May 29, 1993

MSS Stats Class

Planning

Installation

For a stats officer, planning begins with calculating how much work there is to be done during the match. To a large extent, the resources required to score a match depends on the required throughput of scores. In other words, how thick and fast will the score sheets be arriving?

Multiply the number of competitors by the number of stages. Divide this number by the number of shooting days for the match. That's an average of how many scores you must process in a day.

Remember, processing includes:

To calculate the throughput per hour, divide the daily throughput by the number of hours you have available to process score sheets. Don't make the mistake of including the time before the first batch of score sheets arrives. e.g. If shooting starts at 08:00, but the first batch of score sheets arrives at 10:00, then don't include the two hours between 08:00 and 10:00 in your calculations.

Even though there may be multiple stages on one score sheet, you still have to do most of the above operations on each stage. For simplicity, use the same formula and bank the extra time it will give you.

Note: The processing time in the above examples does not include time for printing results, making backups, etc. Even when you make use of Queued Printing (described later on), the time taken to print results at the end of the day can easily add 2 hours or more to your working day.

Now that you know how much work there is to be done, you can plan the resources required to do it.

Three day match Five day match

Determine the location of the "stats shack". Should it be on-site? Or would the match hotel be a better location? There are advantages and disadvantages for each. Consider these factors before making your decision:

An IBM PC or 100% compatible with 640K of memory, one floppy disk drive and one hard disk. A 386-based computer (or better) is recommended. The MSS is a database application, and is therefore very disk intensive. A fast hard disk (20ms or better) dramatically improves performance.

A minimum 520K of available memory is required for the MSS to operate. Use MEM or CHKDSK to find out how much available memory you have. They should report a minimum of 532480 bytes free. Any less than this and you're pushing it.

The MSS 6.0 occupies about 1MB on your hard disk when fully installed. This includes the Conversion program and the documentation file, but it does not include any match data or Master database records.

Note: DOS Version 5 or higher is strongly recommended over previous versions. When installed properly on a 386 class computer, it makes significantly better use of available memory.

In the examples which follow, it is assumed that the MSS is installed on hard disk drive C:. If this is not the case, substitute the appropriate drive letter.

The MSS is installed into a directory called MSS, created off your root directory. You should organize your matches into separate directories created off the MSS directory.

Example:

The diagram on the right shows a portion of the directory structure for disk drive C:. The MSS is installed in a directory named MSS, as usual.

Create a directory named LOCAL to group together all of the local monthly matches. There is a separate directory under LOCAL for each month (JAN, FEB, MAR, etc.).

Create a directory named STATE for the state championship match.

Create a directory named NWA1C for the Northwest Area 1 Championship match.

To help you with managing your match directory structure, the MSS provides the Create New Directory and Change Directory menu options. Both of these are under the Drive & Directory option of the Configuration menu.

If your printer is not on the pick list of supported printers, check your printer manual to find out which printers it can emulate. Many inexpensive printers are compatible with brand name printers like IBM®, EPSON® and Hewlett-Packard®. If there is no hardware means of putting the printer into emulation mode, by pressing a button for instance, then you may find that the printer requires a special command to enable it to emulate the brand name printer. This is usually done in the form of a sequence of characters which is sent to the printer to put it into emulation mode.

The MSS supports this through the Setup String on the Printer Selection screen. Whatever you have keyed into the setup string is the first thing sent to the printer each time a report is printed. All you have to do is key in the sequence of characters that will put your printer into emulation mode.

The only difficult part about this is dealing with control characters which aren't on your keyboard. For example, most printers require an ASCII escape character as the first character in the command sequence. This is not the same as the Esc key on your keyboard (a source of much confusion for many unsuspecting users). The escape character has a decimal value of 27. Your printer manual may show the escape character as CHR$(27), which is how it is coded in the Basic programming language.

You key an ASCII control character into the Setup String by typing a backslash (not a forward slash) followed by the three digit decimal number for that character. So an escape character would be keyed in as

You can use the chart on the right to map an ASCII control character to the setup string required by the MSS.

