Archive for November, 2009

After a LOT of work/heavy lifting with C++, audio timing and beat spacing, I finally am relieved to have a sizeable prototype for thesis that is a big step towards my intended project. It may not seem like a lot in the form I’m presenting it, but it involved a lot of planning, coding, and adjustments to my XML in order to create something that I can test.

This test consists of two audio files, both generated live from baseball game information read from a database, parsed to XML, imported into openFrameworks, then associated with certain beats in two different patterns. I associated the same beats with events in each pattern so that they can hopefully be compared in a similar fashion. The beats are as follows:

• Inning Change: Snare Drum
• Top/Bottom of inning: Bass Drum
• Out: Kick Drum
• Hit: Clapping

The first pattern is linear, which means that every plate appearance by a player is mapped to an equally timed beat. This diagram attempts to illustrate what I mean…

This approach is true to the actual rhythm of the game, and spaces the beats as they would occur in actual time. The audio effect that this gives can be quite random at time, and while it represents the game very well

Here is what this sounds like:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The second approach I took was to use the constants in the game (9 innings/Top and Bottom to each inning) as steady beats, and then use the variable events within these constants (hits, runs, outs, etc) as sections of variable timing within the the constants. The diagram below attempts to illustrate this:

This approach doesn’t hold as true to the actual rhythm of the game, however I think that the contrast between constant, steady beat patterns and variable events gives both a feeling of the game as well as a better sounding, more rhythmic sound.

Here is what this sounds like:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I’d appreciate any feedback you have as well as suggestions, so please review these two tracks and let me know what you think in the comments!

I’ve begun to dig into the Retrosheet database that I recently acquired (see previous post) and have started to plan out a basic format for parsing the immense amount of data into a readable, usable XML format that will let me retrieve game data in a simple, direct way.

In order to do this, I had to first think about how a baseball game is structured. What are the constants and what are the variables? How can I structure my XML around this?

Speaking in terms of a baseball game and not the way that Retrosheet is formatted, the constants in a game are as follows:

• 9 Innings
• 2 halves of an inning
• 1 set of at bats and 1 set of fielding (defense) for each team
• Away team always bats first in an inning
• Each half of an inning consists of 3 outs
• An out always ends an inning

After writing this down, I was starting to see a structure.

I then started to investigate how the game data was stored in the retrosheet database. The database is structured in a somwhat simplistic way, with only two levels of heirarchy: Games and at bats. Within the at bats lies all the other information about where the at bat took place in the game…which inning, which team, how many outs, etc.

This format didn’t quite mix with the way that I was thinking a game should be represented, but for a database structure it made perfect sense. I then began to think how I could merge these two formats, and what information I could gain from a game.

After several attempts, this is the XML format that I have come up with which I think will work quite well in organizing the information that I need.

This format organizes the game around the structure I mentioned previously, then adds in the game events from retrosheet as Plate Appearances within outs. This approach creates an XML document that is very easy to read, which I can use to reconstruct a game very quickly and pull connected data out based on related fields. At this point I am not pulling all the data but a smaller set that will be easy for me to get started with.

Here is a diagram of the overall structure.

The first major challenge of my thesis project has been acquiring historical data, parsing it into a usable format (database), and then going through it and trying to make some sense of it. I’ll try to go over some of the steps I took to get where I’m at (as usual both for anyone trying to do the same thing and for my own sanity the next time I need to do this).

First of all, thanks to the extremely hard work of a few super dedicated individuals, historical data for every baseball game  is available online at the site http://www.retrosheet.com

These files have an insane amount of data for almost every game played for at least the last 50 years (there is more but before then the complete info is a bit hit or miss). Unfortunately, due to the way that they are recording the data (I’m not really sure how, but I assume it involves some sort of spreadsheet), the files are not really in an easily interpreted format. Luckily, again due to the work of a few dedicated individuals, the open source community has a solution for this as well. The tool “Chadwick” (named after the man who is historically credited with inventing the first widely accepted form of baseball scorekeeping) is a command-line unix tool which can take these files and parse them to Comma Separated Value (CSV) files. This does entail learning a proprietary command language for the compiling (it looks sorta like regular expressions but I don’t think its related), but the end result is worth it.

