2007 March Madness Notes

The 2007 Men's NCAA Tournament is available on the Demo server. Feel free to use it for your own pools if you don't feel like doing your own installation.
http://regier.dnsalias.net/tournament/servlet/com.tournamentpool.servlet.MyTournamentServlet?invitationCode=910GXT

I've found that the new start time logic for tournaments can be a little flaky, depending on which MySQL version you use. Older versions of MySQL seem to have problems, but newer ones don't. I could get pools to close properly if I run a SQL statement updating the tournament start time to the current_date, then restarting the server. I've also had problems with some older tournaments not having a valid start date in the database. Whenever I then tried to view those tournaments I'd get an exception. The same fix works for this problem too.

update tournament.tournament set start_time=current_date where tournament_id=?

Also, be aware that with the new Daylight Savings Time rules, you will want to make sure your Java Runtime Environment is completely up to date. I've heard that there were bugs in the original fixes for this put out by Sun. You can get the latest at http://java.sun.com.

It looks like the NIT has changed their format from 40 teams to 32 teams this year, so you will not be able to use the NIT tournament type. Hopefully I'll get some time before it begins to get a new one available.