A setup string can also be used to change the font, spacing, orientation etc. of the reports printed by the MSS.

Example 1.

Example 2.

Note: For the above examples to work, you must also set the Wide Print field to Y in the Printer Selection screen.

Before you setup a new match, create a separate match directory for it. From the MSS Main menu, select Configuration, then select Drive & Directory.

Check if the current directory is the one you want the new directory to be under. The path name of the current directory is always displayed on the MSS menu screen, on the left hand side just below the version number. If you don't want the new directory to be created under the current directory, then select the Change Directory option from the menu and navigate to the directory you want the new one to be under. When you're done, return to the Drive & Directory menu.

From the Drive & Directory menu, select Create New Directory. The MSS automatically fills in the current directory path for you in the input screen, and positions the cursor at the end of the string. Now all you have to do is type a backslash (\) and the name of the new directory.

You should use 1 to 8 alphanumeric characters for the new directory name. Choose something that you can easily associate with the match.

Warning: The MSS relies on DOS to validate the name of the directory you specified. Beware of the following pitfalls:

There are different options in the MSS for:

After you have finalized the stages for the match, you should print a stage profiles report and check it to make sure the details of each stage are correct.

The stage profiles show the relative weight of each stage as a percentage of the total points in the match. This is considered useful information by most competitors, so include it in the match copy.

The MSS will print score sheets for each stage in the match. However, the score sheets which the MSS produces are quite basic. If you have a large or important match, you may want your score sheets to be more closely identified with the match.

If you have word processor skills, or you know how to make some other presentation software perform magic, you can use the score sheets which the MSS produces as a starting point for your own.

A technique that some people use is to print the score sheets to disk, then import the resulting files into their favorite presentation program. If you take the time to develop a few handy macros to do the bulk of the file manipulation, you can use this technique many times over.

The MSS will print the score sheets in separate files if you request the stages individually, or in a single file if you specify ALL.

After you have prepared the score sheets to your liking, consider the following when you take them to the print shop for reproduction:

There are basically two ways you can distribute score sheets for the match.

As with most things in life, the choice comes down to tradeoffs. Option 1 makes it easier on the match organizers, and provides greater flexibility, but places more responsibility on the competitors. Option 2 puts less of a responsibility on the competitors, but requires more on the part of the match organizers. You have to ask yourself "who is the match really for?" We all know the answer to that question.

Most MSS stats officers will attest that it is worthwhile taking the time to create and maintain a Master database of shooters. Registering competitors for a match then becomes a simple point-and-shoot operation.

Here are some points of clarification about registering shooters from the Master database.

If any of the following competitor attributes are required:

they must be entered through the Modify Competitor menu under the Registration & Maint option of the Match menu.

If you are not entering chronograph results, then be sure to review and revise, if necessary, major and minor power designations. You may want to do this anyway, as some competitors get quite agitated if they see the wrong power designation on interim results.

When everything is settled and all competitor information is complete, print final copies of the following lists:

Experienced computer users know only too well that Murphy watches, and he will pick the worst possible time to strike. If you have a good backup strategy, and you faithfully and religiously follow it so that you are virtually assured that you can recover from any hardware, software, or human error in a reasonably short time — then nothing will happen.

If, however, you take chances and try to save time by not bothering with any kind of backup strategy other than "do it all over," then when things are absolutely at their most critical and vulnerable state — that's when Murphy will strike.

The purpose of taking a backup is to establish a point in time such that if anything "goes wrong" afterwards, you can recover everything back to how it was at that point in time and go forward from there. Taking a backup is the act of establishing another point of recovery, also referred to as a checkpoint.

The formula is simple. The longer the backup intervals, the longer it takes you to recover. Conversely, the more frequently you take a backup, the less time it takes to recover.