From this point (once you have your CSV files) you can create a database in the SQL of your choice (MySQL, sqLite, etc) and import the database.

Fortunately there are a few people out there who have already done a great bulk of this work, and have written some scripts to take care of a lot of this process for you. Unfortunately, they are using Python with the MySQLDB extension, which under snow leopard is near impossible to compile at this time.

The main site I have been working from to get this data to work can be found here:

http://blog.wellsoliver.com/2009/06/retrosheet/

This guy is the perfect combination for my thesis: a data geek and a huge baseball fan. He has made several amazing tools (a few of which I look forward to getting into in the future) that allow people to get baseball data in a bit more friendly manner, and shares his experiences obtaining the data.

I spent the better half of a weekend attempting to get his code to work on my computer, due in no way to any error on his fault but solely based on the fact that snow leopard refuses to compile and install a workable version of MySQLDB to python.

I finally gave up, and decided that I would go to plan B and run the script on my server (Dreamhost). This too proved to hit a few roadblocks (the version of Python installed on my server wasn’t new enough, had to install new Python then compile and install new MySQLDB a couple times )

Then I had to figure out how to compile the Chadwick source code under Unix, which seemed very unclear until I actually opened the readme file and realized all I had to do was type ./configure in the Chadwick directory and it would compile no sweat.

I finally got the code to run and (seemingly) work! Then I realized I had another error…my server was killing my requests and I was only getting part of the data. After emailing back and forth with Dreamhost for an hour or two, I finally realized what the issue was. The python code that I was working with ran in 20 seperate threads (which would have been fine had I been able to run it on my own computer) however my Dreamhost account had a limit on concurrent threads that were allowed to run and i was greatly exceeding this. After changing the amount to 5, I finally was able to execute the script and build my database. It took about 15 minutes (!) to run the script through, and I was left with a complete, 4+GB database of baseball information.

This has been a huge headache (to say the damn least!) but now that I have gone through this process once it should be a lot easier from her on out if I need to grab new data (hopefully…).

I’m now working on understanding and parsing this enormous amount of data (the one table of events alone has over 8 million rows…) and make some sense of it. I’m close to having a workable XML format and I’ll post more about this in the future.

One more thing….

I found this link: http://www.wantlinux.net/2009/04/retrosheet-baseball-mysql-database-download/

which is basically the entire code already compiled into a database and downloadable On one hand this totally bums me out, but on the other hand it was a great experience having terminal/unix try to beat me down and coming out victorious! I am considering doing what this person has done and hosting the 2009 database on my site once it has become available, I’ll make a post if I decide to do so.

I’ve been doing a lot of thesis research for what seems like forever at this point. I’ve known from the start that I wanted to do something that I was really interested in both technically and conceptually (seems like an obvious thing but its very easy to get sidetracked by the thesis process….). The easy part of the process was identifying exactly what I wanted to explore, which is the subject of baseball. I have been interested in baseball since I was young, and to this day I am borderline obsessed with the sport (and the Phillies in particular ). I also knew I wanted to explore the emerging technology surrounding multitouch and tangible interfaces, so I thought that I could combine these two ideas and a concept would emerge. After a month or two of going back on forth on exactly what I wanted to do with baseball and multitouch (Data visualizations, augmented baseball cards, media center, etc) I finally had a revelation that I was trying to fit a concept into a box that I had voluntarily made. After freeing myself from the focus/necessity of designing exclusively for a multi-touch installation, which was severely limiting my thought process, I finally feel like I have come up with a concept that is

1. Totally unique
2. Interesting to me
3. Can incorporate multitouch but does not rely on it
4. Can be appreciated by fans of baseball
5. Allows people who hate baseball to get an abstract form of enjoyment out of the game

So what is my concept? My concept is to use existing historical (1950-present) baseball game data and investigate the rhythmic, cyclical nature of the game. Furthermore I want to show the factual, hard evidence that remains after a game has been played (box scores, statistics, etc) and from that attempt to recreate the emotional experience of a fan that existed at that moment in time.

