DialIdol.com - Measuring the busy signal.

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Thursday May 27, 2010

Lee DeWyze won American Idol as predicted by DialIdol. Congratulations to Lee for the win!

This marks the first season DialIdol got no predictions wrong and the sixth season in a row DialIdol has accurately predicted the winner of American Idol!

Thank you everybody for visiting - see you next season!

Wednesday May 26, 2010

Mostly this season I've been letting DialIdol do the talking but when I woke this morning I thought about commenting on this week's predictions. I held off at first because it seems obvious what DialIdol has to say about the finale - I held off until someone requested commentary which is why you're reading this.

Let's get one thing straight first - I am the operator, owner and creator of DialIdol. DialIdol is a one man show and I live in Cleveland, Ohio. With that in mind understand that I am, and have unequivocally been a Crystal Bowersox fan since I first noticed her singing in Hollywood week. In recent weeks I've also become a fan of Lee's but never so much that I wanted him to beat Crystal. I continued to root for Crystal in part so I could attend her homecoming and when she got that far I was there (her homecoming was in Toledo, Ohio which is two hours away from my home in Cleveland, Ohio) and became an even bigger fan of her's. Last night she knocked my 'Sox off again - and blew Lee out of the water (in my humble opinion) and I was rooting for her - until I saw DialIdol's first prediction at 9:04 PM...

DialIdol measures the busy signal every four minutes - I call this an interval and the data is online in the DIHardGraphs page. The first 30 minutes or so of East coast voting are usually the most telling and Lee had "won" every single interval during that time by a significant margin. In fact Lee went on to win every single interval for the first 2 hours and 16 minutes of voting. This is incredibly incriminating evidence and with every interval win I had to adjust to rooting for Lee - at least a little. When I analyze the prediction DialIdol is putting out there I look at this data first and usually when I post a message about "dialing irregularities" - it comes from a discovery here - there were no discoveries.

DialIdol also tracks voting geographically on the GeoPredictions page. Looking at this page can often point to one or two individuals overly influencing the predictions. What I see on this page is a split country - I suppose this page could give some hope to Crystal Bowersox fans because it kind of implies that the results may be closer than DialIdol suggests. For one - Crystal did not win her home state of Ohio. This strikes me as odd because generally we are pretty proud to support the home team here in Ohio but Toledo, Ohio (Crystal's home town) is close to Michigan and Detroit and she did do better in Michigan than Lee so I'm not sure how much hope can be drawn from this. Plus - the GeoPredictions are generally not as reliable because the predictions on that page have a much higher margin of error.

Lee did have significantly less calls placed with DialIdol and many times people think this matters - in itself - it doesn't matter. The only way it does matter is indirectly - if Lee had so few dialers that one or two of them over influenced the vote (for whatever reason). I don't really think this happened - mostly because of the GeoPredictions page showing Lee winning across many states in the union and also because Lee did well on the West coast too (which doesn't matter nearly as much).

So - in the end - I see only reasons to be confident in DialIdol's prediction that Lee will be the next American Idol but that doesn't mean I'm happy about it - as evidenced by my Facebook post this morning.

As always there is only one way to be sure who the next American Idol will be and that is by watching the results show live on FOX tonight at 8pm!

Friday May 14, 2010

My fiancée and I live in Cleveland, Ohio which is about two hours away from Crystal Bowersox's hometown of Toledo, Ohio so we decided to take a trip out there to check out Crystal's homecoming. Crystal arrived at the parade site in a stretch Ford limousine. While she waited for the parade to be staged a crowd of people formed around the limo and she popped open the sunroof, climbed through it and sat on top of the limo for a few moments talking to the crowd. This is when we got the closest to Crystal and it was close enough to hear her loud and clear! Once the parade began things got a bit crazier and when she performed a brief two song concert (Hello Toledo and One Hand In My Pocket) things were quite crazy! Afterwards we drove home through her hometown of Elliston, Ohio where it looked like additional festivities were ongoing in her buzzing but tiny hometown. We took some pictures to share - not extraordinary but thought you might be interested to see what it looked like from a fan perspective!

Wednesday April 28, 2010

Aaron Kelly's prediction is likely inflated much higher than it should be due to a dialing anomaly that seems to have occurred in Pennsylvania and in particular with one dialer in the 724 area code. You can view this anomaly on the DIHardGraphs page or the GeoPredictions page (especially when you check the Area Code checkbox). On both pages it is obvious that something is going on with Aaron Kelly that doesn't fit with other contestants. This dialer, combined with low call volume for Aaron is likely providing a misleading prediction. If this data had not been included it is likely that Aaron would have at least been tied with the other contestants instead of being predicted to be safe altogether. I suspect that he even would have ranked much lower.

Nevertheless - DialIdol will be held to the prediction shown on the Predictions page since most people probably don't read this and since many people have already seen that prediction, some of whom may not come back to even have the opportunity to read this.

