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Archive for November, 2010

Draw, sweet draw…

Wednesday, November 24th, 2010

This was a not bad week for me so far. (It’s Wednesday, but because of Thanksgiving it feels like Friday…)

On Monday night at the club I played an unrated game against one of the stronger youths around the B/N chess scene. More specifically, I’ve never won a game against him. My record was 0-2 in tournament play, and I know I’ve lost at least two other unrated and unrecorded games against him.

While I wasn’t able to scratch out a win, I was able to hold him to a draw. One of my friends noted that I was a little generous in proposing the draw – he thought that, even though a pawn down and with doubled pawns, I could have scratched out a win. I’ll be checking that this evening, and hopefully updating this post with the results.

Update: I did place the final position on both Fritz 12 and Stockfish 1.8; they both hold that Black is very slightly better out to an obscene depth level. But I think that the continuation is still holding a draw and the advantage isn’t enough. I’ve appended a second game to the pgn file below which shows the continuation.

But still, it is most excellent to get a different result from a player that you’ve historically lost to on a consistent basis.

And I get to test a plugin I just installed for this blog to display PGN files directly (without having to go through the Caissa’s web link, which I have been grateful to have.)

Though it’s beginning to be miserably cold here, it has been a most excellent week for enjoying my chess. I hope you, too, have been able to

Enjoy your Chess!

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Scheveningen Steamroller

Saturday, November 13th, 2010

The blog theme is nice and lightened up…  I’d like to increase the main width, but it certainly works for now.

So, as promised, my correspondence adventure in the Schevenigen Sicilian…  Two months in the making.

Here’s the game itself in viewer mode:

Play Online Chess

Analysis follows the cut…

(more…)

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So one of these days, I’ll get back to chess…. ;)

Thursday, November 11th, 2010

I’m coming closer to being at the end of Ye Olde Blog Configurations.  I like almost everything about this theme better, except that I miss my old black-text-on-white-container for the posts themselves.  I’m trying to keep away from going too deep on the php edits again, seeing how my track record has been.

But it hasn’t all been old blog configuring.  One thing that I learned as part of the restoration process is that Y! Webhosting allows multiple WP blogs to be started in the same site.  Also, I’d been working on a website for our chess club to complement the Facebook site that another member is developing.  But static management was getting to be a pain in the tail – just trying to keep it all square.  So…. behold!  I really think it is possible to create a type of website based off of using WordPress as a sort of CMS system.  (There are commercial packages which blur the line even further, making it darn near impossible to tell that one is seeing a blog system instead of a website.)

The club blogsite/site is still very definitely in beta (I need some feedback from other club members, as well, as it is just something I’ve been doing with sort-of-semi-sanction.)

But I like it.  It’s light theme (the default WP theme just very lightly tweaked) is quite enjoyable.

One last piece of web news (and thanks for wading through it…  this is supposed to be about chess, not tehInternetsTechnoGeekery):  The spam flood continues, and I’m quite sick of people hogging out my bandwidth to post spam comments – even if they are easy to manage.  So I’ve taken the step of closing comments on most of the posts in the Blog.  I may develop exceptions to certain posts (like the Tools of the Trade series.)  But for now, if it’s 30 days old and uncommented, it’s now locked.

I do wish the spammers would develop better tools to see that a blog using Akimset is dang near impossible to spam, so don’t bother…

*

But there is chess news….  Back in September I posted about how I jumped right back into another correspondence series.  Of the four games in my class tournament, one of them ended when my opponent failed to make the time control before move 8, and I just resigned another one.  (That one had already defeated the other two players for a perfect 4.0 score.)  So, I hope that before the weekend is over I’ll have a post about that lost game.  I may also make a video again.

One of the hard parts about correspondence is that, aside from dull detail about how far along each game is, I try to be sensistive about not receiving feedback about the active game.  So blogging becomes, “Hey I’ve started,” and then an update four months later.  :O

But of the other two games, I think I’m definitely near the end of one of those.

So it’s been a mix of enjoying my chess through actual playing and journalism infrastructure, I guess.  Until the next update (with game analysis, hopefully!)  I hope that you

Enjoy your Chess!

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Blog back up without theme… Plus

Saturday, November 6th, 2010

….After my blog ate itself during an upgrade, it took awhile to figure things out.

The key to retstoring the text was to use Yahoo’s database administration tools and phpMyAdmin from the Yahoo control panel end to restore my WP backup (as opposed to the phpMyAdmin tool one can install inside WordPress itself and use from the WordPress Dashboard.)

And, got to give plus points and an apology to Yahoo’s favor:  I never reported this as a problem, but I did get an email from Yahoo! customer support stating they noticed I was having a WordPress problem and they were available to contact for support.  Big plus for Yahoo, when you haven’t reported the problem but they know about it and initiate contact!

But, as you may see if you’re viewing this now, when I got it back up, it turned out something is broken in my theme.  Not too surprising - I did quite a bit of customization on that theme and it was a learning experience in php and CSS.  It wouldn’t surprise me if I introduced a change that busted the theme.  And if those theme changes were what ate the blog post-upgrade. (Actually, since I couldn’t open up the blog admin controls, I’ve rules out my changes as to what ate the blog.)  But I’m still not upgrading via the WP dashboard.

So, now all that left is to build/rebuild a theme.  Part of me will miss the old layout, but I think I was getting a little tired of the severity of it. The theme is back up again, much as it was as before.  I’m still trying to figure out just how I got the sidebar a little smaller and the text containers larger.  That should be the end of the theme work.

Actually, I also found out that one thing the db backup didn’t do was to backup all the images and pictures that were in the blog.  They weren’t part of the db, residing in a separate media directory that was apparently wiped when I deactivated/reactivated the blog as part of the restore process.  It will take quite awhile for me to locate all the links and try to repair them – not made easier by a change of computers since I started the blog.

So, onward and upward!

And now, as I was re-customizing the theme, some of my posts started dropping out.  (This obviously was an accidental typo somewhere.)  And just as I was getting close to having it perfect again….   Sooo….  A complete change of theme to something I might like better, and a little header customization is all I’m looking for.

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