halfgeek.codes

A couple of months ago, my wife learned that D Magazine — a magazine promoting the City of Dallas — was having contest to determine the cutest pet.

The rules were simple enough: voting was open to the public, and the public was encouraged to vote as often as it wanted for the pets in the contest. That is, there was no limitation on voting, and voting was as easy as clicking a button.

So I wondered, given these rules, if I could develop software that would do the voting for us: something I could run that would visit the link that was the destination of the button click, but do it in a way that wouldn't create problems for other users — no denial of service or anything like that. Something that could run inside of a loop and just click, but would also look like a browser to the server, so the server would have data available to collect.

Over time, the project grew more and more mature. It really wasn't about my dog at all — it was about learning something new, and adding more features as I learned more about developing in Windows Forms: I wanted this to be a desktop application, something outside of my comfort zone. And honestly, I hadn't built anything in Windows Forms since maybe just after high school.

As the project matured, I thought a lot about the pace at which the application operated. I decided to introduce a slow mode to really pump the brakes and run at a pace of one click per minute over several hours. Steady clicks at a rate that should not interfere with any other traffic. Slow and steady would win the race for us — slow enough, in fact, that I even "wired in" sounds so I could run the software minimized and hear a short beep each time a click was performed.

I also had the software output to a text file as an option, so one could see the incoming status messages from the server. Shorter runs produced shorter logs.

One big breakthrough was in learning how to create menus. It made the app look so much nicer than the simple tabbed interface I'd originally used.

I probably went a little over the top near the end of development, when I added web services. Two calls: one to report the parameters at instantiation, and another made intermittently to update the current click count. Using the web services, I could monitor the run without having to visit my computer; I could do it right from a browser on my mobile device. The first here: implementing web services on a desktop app.

This was never about the contest. My dog isn't really very cute. I don't care about having a professional photoshoot. He's a little pizza-stealing asshole who glues himself to me whenever it rains. He's not pretty. But we do love him, and he loves us so much. No, our good boi is simply a beneficiary of the development — development simply done to satisfy my curiosity.

(Even if it was about the contest, there was nothing stopping the other 999 participants from building their own click machines too.)

The contest has two parts: the popular vote and the judging. How are we doing? well...

D Magazine notified us today that pup is a finalist, and their art department made us the faux magazine cover. For me, this is enough. Really. If there were no judges involved, and the prize was awarded solely on the popular vote, I would explain things and insist the prize go to the next popular pet. I wouldn't feel right about that. But because there are judges, that tells me there's more afoot here than just clicks.

(Besides, I feel pretty comfortable that he's not the cutest in Dallas. I mean, look at him.)

UPDATE:
I'm thrilled to report that we didn't win!!!

Our good boi placed in the top 20, and that was pretty amazing, I think. I'm really glad we didn't win, though, because I think I would have felt awful had we won based largely on a program I wrote. It wouldn't sit well; I would have asked them to choose another winner... even though the rules did not prohibit his particular path to victory.