Tuesday March 23, 2010

Ever since DialIdol's re-design years ago the predictions bars that are displayed in the predictions table wouldn't reflect a score if the contestants margin of error was greater than their score. That has been the case quite often this year (which in itself has a whole different cause outside of DialIdol's control). I finally decided to do something about this and then I remembered why this problem existed in the first place! The code behind the predictions page is incredibly lengthy and complicated (anyone who knows me won't be surprised by that :))! Nonetheless I persevered and fixed the problem. Now the predictions table will reflect a score if a contestant has one. You can see the difference below.

Before	After

This change will also make it much easier to actually see a contestants score (though it will not guarantee it).

All past predictions will now reflect this change in addition to all future predictions. Though this may visually seem to change DialIdol's past predictions it really doesn't. This new visual style is a more honest representation than that of old. Also this change in no way impacts DialIdol's past accuracy because the contestant scores, margin of error and rank, order they are listed, etc. all remain the same.

In separate but related news, since scores have been so low and so close (resulting in so many yellow predictions) I've decided that margin of error will only apply in one direction now - not both directions. For you DIHard DialIdol'ers you'll recall that I've done this before. I applied this change in a test environment to this season's predictions and it did not impact the accuracy in the least but it did lead to more definitive predictions (green/red bars are definitive - yellow aren't). Note that though I viewed how this change would impact this seasons predictions - it will NOT be applied to this season's past predictions - it will only apply to the weeks with 11 contestants or fewer.

Since 64 bit systems have become more prevalent I feel it is worth mentioning that if you are using a 64 bit web browser to view DialIdol.com the predictions web page probably does not show you the bars that you see above and instead shows you a rudimentary bar instead. This is because Adobe does not have a 64 bit Flash player available and the bars are an element that requires Flash.

There was a bit of a DialIdol snafu last night during Dancing with the Stars voting that caused the first 10 minutes of data to be discarded. This relates to DialIdol having been configured to run on its off-season server which is in a different time zone than DialIdol's in-season server - DialIdol must compensate for this and I mistakenly forgot to reconfigure the difference. Oops! Sorry! :(

A word of caution about DialIdol's current DWTS prediction... Six contestants have a pure DialIdol score of zero, which means their margin of error is also zero. When margin of error equals zero for any contestant special considerations have to go into the code; those considerations don't exist at the moment for DWTS specific predictions - I will try to get this in this weekend and when I do expect the green/red to go away or at least some yellow to be introduced. Sorry. This consideration does exist for the pure DialIdol DWTS prediction (which is based exclusively on busy signals - the DialIdol (DWTS) prediction factors in judges scores) though the DialIdol (DWTS) prediction is DialIdol's official prediction for DWTS - not the pure DialIdol prediction.

Thursday March 4, 2010

Last night while the West coast was voting at around 1:20 AM Eastern time there was some sort of oddity in the voting that caused predictions to get a bit screwy with the girls. Paige was a significant benefactor from this as was Katelyn and Didi. Paige probably should be closer to the bottom than the top if not at the bottom altogether. Katelyn, Didi, Haeley and Lilly are probably higher than they should be too. You can see the bump in DIHardGraphs.

None of this really matters too much since the predictions are too close to call this week at all and everyone is in a virtual tie. This happens around this time of year and will eventually get better if more people pick up the phone and vote.

Wednesday February 24, 2010

DialIdol v3.5.1.0 has been released today. This version should work a little better on Windows 7 - meaning it shouldn't require it to be run as administrator and hopefully it won't ask you if the program ran correctly when you close it. Your call data and a log file (if you generate it) will no longer be stored with the executable; instead those files will be stored in your AppData folder. Additionally those files will be backed up every time you launch the application. These are the only real changes. Oh - the XML file is now called DialIdol.xml instead of DIStats.xml. If you want your old stats to show up in this new version you will have to move the old DIStats.xml file (located wherever DialIdol was installed - probably C:\Program Files (x86)\DialIdol.com\DialIdol) to your AppData folder (perhaps located here depending on you version of Windows - C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\DialIdol.com\DialIdol), when you move it - be sure to rename it DialIdol.xml (there may be an existing XML file there is you ran DialIdol after you upgraded to 3.5.1 but if you haven't dialed with this version it doesn't contain any data and thus is safe to overwrite.) The older version is still available for use/download - mostly because I only tested the new version a little (versus my usual obsessive testing).

An old bug resurfaced relating to moving DialIdol from shared web hosting to dedicated web hosting last night. It was corrected by 10:36 PM Eastern. The only real ramification is that DIHardGraphs showed double interval data for intervals prior to 10:36 PM. This had no impact on the actual predictions and DIHardGraphs has been corrected.

Sunday February 21, 2010

DialIdol moved to its in-season home today. This move is a bit risky as it marks the first time DialIdol.com's old web code will be running on a different operating system/web server so look out for oddities.

DialIdol does work on Windows 7 though admittedly it could work better. You must run DialIdol as an Administrator on Windows 7; this is because DialIdol tracks your statistics in an XML file stored where the executable is stored. This location has since become a read-only location and thus requires Administrator privileges to bypass it. I intend on fixing this at some point but in the meantime please use this workaround.

I have been a bit absent since about May of last year - if you tried to get a hold of me then you probably didn't succeed. :) I'm hoping to be a bit more responsive now that we're starting back up again!

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