Monthly Archives: February 2009

Wouldn’t you prefer a nice game of chess?

I have a penchant for strategy games but, I am unlucky enough to be horribly bad at them. Take chess for example, I love to play but readily get creamed because I sometimes fail to take into account all of the advanced intricacies like key squares, en passant, castleing and changing point values for advancing pawns. The biggest problem comes from my inability to see more than a move or too into the future. That visualization is probably the hardest part for most beginning chess players. Enter Thinking Machine 4 . It’s a Java applet utilizing Processing, an OpenGL style language used primarily for visualizing data. Thinking Machine is designed to have the intelligence of the average chess player so it doesn’t offer anything interesting on the playing front (unless you’re below average like me in which case it’s always a challenge). Its true power lies in its decision making ability. Before moving a piece, Thinking Machine draws every possible move and counter move for both players based on the current board positions. Green lines represent white moves and orange lines represent those beloning to black. The deeper the hue of a move the more likely it is to occur. Once all possible moves have been drawn, Thinking Machine makes its final decision. I have yet to beat Thinking Machine (which isn’t saying much) but it’s interesting to watch the thought process of a decent chess player from the most basic opening move to the more advanced end game.

Posted in 930posts | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

OTHERS NEED TO POST.

So today I installed VMware Server on my work PC, and set up a virtual machine. In doing this, I had VMware Server allocate 12 GBs of hard drive space for use by the virtual machine. Immediately on doing this, performance on my PC took a dump.

The following is a screen capture I took after I defragmented the hard drive. The top line is “before,” the bottom “after.” The red parts in the first line are the fragmented parts, and the white space is empty space on the hard drive.

Windows confused, windows SMASH!

Posted in 930posts, Introductions | 1 Comment

"Uptime," more like……"downtime"

Out of curiosity last week, I set up service and host monitoring through Pingdom. They offer a free 30-day trial for their low-end account, which includes testing of 5 hosts. (If you pay it’s like $10 a month.) It’s a neat service, although kind of expensive, at least for how I’m using it. It’s been configured to check for web services on this site (Sector930) and my home server (Home,) and SSH on my other hosting server (Enterprise) every minute, and send out emails if it finds something amiss. In the last 12 hours, I’ve had downtime on all three sites:
That gmail label already stresses me out.

That gmail label already stresses me out.

Posted in 930posts, Admin | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

“Uptime,” more like……”downtime”

Out of curiosity last week, I set up service and host monitoring through Pingdom. They offer a free 30-day trial for their low-end account, which includes testing of 5 hosts. (If you pay it’s like $10 a month.) It’s a neat service, although kind of expensive, at least for how I’m using it. It’s been configured to check for web services on this site (Sector930) and my home server (Home,) and SSH on my other hosting server (Enterprise) every minute, and send out emails if it finds something amiss. In the last 12 hours, I’ve had downtime on all three sites:
That gmail label already stresses me out.

That gmail label already stresses me out.

Posted in 930posts, Admin | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

This Morning's Downtime

Sector930 was down for a period of 11 minutes this morning, from 11:19 to 11:28. It appears that the flange for our network pump broke, which prevented any internet from being drawn. Luckily, the wizard at our hosting facility was able to repair it, after casting Haste and using his Multitool of Power +3.

I would like to apologize to our thousands of loyal readers for the untold inconvenience you suffered this morning, and would also like to thank you for your continued dedication and patience. I assure you that all those responsible have been fired.

Well, there's your problem

Well, there's your problem.

Posted in 930posts, Admin | Tagged | 1 Comment