Let's look at the simplest strategy first. No backups taken at all, before or during the match. With this strategy, you have a single point of recovery — right from the very beginning. In the case of a complete hard disk failure, you would have to setup the match all over again, and reenter all of the scores. If this were to happen on the last day of a major match, it would be a total disaster.

A more reasonable strategy is to have several points of recovery during the life of the match. How many should you have? The answer to that question should be determined largely by the answer to another. How much time you can afford to do a recovery?

Other factors influence your backup frequency, but by far the most important concern should be how long it would take to recover. By comparison, it takes much less time to do a backup.

This option is provided to make taking a backup of match data more convenient. Note however that it backs up match data only. It does not backup the MSS program and system files.

The MSS backup is intended to be used in addition to, not instead of, a system level backup. It is up to you what tools or techniques you use to do a system level backup. Most people invest in one of the specialized third-party products, such as PC TOOLS® or the NORTON BACKUP® program. For people of limited means, the latest version of DOS now has a very capable and very usable backup and recovery program bundled in with it. So there is no reason for not having a system level backup.

This strategy addresses the recovery of match data, and assumes that you have a system level backup strategy which provides a recovery point in the case of total failure.

Usually, you are entering data from documents, like match application forms or score sheets. You need to coordinate the documents with the backups. If you have to recover data back to a previous checkpoint, you need to know what data has to be keyed back in to the system. This is where a squad list and a squadding schedule can come in handy.

The MSS provides no facility or option for doing the actual file recovery. It's purely a manual operation. What action is taken depends to a large extent on the nature of the failure, but a word of caution is in order here.

The MSS is a database application. There is a large number of files which are all interrelated in some way. Be very careful about recovering individual MSS files from a backup. You should not attempt this unless you are absolutely certain that you know what you're doing.

In particular, you should be aware that, after stage results have been calculated, each stage data file has a corresponding index file. The data file has an extension of DBF, while the index file has an extension of NTX.

Example

These files always go together. If you recover one without the other, the results are unpredictable.

Do not recover an individual stage if you have made any significant changes to competitors since the backup was taken. This includes adding or deleting competitors, entering DQs, changing a power category from major to minor or minor to major (either directly or as a result of entering chronograph results)… the list goes on.

We strongly recommend that recovery be an all or nothing proposition. In other words, you should recover all of the match data from a backup, or none of it. This can seem like a lot of work if only one stage file has been damaged. The problem is that the stage files are kept in synchronization with the others by the MSS. If you recover an individual file, you could put the match data into an inconsistent state.

A data entry routine should be followed for each batch of score sheets which has to be entered. If you get into the habit of using the same routine every time, it becomes automatic, smooth and efficient.

A recommended routine is presented here for people who are looking for a place to start. However, if you have your own routine, and it works for you, then by all means stick with it. The important thing is to have a routine, and not just wing it.

The steps to be followed are:

Local circumstances may require you to make changes to this routine, and you may find your own improvements and variations. Incorporate these changes as required, but don't sacrifice accuracy for speed. A stats officer has the responsibility of insuring that all competitor scores are entered accurately and completely. There is nothing that can discredit a match more than "questionable results".

Posting results twice a day seems to be the most popular and practical frequency. Print stage results and match results at the midpoint of the day (not necessarily noon) and at the end of the day. Post the results on the range at a central location and, if applicable, at the match hotel.

In a large match, finding a surface area big enough for posting the results can sometimes be a problem. You may have to scout this out in advance, and obtain suitable boards or other equipment to hold the results.

In a large match, printing two copies of stage results can take a long time. If you have to wait for the printing to finish before you can enter more results, your throughput is impacted. You can carry on entering results if you have a print spooler, which allows printing to carry on as a background activity while you do other things in the foreground.

Few PC users realize that DOS comes with its own print spooler — a program called PRINT.EXE which will allow printing to be done in the background while other things are being done in the foreground. The DOS PRINT program is a TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) which you can start from the DOS prompt. The MSS will recognize its presence and make use of it if you so choose.

