Monday 17 January 2011

Trainspotting

I love Moths and I am a bit of a Moth trainspotter. That with my database geekyness has resulted in a Statistics Page of the Boat data in the IMCA Database:

http://www.moth-sailing.org/imca/faces/Stats.jsp

The first thing to notice is that this data is not a complete set of data of all Moths built since 1928. Does such a record exist? I know that year books contain some lists but I do not think there is a complete record.

I hope the Boats For Sale feature (see my last post) will feed more data into this but so far zero response. Maybe it does not work or no one is interested? Anyway I want to get this data and use it because it gives a nice picture of the class and the trends within it.

If you want to reuse this data there is a dump of it here: http://www.moth-sailing.org/imca/faces/boats.xml This can be used to sex up gear tables for events.

If you are a member you can log in to the IMCA site and add your boat into the database (if it is not there already). The problem with this is I do not know who is a member and who not as my centralized membership management features have at best failed miserably.

Am I the only trainspotter out there or are there others that are interested in this project? If so do you have data and time?

7 comments:

Assassin said...

Hi Doug,

An update there are 97 assassins built to date. 58 in 2009 and 39 in 2010.

cheers
Darren

Simon Liddington said...

This is a good idea but it does seem to need a little work. It seems you have to go to "Sell a boat" to add a boat to the database which is a little confusing and "Boats Search" doesn't list any boats although my boat is now listed in the XML dump. Simon

Doug Culnane said...

Thanks guys,

I really appreciate the feedback.

@Darren do you have ISAF numbers for these boats. If you let me know the numbers or ranges I will bulk add them to the database.

@Simon who are you I know a few simons and what is you boat and how did you search for it? I will make the add boat open for all logged in users and will try to reproduce and fix bugs you report if you let me know which boat your searched for.

Thanks,

Doug

Doug Culnane said...

Ok guy looking at this again and seeing the activity it looks like the process does not make sense. First you select a boat then you can edit the boat data. Then you have to create an Advert for the boat. No advert to entry in the for sale list... Is this confusing? It makes sense to me because I designed it but maybe others do not get it. I will try to make this clearer.

Doug Culnane said...

PS.... I guess it is Simon Payne trying to sell his boat based on the Blogs... Si how did you search for your boat. GBR 1 does not identify the boat at all. I do not think ABARTH if that is it name is in my database so I am confused how you found it.

Simon Liddington said...

Hi Doug,
It's Simon Liddington though it's fun to be confused for our previous world champ :) I'm not selling, just adding my boat to the database. The "boats search" link in the members toolbar just takes me to a blank page on my iPhone and I think just gave an empty list whatever I entered when I tried it the other day.

Doug Culnane said...

Thanks Simon,

Found the problem and have fixed it. I forgot to remove a second layer of security. I will publish an update in the next hour.

Thanks again,

Doug