REMINDERS & HINTS
- When you send me an email please put your team abbreviation
and conference in it so I know who you are e.g. IOS(UC1).
- Don't forget the mail deamon can do many tricks. Try sending
an email with the subject 'help' to cricket@ultra-sports.com and
it will reply with a list of the commands it understands.
- I have four people helping me 'run' Ultra Cricket -
Mark Astley is the UC1 rep, Tom Caton
helps with UC2 and Michael Sargent is the UC3 man while
Brendon Meynell is the contact for all things UC4. Their
emails are ucX@ultra-sports.com with the X being the Conference they run.
GENERAL NEWSShow All October 22, 2007 This is my email on the Future of UC
As Mark has hinted at in Forum - UC's future is very unsure. I am planning
an extended holiday next year which will prevent me running UC for at
least 3 months. As you are all very well aware UC has not been run as
regularly as it should over the past few years. As my family grows I have
less and less time to do the necessary admin. You'll also notice all the
promises about code changes and no action.
Also, the finances continue to be very tight. Also, the system admin to
prevent hackers from spoiling things (as can be seen from the fact that
Google is at present warning that this site is unsafe (it isn't anymore -
it was for a few days a month back).
The plan - quite soon I am hoping to move off my own server onto a
administered server. If I can pull this off and maintain all the
functionality required then we should be able to cut the costs quite
dramatically. I then plan to shut down UC and spend spare time doing
some programming - basically a major rewrite of UC and hopefully some
graphical front ends.
UC almost had 1000 teams a few years back. We're down to less than 300 now.
People are expecting a more user friendly interface. I have always wanted
to learn how to write in something like Visual Basic and Mark is keen to
learn also - so the plan is that we will learn together and with some luck
in a year or so UC will return bigger and better. Mark may even take over
the Commissioner role if he has the time and interest once at High School!
If the move to the new home works I'll work with a few people and see if we
can keep some form of UC competition running during the hiatus. But
basically I don't see a future for UC in its present state.
How can you help? If you can programme - let me know. I'll need some advice
on the best language and environment to learn. And we should be able to pool
our time and resources I imagine to get some of the coding done together.
I have kept UC running for 15 years but I think the past 5 may have been
a bad idea. I needed to sort out some of the user interface issues back then.
I kept hoping I'd have more time and enthusiasm :-)
Let me know if you have any thoughts on how we can keep UC ticking along and
what we can do to ensure its long term survival. I am afraid the mighty $
will play a role in all this.
Cheers
Tim
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