BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

As I have promised two days ago, the preview feature has been implemented on more pages. Now, you can see a preview of

• Notepad entry
• Profile description

before it is actually submitted and stored to the BrainKing database. It is particularly useful for profile description changes because you don't need to wait for an administrator approval in order to see whether your new description looks exactly as you wanted to or not.

If I am not mistaken, the long awaited iPhone by Apple has been released yesterday. If someone already owns this new achievement of Mr. Steve Jobs, I would be very grateful to hear some personal experiences with it.

Since the current entry number is 333, which is a nice looking number, I was hoping for a remarkable event to happen today which would be worth mentioning, like "we have 50,000 registered users" (actually, it is 49,704 at this moment) or "out statistics shows 100,000 unique visitors in June" (it might be true by the end of this year). Well, nothing like that is going on. Instead, let me present some statistical data (useful or useless), squeezed out of BrainKing's database:

• The total number of moves in all games, from the BrainKing's beginning on October 2002 to this moment, is 105,877,897.
• There is a nameless enthusiast from a nameless country south of Canada who created 3,123 tournaments so far, which is a notable achievement.
• There is another nameless writer from another nameless English speaking country who wrote 14,933 discussion board posts.
• The most popular size of tournament sections, regarding the ones greater than 8, is 20 players per section, the biggest one. I am glad that the section definitions rewriting was not a waste of time and tournament creators really use the new features.
• A friendship takes over BrainKing! I have found a user who has 1,276 names at his Friends list. That must be really long page. I wonder if he remembers all of them?

If there is an interest for another stats of this kind, just drop a request.

There is one feature which was missing on BrainKing from the very start of the site, regarding the discussion board system. Since the users can write messages with live links, smiley codes and formatted text using a set of selected HTML tags, it is not a rare situation when a typo slips into the text and is not seen until the message is posted. And although paying members can edit their posts and make corrections, it is not the most convenient way to post without errors.

The solution (which has been added an hour ago) comes as a new button Preview next to the Send one below the editing text area on discussion board pages. Clicking the Preview button does not store the text to the database, but simply shows the result below the editing form, so it can be reviewed before the message is actually posted. The functionality is as simple as it can be and an unwanted click on the Preview button causes no harm - if you wanted to post the message instead, just click the Send button afterwards.

And since this feature would be very useful for private messages, profile descriptions etc., it will be added to these parts of BrainKing very soon.

As I have already written about several weeks ago, there are many users who dedicate their time and effort to create really nice and impressive BrainKing profile descriptions, full of nice text, well selected smileys and links to other interesting pages. And since it would be a real pity to lose a half finished work in case of a sudden site down event, the autosave feature has been improved to cover this part of BrainKing as well. All supported keyboard shortcuts work there as well - if you are editing your profile description and want to make sure that the momentary draft is securely saved on the server, simply press Ctrl-Shift combination and a green text Autosave OK! should confirm the action success.

There is no point to write more bla bla blas today, in order to make the entry a little longer.

Sun Microsystems announced today that they used their hardware to build the most powerful supercomputer ever created, containing 62,976 CPU cores, 125 TB (terabytes) of RAM and 1.7 PB (petabytes) of disk space. Well, although not every family can afford a home computer of this size (the cost is about 30 million USD and it requires 3 megawatts of power to run, not to mention the maintenance costs of 29 million USD), it is a nice achivement anyway.

Our plans of BrainKing expansion are more reserved, of course. The new database server we are just configuring and preparing for a launch is based "only" on Quad Core Intel Xeon processor which is a very good CPU as well and the machine should be capable to host three or four virtual servers. This approach allows us to build a scalable and fail-safe system which is exactly what we always wanted to have because several clones of a digital administrator are much more reliable than a human.

The release is planned on the beginning of July and since it can be done in several independent phases, it should not affect the overall site uptime and accessibility.

I have just installed a new version of Safari browser which has been released in a new 3.0.2 version for Windows today and I am glad to confirm that it seems to be stable and all right at last. The recent problems I have been writing about were probably caused by a bug on non-English Windows. Which also explains why certain BrainKing users did not understand my problems with that.

I have been testing BrainKing pages with Safari for about half and hour and found no problems so far, so I think I can officially add Safari to the group of supported browsers which are recommended to use with our site(s). If I want to compare it with the others, Safari look at feel is the most similar to Opera, speaking of the rendering results. The only lacking thing I have found is that the fonts seem to be blurred a little - probably a consequence of anti-aliasing techniques. But it can be my personal opinion only, of course.

