Ludlow Food and Drink Festival

Edward — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 08:44:00 GMT

In this week's devCity Newsletter, Serge thought it would be a great idea for members of vbCity and devCity to send postcards to vbCity from where they live. I'm fortunate to live in Shropshire and this weekend I visited the Ludlow Food and Drink Festival. It is a great experience and is considered one of the best food festivals in Britain. Ludlow is a small market town (population 10k) in South Shropshire that is famous for its food and drink. The food festival promotes local produce from the Welsh Marches.

As vbCity's unofficial representative, you'll be pleased to know that I did a fine job of sampling as much as possible. Particular highlights were:

Roast Boar
Welsh Oggie (a pasty made from Welsh beef, onion, leek, potato and gravy)
Bacchus from Frome Valley Vineyard (a fruity white wine with a strong aroma of elderflower)
Wood's Shropshire Lad (a fine local beer)

Postcard on its way.

Time to Dust off that Soccer Prediction program

Edward — Sun, 15 Aug 2004 12:53:00 GMT

The Premier League started this weekend bringing the English soccer season into full swing. For those that don't know, the Football Association; presumably under pressure from the sport's governing body, Coca Cola, have decided to rename the remaining leagues. Last year's League Divisions 1, 2 and 3, formerly known as Divisions 2, 3 and 4, have cleverly been renamed: The Championship, League One and League Two.

Anyway confusing name changes aside, the start of the new season requires me to dust off that old favourite project, the Football Predictor. Now it doesn't really start to come into its own for about 10 weeks when it has some form to work with, so I have plans to enhance it in the meantime.

This year I aim to add a module that predicts the score of a fixture. Some of the statistics for each team's score patterns can be quite remarkable - these are a snapshot after about 30 matches last season:

Arsenal to win 2 - 1 at home (40 % of home matches)
Leicester to draw 1 - 1 at home (31.25 % of home matches)
Manchester United to win 2 - 1 away (26.67 % of away matches)

The prediction process is two fold. Firstly making predictions (obviously) but secondly analysing how the information is interpreted to see if it can improve the quality of the predictions. Last year I added a system where the project also rated the 'chance of success' of the prediction. This worked okay, but I had to stop the project from trying to have a 100% success rate. At one point I did end up where it would have only made 2 or 3 predictions in the season and these were all Arsenal to win

blog.me

Ludlow Food and Drink Festival

Time to Dust off that Soccer Prediction program