DOTLAN EveMaps

I’m still working on the intel manager and improving it with a few testing alliances. In the conflict between IRC/ED and RA they started a tower spamming in one of our station systems (IRC) while they’re still fighting in ED‘s home constellation. After this tower spamming, RA was holding the tower majority with all moons taken in RK-Q51.

Due to strategy plannings and personal interests, I wanted to know the exact day when the Sovereignty could flip. With multiple towers, placed in multiple timezones and combined with towers placed before and after downtime, it’s getting interesting to do the calculations in an excel spreadsheet. To do this with 15 moons seems to be pretty easy in the beginning, but thinking about systems with more then 50 or moons sounds just like heavy work.

Here comes the intel manager into play. As we already used it to track hostile posses and timers, it was an easy task to take this infomration base and develop a module to take those posses and the online timers into the calculation to get a forecast system.

Here are 2 screenshots how this module looks like:

After having a bug report open for 8 month in CCP’s bug tracking system without getting updates about the progress I’ll try to sum up the problems and give my readers some information about my problems with updates, sovereignty API and background work.

The Problem: Outdated exports:

I usually start 2 hours after downtime to load sovereignty and alliance information. I found out that it’s pretty common that CCP don’t flush their API caches during downtime and even up to 4 hours after the official downtime, their servers are still delivering outdated sov data from the day before. With a CachedUntil Timer for 6 hours for the sov data, this server/ip isn’t allowed to query anymore. To fix this issue I’m happy that to be able to use several IP addresses to query the API Servers without running into a cached -until-loop. I’m starting with 14 GMT time and then retry each hour until midnight or I got a valid and udpated sov export from the new day.

The XML Files are looking something like this in such cases.

<currentTime>2009-03-02 14:00:12</currentTime>
<dataTime>2009-03-02 08:51:25</dataTime>
<cachedUntil>2009-03-02 20:00:12</cachedUntil>

That’s the reason why it sometimes took hours until my websites gets updated.  This bug was reported 8 month ago, it’s  attached to a known defect, which is still open.

The latest issue: Wrong data exports

After my scripts are doing several requests, spreaded over several ips (the api caches are per ip-only) I could lean back and start ignoring CCP’s lazyness to fix this problems. But yesterday I CCP was delivering false data. At 14 o’clock I got a valid sovereignty export with a DataTime stamp as well 14 o’clock. Sounds good? Of course … but the main issue was that this data which was tagged as updated after downtime were the unchanged sovereignty situation from the day before.

This caused my database to update the history table and ends with no sovereignty changes for day 27.05.2009. A manual sov import some hours later ended in really strange results and forced me to load a sql backup from the day before and reimport the current sovereignty export.

<currentTime>2009-05-27 14:00:09</currentTime>
<dataTime>2009-05-27 14:00:09</dataTime>
<cachedUntil>2009-05-27 20:00:09</cachedUntil>

Dear CCP

Please fix your API Servers. Restart/Reload the API Servers or just flush the caches during or after downtime will do the job and everybody who’s using sovereignty data will be happy. It’s one simple cronjob … oh I forgot you’re using windows, but there’s  a task/schedule planer too :-))

No i’m not dead. I’m just really busy currently in real life. I didn’t had the time to work on bigger updates or even had the mood to write blog postings. But I think, it’s time to write about a few stats about what I’m really happy and the small things I’ve done in the last days.

The traffic and visitor counts are growing and growing every month currently. Sometimes because of new features (like the Flash Maps for IE users), javascript additions and sometimes just new visitors 🙂 Here are the raw numbers.

With all the new features, javascript additions here and there I know I had to work on. That’s where i started to optimize stuff. Merging multiple javascript files, removing white-space from js  and css files to reduce their filesize, setting explicit expire timers and max-age cache control headers with mod_expire static images, css and javascript files. The result with tuning those parameters was great. But can only be measured on a long term basis.

The POS Intel Manager is already heavly used by my current Alliance aswell as some other test users. But I need to find some time to go on with programming, tuning, etc.

