RE: A way to divine your number in line?


hede

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Joined
Oct 3, 2008
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361
I have written some ugly script to do the work for us. Test it at http://www.home.unix-ag.org/hede/pandoracounter/.
It's a counter where anyone can add his purchase date. Time/Date must be entered in UTC-Time. That means London Time, GMT, whatever.
Please add the Location where you purchased it as the comment. If it goes down a bomb I will continue my work and add more features :D

You can add your pandora but no one than me can remove any entry so far :p write me if you want to have something removed. Also write me if you have any security concerns or something else goes wrong... It's a very short and ugly hack and I'm a beginner, so I'm not sure if I have done the things right.

(And btw: Yes I know the script is not secure, anyone can put any data he wants, please don't do so :wacko: )
 
zarneth said:
Awesome. You should post this on the GP32X forums too.
I do not have an account there (not yet). But you can do so, if you want.
 
Damn it. It looks like I've ruined it by posting four times.
It gave me the message that it couldn't parse the form so I assumed it failed! :huh:

Anyway, apologies for breaking the counter. I wasn't the only one to do it more than once, but I was certainly the only person to try four times! :(
 
hede,

As I posted over at the other forum (but as I understand it you're not subscribed there yet), there's a problem with the script - whenever I access the page I get re-added, and worse, suddenly the submit field was filled out with someone else and I'm sure if I access it again that person (who is not me) will be accidentally (re-)added.

I'm not pressing the submit button, I'm not clicking refresh, I only used the URL itself (as in the original link).

Last time I looked I saw myself (Tor) twice, I only ordered one device so feel free to remove one of the entries.
 
Tor said:
[...]whenever I access the page I get re-added [...]

I use one script with one URL for all the things. Viewing and posting. This is uncommon, maybe that's the problem.
Firefox asks the user to resend data before transmitting data twice, maybe others do not. There are some other bugs so I took the script offline for now. Hopefully it will be back online at the end of week.

Tor said:
[...] and worse, suddenly the submit field was filled out with someone else and I'm sure if I access it again that person (who is not me) will be accidentally (re-)added.

I'm not pressing the submit button, I'm not clicking refresh, I only used the URL itself (as in the original link).[...]

That shouldn't happen. I will revise my script anyway, so I will try to figure that out.

Following things I have to do:
  • Trusted adding - it should be harder to add bogus entries.
  • The Form-Data-Catcher (the script which gets the sent data and adds it to the database) should have a different URL to not confuse some browsers (auto fill in form data, etc.)
  • Database-Locking (for now, 2 users adding at the same moment will (maybe) crash the database)
  • It should be possible to add a quantity of ordered pandoras
  • Everyone should edit its own entry. (I don't want to, but maybe a registration via email will be necessary)
  • and at last: the design :) (I think, thats not necessary)

Hopefully the script will be back on-line at the end of week. Hopefully I will have enough spare time...
 
Ooh, cool, I don't have to add myself. And yes, Gmanx purchased two Pandoras, thats why I listed him twice.
 
i don't know how your system works, but here's an idea:

You could read the percentage of people ordering at a specific hour, and calculate it up to 4000 using percentages. like if there's 3 people ordering right when it comes out, and 1 person ordering a day later, you could assume that there are 3000 people in front of that 1 person.
 
I didn't continue this work last weekend, the reasons are:

I didn't find a way to do some way of authentication without email registration and I do not want to depend on everyone's email address. (There are enough sites where you have to enter your email address and I do not want to be one of those leaking these to some spammers :p )

First I thought of parsing this forums mail system i.e. registering some bot-user to send everyone asking for access some "access key" via in-board "private message". This is definitely a possible task, but at least I have to ask the forum administrators for admission and this could possibly (but unlikely) turn the board unstable... apart from that it's more work to do than I have time to spend. (at least with my little programming skills ;-) )

Does anyone have a good idea?

Second: I'm pretty sure there won't be more than 10% of all pandora preorderers take part in this, so it won't be very reliable anyway... (ok, you will see: "hey, i'm in the second quarter of all preorderers")

At last it's not needed to know these things :eek: you'll get your p&|a "when it's ready"
 
that sounds an awful lot like what the duke nukem forever devs are saying
 
Kyosys said:
that sounds an awful lot like what the duke nukem forever devs are saying

argh! I mean -- no! I want to have my pandora before "duke nukem forever" is released. :|
 
Color me confused, but where did this whole "line" idea come from anyway? People keep talking about it like it's just assumed to exist, but I haven't seen anything to indicate that they are sorting shipments that way. If fact I think that it's been explicitly said, a few times, that they aren't.

Now maybe there's something that I haven't seen, I don't check the boards every day, but as near as I can tell this just sprang up from nothing.
 
shmuck said:
Color me confused, but where did this whole "line" idea come from anyway? People keep talking about it like it's just assumed to exist, but I haven't seen anything to indicate that they are sorting shipments that way. If fact I think that it's been explicitly said, a few times, that they aren't.

Now maybe there's something that I haven't seen, I don't check the boards every day, but as near as I can tell this just sprang up from nothing.
It exists :)
Search in the early posts it's there somewhere.
 
Hey guys, although I know alot of folks say this is useless, but I find it kind of fun and interesting...enough so I decided to carry on with the idea. I've been wanting to play with Rico some anyway...and I got to dabble in some sql which is always useful...

Anyway, the list in located at http://glastronowners.com/pandora/divine.php. Double click on the list to add a new entry. Contact me here for any corrections. I transferred the data over from the old list, removing seemingly bogus/bad entries...So you'll need to double check you entry to make sure it's there and for accuracy. For example...the first few entries are from before 14:00 GMT, which was when the preorders supposedly started. So are those times right? For those that don't know, look at the full email header for the most accurate times...

I thought about letting the user enter their email address and emailing an access code to edit their entry, but figured with a max of 4000 entries and not likely to get near that many I could just manually edit them if needed...

The list shows the ranking of submitted times plus an estimated time based on the information/algorithm provided in the original "divining" thread. I tried to test it a bit, but I'm sure there's likely to be something wrong somewhere... Take a look and tell me what you think...
 
This list is much better than mine. But there's still this kind of "we have to trust each other, everyone can make any entry he wants".
But it seems good enough for a simple overview "hey, i'm one of the last"...
 
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