It’s all just 1’s and 0’s…

Since about two months I have gone back to learning more about chess. I had taken some courses when I was younger, but never really played much. A friend of mine pointed me at chess.ac, a website where you can play chess move by move. Move-by-move means that there is a time limit for the game, but this is in the order of days, so you can really take the time to think about what your next move will be. And this is actually pretty good from a training perspective.

Another neat thing is that you can export the game using the PGN notation, which you can then import into the Fritz engine. Then it can analyse your play and point you at obvious flaws and other alternative moves which you might not have thought about.

Chess.ac also has teams, which can challenge each other. I have a team as well, with a couple of members, but we need more to be able to play team challenges.

All in all, it’s a pretty nice environment to play and learn. If you give it a shot, let me know, and we can play a game or two, or you can come join my team! Send a message to gobo on the chess.ac website.

Yes, the blog was kinda dead for a while…sorry about that. I have moved the server to a new machine, did a complete reinstall, and this also meant I had to put everything back for Wordpress.

I’m not 100% satisfied with Wordpress, I’m on the lookout for alternatives. My main problem was that it took a big chunk of cpu and memory, which my last machine did not have much of. The newer one is much faster and has more memory, so it is a little less pressing.

But now the blog is back up and expect some more stories soon!

Small update below (the powerpoint user interface is even more hideous than I thought) Am I missing something glaringly obvious in Powerpoint? (Yes, I have to use Powerpoint, don’t ask.) As far as I can see, you can do pretty much anything with keyboard shortcuts in Powerpoint:

• Change to Italics (⌘I) or Bold (⌘B)
• Change the font-size (Shift-⌘< and Shift-⌘>)
• Change the indentation level (Shift-⌥→ and Shift-⌥←)
• Insert a new slide (^M)
• Switch between slides (page-up and page-down)
• Switch between slide input and notes input (F6)

With the above things you can pretty much create a whole presentation completely using the keyboard. But there’s one very basic thing that compels you to use the mouse: there is no way to switch between the title text box and the main body text box!

I have searched and searched, but to no avail. Please LazyWeb, tell me that there is such a keyboard shortcut…

Update: A reader commented that in outline view, you can use the tab key to get from the title to the body of a slide. When I tried to test this, I found some really horrible usability problems.

First of all, there is only one way to get to the outline view, using the small button on the bottom-left of the window. It’s not listed in the “View” menu and if you switch to outline view, the “view” menu looks odd, because there is no checkmark next to the current view.

When I did get to the outline view, I tested the Tab key shortcut and the behavior of the tab key is really odd: If you’re on a line, it will indent the line like Shift-⌥→ and Shift-⌥←. However, if you are on a Title line, it will indent that line and move that line to the body of the previous slide!.

So yes, it does allow you to go from the title to the body of a slide, but to do so you need to create a new slide, enter the title of that slide, create another slide, type a line and press tab. But somehow I don’t think that this is the intended or recommended way to do this.

It has been a while since I have posted. Posting on the blog really reminds me that I need to upgrade my server; it’s having a lot of trouble keeping up. Especially since the 5000 comment spams that I received since I installed the filtering. For now I have just plain disabled commenting, I just might turn it back on when I have a new server.

I will soon write a longer update and some interesting stories, but meanwhile have a look at an excellent post: Great Programmers Answer.

On another blogging related note: check out the blogging industry over at the World Series of Poker. There is blogs about this everywhere:

• Pokerstars has a whole team of bloggers,
• Absinthetics contains some updates from a players point of view,
• Pokernews has news about the WSOP in all kinds of languages,
• Cardplayer has the official chipcounts,
• and many many more blogs can be found from links from those sites.

Summary: the main event is well under way, about half of the 8500 players are left and they are playing for a first prize of $12,000,000 dollars.

Since a couple of days my blog has been under attack of comment spam.

Since the beginning of this blog I had some comment spam. At first it was only one or two a week, which wasn’t that much of a problem. I looked into some possibilities to have a user-friendly way of stopping this. I ruled out CAPTCHAs, while these may be “friendly” to users who can see, they are not for the visually impaired, and besides, there are already programs that can do them about just as well as humans.

Then I encountered the Hashcash plugin for Wordpress. It provides the browser with a simple mathematical puzzle, which solved correctly, allows for the comment to be posted. Most browsers can do this without a problem, so that looked to be the solution.

After a while, comments again started to trickle in, first once or twice a week and the last couple of days it became more than 20 a day. I have now installed the (SpamKarma)[http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/] plugin (see the footer of the page), which does some filtering and other smart stuff to figure out if a comment is spam or not, once it has been posted. This (and Wordpress itself) is turning out to be a pretty heavy load for my poor little server, so I might soon have to look into other possibilities.

To have a frame of reference of how fast things are going with the comments, at the time of writing it has caught 117 comment spams. Most of those are from before, which I had either forgot about or were in the archive but not displayed.