Drifting through data....

Today was pretty cool. It snowed, it was sunny, it snowed again, and then it rained. I guess a day that doesn't know what time it is shouldn't be expected to make up its mind on the weather....

Eve:

I wrote a query that gives us the average price for an item but only sorts the lowest X sell orders and the highest X buy orders. In the case of Zydrine I was looking for the cheapest 4M ISK worth for sale or 2M units whatever came first then the highest 2M units being bought. This query tells us that in general it is best to get your Zydrine in Metropolis and sell it in Tash-Murkon. What it does not tell us is how many units move through that region per day. 

The output is still very rough, I hope to learn how to make a python GUI sometime in the future. Plus we could have this in some sort of task that takes market snapshots every few hours.

All this data mining is making me feel like I'm drifting into the future. Very cool 

New week... New goals...

Last week trudged by and gouged a deep trench of bone chilling tired into my life. The major system upgrade at work is done (with plenty of little issues left to bug me) and I was also able to get the Trade Finder working. Some highlights include, learning how to index a table, adding error handling to the python script, and seeing the damn thing actually find some decent trades.

Currently the Trade Finder exists as two separate scripts. The Order Importer scours an email account every three minutes and grabs all emails from Eve-Central. These are examined and inserted into the MySQL database along with a few extra fields for if the order is in hisec, the time it was imported, the total value of a buy order and a UID.

The second script is the Trade Finder. Right now I have to hard-code user variables but it searches all of HiSec for the best trades based on the users cargo capacity, capital investment, start location, minimum profit, and maximum number of jumps. The output is an ugly DOS like window with no sorting but it runs in under 20 seconds and finds deals.

The future with contain me learning how to create a python GUI and find a way to host this for my friends to use. There is also questions about creating our own order importer. I'd like to use the EBank method of cache scraping but don't know if it is possible.

Slogging through the numbers

Sunday morning I found a better way to calculate the distances but creating a graph of only Hi Sec. This leaves about 500k routes to find. Started the script around noon yesterday and it has found 305k routes starting from 420 solar systems. My guess is that it will take another 50 hours because the algorithm is less efficient near the end.

More good news is that I logged onto Eve last night. My character still exists and retained about 130M ISK he had, plus a ton of items I need to think about selling. When I have time I may work towards the Crane -Blockade Runner. Need to get Advanced Piloting for that.

On other news this week is the big software upgrade. We are pretty ready but I still worry. We'll see how Tuesday's overnight goes.