Keep on testing.

From time to time, I like to browse the Mozilla page of Firefox add-ons because there are many creative developers who kindly contribute to the wide variety of useful extensions of this popular browser and significantly improve its functionality. My own installation of Firefox currently contains 19 add-ons and I am very happy with all of them because they allow me to work faster and use only one program for many tasks which I am used to.

I have just found an add-on called Firefox Showcase and it has become one of my favorite ones almost immediately. It could be very useful not just for us developers who need to work with many different pages at once, but also for BrainKing players who like to use several Firefox tabs for different kinds of BrainKing pages (games, discussions, tournaments etc.) and I know at least three or four people who really do it.

The Firefox Showcase simply adds a small arrow button to the right side of the open tab list. When it is clicked, a window containing current snapshots of all open pages appear and you can easily check the current content of all of them at once. The add-on comes with many options to set or change, but I am glad to use the default option set at this moment. Everything works great and does exactly what it is supposed to do.

Unlike round robin tournaments, the single elimination ones have a specific rule, regarding the initial seeding of the participants. Since the BrainKing's Help page contains no detailed description about this problematics and there are people who seem to be confused when they play with a top rated opponent in the first round (which usually means a sure loss and an elimination at the very start), let me post a short enlightment (by the way, why doesn't Firefox spell checker know the word "enlightment"?).

The point is that the top players should not meet one another before the last rounds, when only 4 or 8 non-eliminated players remain in the tournament, in order to make the finish more interesting. Otherwise, if the best players play in the first or second round, at least the half of them would have been eliminated and there would be no doubt who wins the last round. For example, if we order the players by their BKR and give 1 to the top one, 2 to the second one etc., the ideal form of the last rounds should be 1-4 3-2 or 1-8 5-4 3-6 7-2.

And because my explanation could easily explain absolutely nothing, please have a look at this page as well.

Right, it is a small improvement to the recent improvement because, whether we like it or not, fellowship members rarely visit the particular fellowship page and read the corresponding private discussion boards much more often.

So, as one or two people have already suggested, I have added the link Waiting games to the top of these discussion boards as well. It is displayed only if there are some public game invitations within the fellowship and the link is highlighted by a red number next to it, showing the current number of invitations.

Nobody has been trying to hack us today. I am disappointed. Maybe we should announce a big prize for the first hacking guru who successfully breaks in and we don't even notice that. Or maybe not.

The BrainKing's vacation system can save your games even if you don't plan any holidays but suddenly cannot access the web and play before a timeout occurs. It is called automatic vacation and everybody knows this feature (or at least many paying members because nobody else can use it). However, this kind of salvation does not work if you start a game with no days off vacation type, and since there are still many users who don't fully understand all possible types of time control (although we have a nice article on BrainRook site), maybe the particular game invitations (and tournamets) should have this time control much better highlighted and enhanced by a longer description (and possible consequences).

But the point of this entry is different. I have seen an interesting system on another site, which allows a user to give another user an access to his account (limited and temporary). This is how it works:

• A user (Player) marks another user (Friend) as his agent/delegate/substitute/representative/proxy/assistant - what is the correct word for this?
• Friend can login to the Player's account with Player's user name and Friend's password.
• After a pre-defined time period is over (usually a couple of days), the Friend's access to Player's account is disabled and cannot be reactivated in the next 30 days (or something like this).

In order to prevent a panic, nothing like that is planned for BrainKing. At least until a balanced and useful version of this idea is worked out and we are sure that we really need it.

Although the title of this article might sound a little illogical, I think it describes the most recent addition to the BrainKing game site quite well. And players can have another reason to visit the favorite fellowship page.

What is it about? Since today, if you are a paying members and belong to one or more fellowships, you can create public game invitations which are displayed within the selected fellowship page, instead of the common Waiting Games one. The point of this feature is that such invitations can be accessed only by members of the same fellowships, so you can easily post public invitations to your internal community and make sure that they will be accepted just by people you know.

The fellowship pages now contain two subpages - Main page and Waiting games. Their purpose is obvious and I guess it's not necessary to write about them in details. When you define a game invitation, don't forget to select the proper fellowship from the Fellowship combo box at the Define opponent page.

By the way, somebody from this address has been trying to hack our server today and probably thinks that we don't know about it. Not to mention he's been absolutely unsuccessful but given us a good satisfaction.