BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

Yes, after a little complicated weekend we are back to normal and although I have just posted a short overview to the BrainKing.com discussion board, the blog site was always better for recording and archiving purposes. The reason of the recent problematic accessibility of BrainKing sites is that one of the main server hard disks have failed and made the rest of the disk pool a bit unstable. In order to keep BrainKing running as much as possible, the site has been moved to the backup server until the damaged disk is replaced by a new one and the system is restored and configured again. And since the backup server is not the fastest one, it has been almost continuously overloaded, but it's still better than no backup server at all.

Everything is fixed and up now, the standard performance monitors show that the site is running fast and smoothly. And I would like to thank everyone who has shown a patience instead of expressing negative feelings on public discussion boards. Don't Feed The Troll!, the wise man says, and everybody knows what to do next time.

Besides, you might have noticed a small visual improvement, which is not too important but can be handy for many users (including me). If a red number appears at your Friends online section (right column) next to a particular friend's name, it means that it is your turn to move in this number of games with this opponent, and when you hover a mouse cursor over the number, a nice box with the corresponding game list appears for a faster selection. The functionality is the same as the red number next to the Main page link, but it takes into account only games with the friend.

The last note - our daylight saving time period is over (yesterday), so the server time is back to the GMT+01:00 time zone.

The lack of the blog articles of this month means nothing sinister. We are just too busy to program, configure and fix many new things which are happening to our sites and, which is good news, everything should turn out as a more flexible, scalable, robust and stable system of services provided by us, including BrainKing.

Since I have a couple of free hours today, the BrainKing.com discussion board is, as announced there, open to post any questions related to BrainKing itself, and I will do my best to answer them all (which is what I am doing right now). And because not everyone reads BrainKing boards, I want to compile the most important issues/questions here as well.

First of all, we moved our servers to a new server housing location. The reason is that we have purchased more machines, in order to build a rack of several physical servers which gives us an opportunity to separate different services (which were running at the same machine before, slowing down the BrainKing node) to different machines. It is always a good thing to balance the load and many big companies are doing the same. For example, Google's search engine is running on a server farm containing 10,000 (or even more?) computers, which work together as one big supermachine, from a user's point of view. And since it is not an easy or straightforward job to make this improved configuration running with no problems at all, occasional downtimes of BrainKing sites can be observed. It is not an out of control malfunction - there are things which cannot be pinpointed and resolved until something goes wrong. And who is patient, will be awarded with a good result.

There is also one more consequence - when servers are moved to another network, they obtain another set of IP addresses, which means that the former ones don't work anymore. There is a recommended and reliable action to do in such situation - to update our local DNS servers and broadcast this information to other DNS servers around the world, so they would become aware of the change and update their internal records as well. Well, I say "reliable" but it is not as easy as it should be, because many internet service providers (ISPs) ignore this kind of changes/messages (although they are obliged to accept it, according to the web standards) and their customers may experience annoying error messages of "brainking.com domain cannot be found" type.

If you have this problem, what can you do now? The easiest solution is to wait - your ISP cannot pretend forever that BrainKing.com domain does not exist and must update its records very soon. Another workaround would be to try one of our other domains - BrainKing.cz, BrainKing.de, BrainKing.es, BrainKing.se, BrainKing.it, BrainKing.hk, BrainKing.ru, BrainKing.ee, BrainKing.dk, BrainKing.sk or BrainKing.nl - there is a good chance that at least one of them is already updated at your ISP. And the last and the most direct solution is to access BrainKing with its new IP address directly - it is 89.187.130.22 and should remain the same for many years.

Now, what to say about images? Careful observers have already noticed that BrainKing images are now provided by img.brainking.com server, which was a necessary change to improve the site's overall performance. However, shortly after this change was activated, the image server went down and BrainKing users could access BrainKing pages but no images were displayed for several hours. In order to avoid this problem in the future and make BrainKing a little smarter again, I have implemented an internal system which can detect if the image server is down and automatically switch to internal image handling - and when the image server is fixed and reloaded, BrainKing recognizes it too and switches back to the original image server. What is the advantage of that? When BrainKing is up and running, it will always be capable of showing its images (game pieces, user icons, smileys etc.), no matter if the external image server is working or not, and it will always choose the solution which results in a better performance.

I have just checked the BrainKing.com board and since there are no more questions at the moment, there is nothing else to write here now. Anyway, we are still here, although we don't always comment everything instantly.

Since the recent improvement of Tournaments page has been accepted very positively, it is only logical that the, uh, tournament alternative - Ponds - should be perfected in the same way. Shortly, if you open the Ponds page on BrainKing and switch to the Fellowships sub-page, a list of open ponds from fellowships you are a member of will be displayed and you can easily choose from them, instead of visiting every single fellowship one by one.

And a simplicity is always our background target.

The smile in the title of this entry refers to the second addition/bugfix/enhancement/whatever of the day. Many tournament creators like to beautify their tournament names by one or more smileys but the particular tournament link has been shown with real smileys only on one or two pages and the rest of BrainKing didn't bother to translate asterisk codes to cute images. Now, the smiley-powered links should be nice looking everywhere (and reduced when necessary).

By the way, this article name doesn't mean that BrainKing users are taken as a "crowd". I am just listening to this song, sung by my favourite member of my favourite band.

Yes, it was almost 2 months ago when the previous blog entry had been released, because I decided to take a break, in order not to become a slave to my own creations. It doesn't mean that we were doing nothing at all but nobody was writing about that. Very well. The rest of this year should be spent by finishing several important changes, regarding BrainKing servers (yes, we have been upgrading our hardware again, it is always a good change), but I want to write more about it later - some details are still being formulated.

Anyway, even a small improvement can be heartwarming, especially for those who requested it some time ago. If you visit the Tournaments page (on BrainKing game site), you should see that it is now separated to two sub-pages - Public and Fellowships. The first one simply contains the usual content of public tournaments, there is no change to it. However, if you are a member of one or more fellowships (which requires a paid membership level), the Fellowships sections will display a list of private tournaments which you are eligible to sign up for (they belong to fellowships you are a member of) etc.

And happy Monday to everyone.