It seems the referee who made so many bad calls against Italy when they played South Korea in the 2002 World Cup has been suspended for 20 games for manipulating an Ecuadorean league game. He added 13 minutes of extra time (while reporting the game lasted the regulation 90), enabling Liga de Quito to come… Read More: Yahoo! Sports: Byron Moreno, ref for Italy-SKorea, suspended 20 games… »
The Crew-Revs match ended in overtime. In the past, the MLS website used “Final (OT)” or “Final (2OT)” to indicate overtime. The 2OT only appeared once that I can remember. Whether the game ends early due to a golden goal or if both overtime periods are played, the website usually says “Final (OT)”. For the… Read More: Minor SoccerPhone Fix for Final-OT »
Last week I was lucky enough to have a business trip take me to the Netherlands. While there I got to see Willem II play Málaga in an Intertoto Cup match. Málaga had won the first game at home 2-1. Unfortunately, Willem II lost their home leg 1-0, so Málaga moved on to face Villareal,… Read More: Willem II vs. Málaga – Intertoto Cup match in Tilburg »
Today I rewrote a Python script I wrote last year for calculating playoff magic numbers for the MLS. It can now function as a CGI script and can generate a reasonably attractive table of magic numbers in an HTML document. You can check it out at https://www.wombatnation.com/magicnumbers/. The right side frame has an explanation of… Read More: MLS MagicNumbers »
In the scoring details on the MLS webpage, the time has always been given as just the minute of the goal, e.g, 34 for a goal in the 34th minute. The main exception is that goals in extra time are sometimes given a plus sign, e.g., 92+. In today’s game between Dallas and Colorado, Steve… Read More: This weekend’s SoccerPhone fixes »
Fixed the problem where the Python script wrote the cached results to one place, but the VXML code looked for it in another directory. I didn’t detect the problem earlier, because 1) I accidentally ftp’d a copy of results.xml to the VXML directory and 2) I didn’t do a good job of regression testing failure… Read More: Fixed Caching of Results for SoccerPhone »
Whoever runs the MLS website is definitely keeping me on my toes. They made a couple new changes to the scores page that broke SoccerPhone again. First, they dropped the date information from each score. Admittedly, I probably should have had exception handling code for this scenario, but it just seems strange that they would… Read More: More MLSnet.com Scores.html Web Page Unpredictability »
I ran out of time before last week’s vacation and never uploaded the new files for SoccerPhone. Consider it done. I even sort of tested it.
I finally got around to reading Fever Pitch during the World Cup, finishing it up just last week. Thanks to my wife’s copy of The Omnibus, I have continued on with High Fidelity and will later read About a Boy. The Omnibus is published by Indigo in Great Britain. We luckily found a copy at… Read More: Nick Hornby Story in the New Yorker about World Cup… »
I finally fixed the problem I caused at some point in the past. For some time now, SoccerPhone got an error when it couldn’t retrieve the scores from the MLS website. The problem was that I needed to set a variable at the VXML Document level scope, not at a block level scope. I didn’t… Read More: SoccerPhone Now Says Day of Week »