I’m still thinking about stuff that can easily be added and or modified on the maps. Does anyone has a list of static plexes (with name and description/ded level if possible), cosmos systems and perhab agents in space that are worth to be added? Those are not included in the real static database export from ccp.

I just finished the database update for the current Eve-Online expansion ‘Apocrypha’. Some agents have been updated, but the most important part is the integration of the wormhole region, constellation and systems.

You can search for the system name and you should be able to see some statistics (npcKills, Jumps, etc) as well as the celestials (planet and moons). You’ll also see the wormhole class in which you’re located. For more features I’m currently unsure what to do with the wormhole space because it’s too much changing data (new and collapsing wormholes, etc)

Fly safe

I’ve created a new combined map for the Catch, Impass and Tenerifis Regions which I would like to share with you.

Catch, Impass, Tenerifis

@AAA: I hope you can identify your space now and btw. nice dead-end systems in Impass. If you find this map usefull, I’m always happy about donations 🙂

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Did anybody tried out the Intel Manager? I still would like to get some feedback from my readers/testers.

The last days and weeks I was working on a closed and secured section for the DOTLAN EveMaps. After seeing this image from Goonswarm how they keep track of reinforced posses during the Delve War II. I thought: I could do this also with more information, map integration, etc.

What comes out? The DOTLAN (POS) Intel Manager

• Import and maintain POS locations
• Track POS States (online, anchored, reinforced)
• Keep track of reinforce timers in multiple timezones
• Report POS fittings (including module states)
• Set priorities
• DED mail import
• Maintain standings
• Region/System POS counting
• The Intel Manager is completely multi-project/multi-user ready
• User management for the project admin
• Different Security Roles: Write, Read, ReinforcedOnly (The last one only gives access to the list of reinforced POS towers)
• Fully integrated in the Region/System/Alliance Listings and integrated into the DOTLAN EveMaps

This complete system does not use any API Keys, etc. just user input. I choose not to use any API keys because API keys can only pull your own private alliance/corp information and basically this “intel manager” is dedicated to keep track of hostile pos locations / pos counting rather then keep track of your home industrial backyard.

I’m planing to make this valuable tool as a rent-able service.

Here are some screenshots what you can expect:

Test Account:

If you wanna test it out at the current state:

LOGIN: https://evemaps.dotlan.net/login/
USER: test
PASS: test

Let me know what you think about it.

I just booked the flight and hotel for my (RL/Ingame) Corpmate and me to Island in October 2009. Some hours ago CCP officially announced the Eve-Online Fanfest 2009 and confirmed the date we already talked about.

Fly safe will really get a new definition then 🙂

Are anybody of you making the trip up in the north?

Just got it from Twitter: Eve Fanfest seems to be held on the first weekend in October. Sounds great: Finally no more conflicts with the birthday of my girlfriend and my own. I’m thinking about making a trip to Reykjavik this autumn. Does anybody has some advices when to arrive (from Germany) and where to stay (hotel)?

Iceland Air: Eve Fanfest 2009

With all the action going on in February I can finally say: I  doubled the traffic and nearly the visitor count. I also passed the million page impression mark (according to webalizer)

Anyway: I’ve to thanks again to BoB and Goons for their nice contribution to the Moon Mining Database: With the lists from the old BoB Directors Board I could updated several hundred (mostly) highend moons.

I’ve also added a new list that shows the distribution of moon minerals over all regions. It should now easy to identify which regions are rich and which one are the poorer ones. But the database is still not even close to complete. But it’s growing every week. I hope you keep up and send me nice and juicy moonscans via email or evemail.

Regional Moon Distribution

Until now i had a small header over each region listing that show the current sovereignty changes of this day for this region. I found the today’s changes listing are completely useless, because everybody is using the normal sovereignty changes sub page. With the newly added feature that you can rollback the time for your region maps, I found out that it would make sense that you get a list of the monthly changes for you favorite home region. That’s the easiest way to get ah fast view on everything which happened after you came back from a vacation or a break.

Check it out

Sovereignty Changes in February 2009: Detorid

Sovereignty Changes in February 2009 - Detorid