You can start the DOS PRINT program by entering

at the DOS prompt. You may want to use a batch command file to do this. The MSS comes with a file called SPOOL.BAT which can be used for just this purpose.

When you request the MSS to print a report to disk, if the PRINT program is resident the MSS will display the following prompt:

The default response is no, but if you answer yes, then after the report has been printed to disk, it will be submitted to the Print Queue. If your printer is on-line and ready, printing will begin immediately. You can then carry on using the MSS, even though the report is printing.

You can queue up to 15 reports. If you want to queue more than that, change the /Q: parameter on the command line shown above. You can manipulate the print queue by using the Print Queue option under Utilities in the Match menu. See the MSS documentation for details.

This feature is most effective for allowing printing to continue while doing data entry. It is not so effective when calculating results or doing a backup, because the foreground activity slows down the background printing.

Providing each competitor with a printed copy of all the results is not only an expensive proposition, it can be completely impractical from a printing point of view.

One technique which was used very successfully at the 1992 North American Championship match, was to print all the results to disk, copy the print files to a diskette and then duplicate that diskette for those competitors who wanted a copy of the results.

Copying disks is timing consuming, but it is much quicker than printing the results. If a reasonable fee is charged, it can turn out to be a good contributor to match funds as well.

Slave Data Entry allows more than one person to be entering scores at the same time, by dividing the workload among multiple computers — a main computer and from 1 to 9 slave computers. This allows stage data entry and printing to be done on up to 10 computers simultaneously.

The main computer has the full MSS program installed on it, and is used to do all the things you normally do with the MSS during a match.

Each slave computer has the SDE program installed on it, which is a subset of the full blown MSS program. It can only be used to enter, calculate and print stage scores.

During match setup, you specify the range of stages to be distributed to each slave computer for data entry. The stage data is transferred between the main computer and its slaves using a technique which is known in the computer industry as SneakerNet.

Slave Data Entry does not require an expensive networked computer configuration. The only kind of network required is SneakerNet (referring to the act of running back and forth between computers). The computers are not linked electronically, they are linked by copying information from one computer on to a floppy disk, then taking that floppy to another computer and copying the information into that computer. When using Slave Data Entry, there are two situations where this is kind of data transfer is done.

These two activities are summarized on the next two pages.

Select the Outgoing option from the Utilities menu on the main computer

Select the Incoming option from the Utilities menu on the main computer

The main computer will prompt you for each slave data disk in turn

You need more than one computer for data entry if your score sheet throughput exceeds 1000 per day (see Calculation of Score Sheet Throughput in the section on Planning). Individual score sheet throughput is usually between 50 an hour (slow data entry operator) to 100 an hour (fast data entry operator).

Once you have decided how many computers you need (or how many you would like to have) you need to determine the availability of the following resources:

Visibly identify the main computer and the slaves. For example, place a sign on top of each monitor. Identify the slave computers by number. Use color coding also, if appropriate.

Finalize all registration on the main computer. When the score sheets start rolling in you will get into your data entry routine.

Now you wrap around to step 1 again. In actual practice, you will usually find yourself waiting for score sheets at step 4. This means either you are managing the throughput very well, or the score sheets are late!

There's an additional consideration for recovery of match data on slaves. An incoming on a slave computer is like a recovery, except it's a recovery to a later point in time, established by the main computer.

If you have to do a recovery on the main computer, then any subsequent outgoing to the slaves will bring their match data in line with the main computer. This eliminates the need to recover match data on the slaves.

As mentioned before, system level recovery is a different matter.

If you haven't used Slave Data Entry before, and you perhaps feel a little intimidated by it, why not try it out at a local match first? A small, four stage match is an ideal place to start. Distribute two of the stages to a slave computer, and go through the routine given above. Discover for yourself, first-hand, what is involved in using multiple computers to score a match.

If you do this exercise a few times, then scoring a large match with multiple computers will seem familiar to you — only on a larger scale than usual.

Go ahead! Give it a try!