My investigation will be materialized as an audio/visual system that will allow users to select a historical game and play it back in a condensed form. The events of the game will serve as individual beat tracks upon which audio samples can be assigned, either by individual event or entire tracks of similar events. The user will then be able to play this game back and see the action of the game in abstract form, both audibly and visually.

Some further ideas I have for this are splitting the game based on fan allegiance (home team, away team, neutral) and allowing the user to switch between these views during playbook. I’d also like the user to be able to physically “scratch” or scrub the playback, simulating a DJ scratching a record.

As far as the how/what of the actual project, I intend to develop the project in C++/openFrameworks which will allow me to develop across multiple platforms (Desktop, iPhone, Touch Table) while keeping the core code the same. I’m really excited to attempt to develop for multiple platforms, but at the same time this will add a large amount of complexity (and work!) to the project, so I need to get moving fast.

I still have a LOT of work to do, but I’m happy that I finally feel like I at least have a direction  and can start to develop prototypes and code non-stop. Hopefully I’ll have a first basic prototype up soon ( I’ve started already but I’ll put that in a separate post)

Anyone who actually reads this and have any feedback on the concept I’d love to hear it, please feel free to leave comments!

I recently ran into an issue that was a bit of a pain in the ass and I wanted to put it up here both to help anyone else out who runs into it and for my own reference.

I have been doing a lot of data mining/visualization recently which requires a large number of calls to several data apis. I am using PHP because I am familiar with it, I like it, and I can’t stand the structure of Python. One advantage of php is that you can execute it in the browser, which I normally take advantage of when I am working on API requests or data scraping. As my scripts have gotten more and more complex lately, I’ve quickly run into Internal Sever Error 500 messages which can only be fixed by limiting the amount of calls to make at a time. At first I thought this was just a limit of my server/php, but then I remembered how I recently was able to import a 4GB database into MySQL through the terminal with no problems after PhpMyAdmin was unable to handle anything near this. So I decided to try to run my script through the command line using SSH with dreamhost.

I attempted to execute the script, and then I got a bizarre error: “Fatal error: Call to undefined function: mysqli_connect()” This error never came up in the browser, yet it was coming up in terminal. After some quick searching I found out this error was attributed to not having PHP 5 installed on my server. This is super strange because PHP 5 is on my server according to dreamhost. I then did a version check on php using the -v parameter. Sure enough, version 4.4.9.

So what was the solution? I found a couple resources after playing around with phrases to search on google, and figured out that while php 5 WAS installed on my server, the command line space is different than the web space, so I had to explicitly point to PHP 5 in order to use it.

Running the following command led me to the path of PHP5 “whereis php” which returns the following path “/usr/local/php5/bin/php”.

So super short finish to a long explanation, use “/usr/local/php5/bin/php” instead of “php” to execute php scripts using version 5 on Dreamhost.

Here is a project I finished recently, check it out. I intended this project to be an installation/projection, however I think it’d also make a really interesting screensaver and might create one if I find anyone would be interested in this.

Description:
I’ve been digging into the New York Times data APIs recently for a class I’m taking, and the biggest thing I noticed was that there is no way of getting any images past a 75×75 thumbnail. Furthermore, most stories don’t even have images. So I wanted to see if I could both show the stories that the NYT felt were worthy of finding an image for as well as sidestep the 75×75 tiny limitations and create a unique data stream from this.

ImageWorthy does this by
-Connecting the the Times Newswire API
-Extracting the last 200 stories in real time
-Finding stories that include images
-Loading these images into memory
-Analyzing them for average color as well as value
-Creating halftone images superimposed on a background color that is the average color of all the pixels in the image
-Cycling through these every 15 seconds with simple audio effects based on the average value (lightness/darkness) of the image