Overall score

I don't consider the gaming aspect of the Forecast Exchange to be the main aspect, but once you play it is important to know how you are doing compared to the others. This has not been possible so far, but today I implemented a new feature. I added two columns to the list of all traders (players). One column for Stock value and one for Total value. I made this column sortable and had Total value as the default sort. Now it will immediately be obvious who is doing best (assuming that the calculation is correct, of course).

This feature was the top choice in the Feedback system and it actually did feel good to choose the item that most people wanted implemented. Here is how the All forecast traders page look now:

Bugs fixed during testing period

The list below contains the bugs that I fixed today. Normally you would not make any changes to an application during a testing period, but the testing period here is so extended that I decided to consider it as two testing periods. The bugs fixed now were the most annoying bugs concerning business logic.

• Duplicate news items are created when a trade is made.


• There is a spelling mistake in one of the automatically generated news items. See if you can spot it.


• You can't cancel an offer to buy stocks in a prediction if you have sold all your stocks in that prediction.


• Offers that expires are removed one day too late. They can't be accepted, but it does take a day before the player gets the stocks or the money back.


• Double check for enough money to buy stocks is unnecessary. The money are withdrawn immediately, yet there is an additional check if the player who wants to buy has enough money to buy.

First medals won

One of the features of the application is that it decides who won the prediction. The calculation is done as follows:

• If the prediction succeeds, the player that had the most stocks wins the Predictum medal.


• If the prediction fails, the player that made the most money trading his/her stocks in that prediction (mostly selling at a decent price, of course), wins the Fatalum medal.

In the example below, the player Torleif H had the most stocks in HUGO when that prediction succeeded. On his portfolio page this is shown:

Test periond half way

The test period for the beta-version 0.1 has now reached its half way point. It will end on March 1st. So far, of the 11 prediction made, only 2 has finished. This is as expected, as several of the predictions were made on events on March 1st.

The testing is not an organized, item by item test suite. Instead testing is performed indirectly by the players as most of them report back the errors they find as well as their ideas on how it should be improved. To give an example of how wide a range of errors can be found this way, here is the complete list of bugs found:

• In the main menu box in the upper left corner, the whole box is selected on mouse over, but you need to press the link in the text to get the intended action.


• For an admin, editing a news item is not possible.


• The log in time takes too long.


• Duplicate news items are created when a trade is made.


• There is a spelling mistake in one of the automatically generated news items. See if you can spot it.


• You can't cancel an offer to buy stocks in a prediction if you have sold all your stocks in that prediction.


• Offers that expires are removed one day too late. They can't be accepted, but it does take a day before the player gets the stocks or the money back.


• Double check for enough money to buy stocks is unnecessary. The money are withdrawn immidiately, yet there is an additional check if the player who wants to buy has enough money to buy.


• In Internet Explorer version 6 and older, the boxes on the left and right hand side (main menu items and player info) are covering the main area, thus making some actions difficult and some info unreadable.


• Where you place new offers, the date field on the bottom offer can be difficult (you need to type the date in) to set when the bottom of the browser is so close that when the date field opens you need to scroll down to it.


• On an iPhone, the date field can't be opened.


• On an iPhone, the check box Remember me next time can't be checked if you want to log in.

Most of these errors will be fixed before the official release of version 0.1. Browser-related errors will likely not be fixed, but all the others should be. With so many errors found, do I consider the testing successful? Yes, certainly I do!

Feedback

In order to get feedback from testers, a new feature was added to the Forecast Exchange today. On the left side you will see a red button saying Feedback. By clicking that you will find a list of suggested new features which you can vote on. All users gets ten votes they can spread over the different suggestions as they please (max 3 per item). The idea is then that the most voted for suggestions will be the next to be developed.

If you have a similar web site you can easily add this feature yourself. UserVoice is the company that does this. Most features are available for free. For an open source project like this you even get unlimited use on the features, in some areas even more than for the professional version. Our link was registered and we had to add a code snippet generated by UserVoice to our main.master file and that was it. Very cool!

Friends with blogs

In this day an age of blogging and Obama I have surprisingly few friends with blogs. Perhaps I'm too old? Here is a short overview of those I know about and their relationship to the Forecast Exchange:

Torbjørn Marø is a software developer who writes a great blog in Norwegian, in which I have contributed a little. It is blog.kjempekjekt.com (in addition he has a Sci-Fi blog at sf.kjempekjekt.com). Torbjørn is the lead web developer at the company I work for and is always eager to start new projects. It is therefore not surprising that it was he who started the coding on the Forecast Exchange in the first place. After a while he took a break from it, to start several new projects, but perhaps now, after the beta-release, he will consider contributing again? I surely hope so!

Pavel Kapustin is also a software developer that works in the same company as me. He is Ukrainian, but also speaks Russian, English and Norwegian fluently. He is an idealistic programmer and has joined the work on the Forecast Exchange on the promise to be able to develop something from the ground up using only the best techniques available. His blog is badbadboy.livejournal.com and consists of a mix of Russian poetry and programming discussions on a high level.

Pål Levang is also (yes, I know ...) a software developer. He doesn't work for the same company as me. Instead he has started his own companies (yes, plural!) and is always full of crazy ideas, a fountain of weird, but also sometimes very interesting stuff. This year he is even part of the Norwegian TV show Skaperen, with a one million NOK first price for the best innovation. He started a blog today, being inspired by this blog. Oh, the ripple effect ... You can check it out at omvendte.blogspot.com.

Ivar Areklett is an old friend helping with the beta-testing. He works for the Norwegian goverment, checking that the Norwegian IRS follows their guidelines. His web page is Ivar Areklett's hjemmeside. It has not been updated for a while, since his computer crashed and burned last year.

Test period started

Today I cleaned up the database and prepared for the first testing period. I set up nine predictions that will all end on or before March 1st. I have asked friends, family and colleagues to test, competing over who will be the best to predict what will happen in February 2009.

It's a girl!

I'm going to have a daughter. Celina and I went to the official ultra sound at Haukeland Sykehus today. It was very exciting! It turned out to show a healthy girl; you could see her kicking and moving around in there, floating happily, having an exclusive party inside Celina's womb.

After putting some kind of blank jelly on the outside of Celina's stomach they dragged, pointed and even stabbed to get the angles they wanted. I was surprised at how hard it seemed that the most experienced woman jabbed the ultra sound device into Celina's stomach to try to get the baby to move so that she could check out the baby's face. I guess it answered Celina's question on how hard she could push on her stomach before it was dangerous. But all in all a very cool experience for a first time dad like me.

First publicly available beta-version

This past weekend I paid to get the Forecast Exchange hosted. I semi-randomly ended up with Netcetera, an English hosting company. For something like £6 a month I get to have web applications running on their machines. I also bought the domain www.theforecastexchange.com after discovering that the domain www.forecastexchange.com was already taken. Good thing the logo says the Forecast Exchange anyway.

I will describe in more technical details later the errors I encountered when getting this to work on the new web host. For now I am proud to present version 0.1 beta available for viewing at www.theforecastexchange.com. You will not be able to log in yet, but at least you can view the application. I expect to clear the database to get some friends to test already this week. If you are interested in joining the beta testing, please just respond to this post.