 04, 2007
Filed under: Gadgets
Published by Adam Podolnick
Tonight I’m pleased to announce the release of VisorLog. VisorLog is a simple and unobtrusive javascript logger. My inspiration for this project came from a program for the mac called Visor (Visor provides a systemwide terminal window accessible via a hotkey, much like the consoles found in games such as Quake.) Anyway, It’s pretty cool and easy to use. All you need to do is include the .js file and you’re set to go.
To log a message to the console, you just need to call a function like this:
1
| VISOR.logger.log('debug', 'this is a debug message'); |
For more information about VisorLog, check out it’s project page.
. Aug 25, 2007
Filed under: Javascript, Projects
Published by Adam Podolnick
Since the College Football season is drawing very near, I figured it was time to mention that I’ve launched a new site called ShackBrackets.com. The overall plan for the site is to have every kind of fantasy / pick ‘em game imaginable and allow for scoring to work across all games. For now, however, I just wrote the College Football Pick ‘Em game. I’ll be giving a prize (in the form of an Amazon.com gift certificate) to the winner of the game. The value of the prize will be based on the revenue generated from the google ads as well as commission from ticket sales from the site. So the more you click on ads and buy tickets the higher the value of the prize will be.
Check out a video demo of the site after the jump or sign up now!
Read more…
. Aug 24, 2007
Filed under: College Football, Projects, ShackBrackets
Published by Adam Podolnick
My parents adopted a dog while I was home for my cousin Rachel’s wedding. Greta, who we believe is a mix between a Husky and a Shepard , is one of the cuter dogs I’ve seen. She’s only a puppy but it’s still incredibly fun to play with her. I’ve been taking a lot of pictures of her which I have been uploading to my gallery.
. Jul 22, 2007
Filed under: Greta, Photography
