It is not trivial to organize a hair contest without hassles. One area where computers can be of significant help is computing the results. It may be somewhat difficult to explain the scoring rules to a human, and if the results were computed by hand, it would be a small miracle if there were no mistakes.
As the Hair Open contest that is annually held in Helsinki shows, computers not only automate the process of transforming score lists from judges to result lists. They can also introduce some added value in the form of pictures of the models. Since 1997, everyone with access to the Internet has been able to view the results and pictures for Hair Open contests.
HairPort is an easy-to-use computer program with a graphical user interface implemented in Java, a programming language designed to run on a wide variety of computer platforms, such as different versions and variants of Unix, Microsoft Windows, and Apple Mac OS X. There is no fear that HairPort would not run on upcoming systems, as often is the case with software written in other languages.
The main concept HairPort is a series of contests. Each series has some competitors and judges who participate in contests. Teams may be composed of competitors. The program computes different kinds of results: individual competitor points in each contest, total individual points in the whole series, and team results in the series.
HairPort is quite flexible. The minimum and maximum allowable number or percentage of different scores can be configured for each series separately. When some strict limits are enforced, it is easier to control the score distribution and the way judges work. HairPort alerts if a score is given too frequently or too infrequently by a judge, and it applies a rectification system that reduces variance in the points given for individual contestants.
In international contests, the points given by judges that have the same nationality as a contestant are ignored and replaced by the average points given by other judges. By selecting a menu item, this behavior can be altered for national or small series where most contestants and judges are of the same nationality.
Sometimes an international contest is also part of a national contest. Only the participants of the national series are picked from the international contest for the national result. This can be achieved in HairPort by making a copy of the international series data (with the File/Save As command) and by removing the non-national contestants from the copied series.
HairPort supports several languages for the user interface and the lists it produces. New languages can be added easily, thanks to the internationalization support implemented in the Java programming language.
HairPort has been developed with several years experience from organizing the annual Helsinki Hair Open contest. We have not prepared a user's manual for the program yet, since it its development is still going on, but we would like to see it used in other contests.
You probably wish to request some features that you would like to have in the program, or have some questions on using the program. Your feedback is invaluable for us, since it helps us to make the software better and to emphasize the most important aspects in the user's manual. I speak all the languages HairPort currently supports: English, German, Swedish and Finnish.
.jar file suffix and start up
HairPort automatically when you select the program in
the file manager.java -jar hairport.jar..pts files) for Helsinki Hair
Open 2002. You can also roll your own series files with
the File/New command.Fantasy.pts, the directory
name is Fantasy. If you
want to export HTML from some .pts files,
make sure that the files are located in a directory that
can be written to (e.g. not a CD-ROM)..pts files but cannot export the files to
HTML..pts files) for Helsinki Hair Open 2002