In which we carp a bit about tabroom, in the mistaken belief that "Carpe Diem!" means to complain about things every day without fail

So a couple of things went off the track in tabroom this weekend. For a while, it wasn’t showing school names in various lists, which may seem trivial, but it made us wonder if pairings might work. Kaz and I both posted help tix. It got fixed, although no one acknowledged it. Maybe it fixed itself, which is rather frightening, to say the least. If you call up the NSDA help phone, you are told to call back during the week. Thank God we don’t run any tournaments on the weekend. Oh. Wait a minute.

Then we discovered this thing where a handful of judges without tabroom accounts are conflicted against a repeated series of schools dozens of times. We thought that might be endemic but it’s hither and thither, and I couldn’t replicate it. This is also a rather alarming bug, and I’ve sent it along to the powers that program. I can eliminate the problem from the affected judges at the Tiggers, but the issue is, how did the problem arise in the first place.

“Always scribble, scribble, scribble!” was the accusation against Edward Gibbon. It’s sort of my theory of tabroom as well. Someone is always scribbling it, changing things on the fly. And one fly affects another fly affects another fly. I’m used to more rigorous change control. An iteration of a program is tested and released. The next iteration is on a test server where, you guessed it, it’s tested until it’s deemed stable. Then it’s released to replace the last iteration. Any given iteration is deemed stable, and no new iteration replaces it until that, too, is deemed stable, usually after being beaten up by a team of beta testers. I don’t think tabroom works this way, but maybe I’m wrong.

Anyhow, enough carping. The Tiggers is only a few days away. The next thing I need to do is create marching orders for e-balloting. I arranged the LD rooms in the fewest number of buildings closest to ground zero, and the Tigs have a decent team of runners to handle problems. My hope is that we’ve trained most people well enough now to make this work. I mean, if not now, when? On the other hand, recent experiences with bad wifi and system crashes can’t have made a lot of users all that confident. If we can pull it off, with only obdurate judges and obtuse debaters to worry about, it will go a long way to erase these issues in people’s minds. If not, I think we’re going to be looking at a lot of paper ballots in the immediate future.

///