Please note: the viewport design is copied from Steve Den Beste's excellent blog, USS Clueless. Used with permission.


Wednesday, April 14, 2004  

My New Game Site:



Jesse Perry's brother Jimmy told me yesterday he's got a game domain, chessnut.net, but nobody's had the time to do anything much with it — could I do something? So I took a look and, Yes Jimmy! I added a quick background picture for a sort of improv logo and spent most of the day chasing some sites people at FICS [(freechess.org) (or Free Internet Chess Society)] pointed me towards for a free game display program. FICS will send you an email note with the games you play recorded in PGN (Portable Game Notation) format, or you can tell the interface program, winboard.exe, to record your games in PGN format.

I've got a few games (including a game from Garry Kasparov's famous match with computer Deep Blue) up on the site in demo form, but I've got to work on automatic loading today — right now, if you click that game it comes up with the game notation in the right frame, and you have to copy and paste the game into the display frame ybefore you can watch the game...

Maybe I can do a quick fix (or maybe I can find a different display program...). I'll let you know.

Update: I found a freeware program that converts PGN format files directly into HTML/JavaScript files, PGNtoJS. That works really well, so I converted the examples I had into the new format. And found out that it does group archive files too. Jesse asked about Paul Morphy games, so I looked that up and found an archive page that has all of Mophy's official games...that's cool. So I converted that into HTML (big file — 1.7M) and put that up. So along with my recent games and an archive that came with the PGNViewer of the 1927 NY Tournament that has lots of games by Casablanka and Alekhine and Nimzovitch (not sure about those spellings!) oh, it's Capablanca and Nimzovich and Alekhine...

Anyways, take a look at http://chessnut.net/ and let me know.

posted by Gary Williams at 1:31 PM | link |
 

via The Register

Libya disappears from the Internet

By Kieren McCarthy
Published Tuesday 13th April 2004 14:54 GMT

Libya has disappeared from the Internet and no one seems to be able to explain why.
Late on Friday, all .ly domains stopped working and they're still not up now. The administrative and technical contact for the country's Internet presence have not answered phone calls or emails at their Tripoli office.

However, one intriguing clue has come from company Lydomains.com - the company charged with selling all .ly domains and which, oddly enough, is based in Macclesfield in the UK. Lydomains.com put out an email on Friday which read: 'It is with regret that we have to inform you, that due to unilateral action by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (http://www.iana.org), the Domain Name Servers that host the zone files for the ccTLD .ly have been disabled.

'The ccTLD .ly has made repeated official requests to the above authority to relocate the Name Servers to an independent environment, to ensure the continued operation of the .ly zone. Unfortunately, these requests, so far, have been declined by IANA.

'Despite our best efforts to maintain the continued operation of the .ly zone, its failure today is totally outside our control... Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience that may be caused. We will endeavour to keep you informed of any future developments.'

This is backed up by a quick check over the Net. Libya's top-level domain doesn't appear to point anywhere at all. It should have primary and secondary name servers where all the details of .ly domains are contained. But nothing. In short, .ly has ceased to exist.

IANA is the California-based organisation that decides how Internet domains all over the world are allocated. Its role was, and is, supposed to still be, completely technical and non-political, although over the past few years, the Internet overseeing organisation ICANN has used the "IANA function" to move country domains or restrict changes being made to them in order to persuade people to sign up to a contract that would recognise ICANN as the ultimate authority in Internet matters.
[more]


posted by Gary Williams at 12:32 PM | link |


Monday, April 12, 2004  

via Fark.com and RedNova.com

Fluids In Space — New Physics At The ISS



Fluids In Space


This is an effect that happens every once an awhile, I don't know why. It's like the bottom edge of the browser window gets stuck, and when you scroll the page, it repeats a little, then stretches into a set of lines. In this case, I was struck by the effect (which lasted a lot longer than it usually does) to I triggered the screengrabber software I have installed and captured the image you see (with a shadow added for effect...)

If you know why IE does this, let me know...

posted by Gary Williams at 11:36 AM | link |

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