Category Archives: General

Little League Evaluations App

Little League evaluations can generate some of the most paperwork of the season.  If you live in the Northwest, there is also the very real danger of scheduling an evaluations date a couple months in advance and it turns out to be raining all day.

Even under a canopy, ink runs, paper gets wet and sometimes falls to the ground.

You get home and then someone or a group needs to enter all the evaluations data into a spreadsheet.

Very time-consuming.

With the help of Paul Grimes, I developed a web app which you can find over on GitHub.

The app currently deals with Registration, Fielding, Hitting, Pitching and Baserunning.

Redwest Evals App

Registration

At Registration we assign a bib number to each player and take a picture.  At each station the volunteer enters the bib number and an optimized picture is displayed to confirm the right child is being evaluated.

Fielding

For fielding we record successful catches of ground balls, fly balls, throwing and general baseball IQ.

Hitting

The Hitting station records number of contacts, power and mechanics.

Pitching

Pitching records top velocity as measured by a radar gun, accuracy (number of strikes) and mechanics.

Baserunning

Baserunning records the time to run from first to third.

Normally the data entry took a couple days.  Now I can do exports as soon as I get home and we can start to analyze data.

Redmond West has now used this for baseball and softball evaluations with much success.

Tech Stuff

The app is just a web application, you don’t have to get it into an App store.  It will work on any recent-ish smartphone.  For the backend, It’s written in PHP with minimal javascript and uses MySQL for the database.  I avoided using any frameworks to keep it lightweight and fast.  If your Little League has access to a web server, or if someone on your board is a web developer it should be pretty easy to get this up and running for your own organization.

If you are interested in deploying the app for your own Little League evals, let me know in the comments and I’ll get back to you.

Seattle’s Mercer Mess – and How to Fix It

Those that live in Seattle know that Mercer street has sucked for 40 years.

Over the past couple years, there has been an extensive effort to make Mercer better – and the street and surroundings have improved markedly … but …

Rush hour traffic, especially east-bound evening traffic, continues to suck and is actually considerably worse than ever.  This is not entirely the fault of the new design of Mercer.  This one lies entirely on humans, the traffic control officers employed by Amazon around the side streets of Mercer.

Continue reading Seattle’s Mercer Mess – and How to Fix It

Marking Time – A Novel by April White

Marking Time Book Cover

My dear friend April White has just released her self-published young adult novel Marking Time, the first book in her Immortal Descendants series.

Marking Time is available for Kindle for just $2.99.

If you like epic quests of time traveling immortals with a smattering of the paranormal and ancient family lines this will be a great book for you. April needs reviews on Amazon for this initial publishing phase so please download, read and review!

Airport Utility 6.1 Supports IPv6 Configuration

The recent 6.1 update to Airport Utility now lets you edit the IPv6 configuration of your various Apple Airport devices.  The new 1.1 version for IOS also supports editing IPv6.

In the Tunnel section there is a new field called ‘IPv6 Delegated Prefix’.

If you are using Hurricane Electric’s Tunnelbroker for IPv6 – you can enter your ‘Routed /64’ address there in its entirety.

Not exactly sure what functionality this adds to the Airport device however.  Everything on the home network functions as it did before.

[Update 3.13.2013] – Apple has posted a support page with official instructions on how to configure Manual IPv6 Tunnels in Airport Utility.

 

iTunes Error -50 preventing sync

Just had this error today with an iPhone 4 and the apple support document is not very useful.

From Googling, it seemed that many people used to blame this on corrupt photos in iPhoto – but tracking those down can be painful.

In my case I think it was a partial sync that happened when I drove away from the house in my car. I plugged in my iPhone in the car while in the garage, and it connected to my WiFi and started to sync – I was late so I drove away as it was trying to sync and then gave up. I think this made the iPhone very happy.

I was prepared to go down the route of doing a complete restore but I decided to try the semi-obvious first.

I rebooted the computer running iTunes, I shut down all the running apps on the iPhone and then rebooted the iPhone – and then it did a backup and then did a sync.

All is well. Hope this helps someone.