BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

A short message to all Firefox avid users who would like to make their favorite web browser even more popular:

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Come on Firefox users, get ready to Set a Firefox World Record!

All you have to do is download Firefox 3 when it goes live on Download Day — some time in June (I will let you know) and see if it can set a record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours

You can keep track on everything here - World record attempt

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Thanks MadMonkey for bringing this to my attention. I am always glad to support Firefox and when the Download Day is known, I will post a reminder here as well.

Since one of BrainKing public opinion polls shows that there is a group of people who would like to play domino games on our site, we present a domino type game proposal this time. Created by Andy Lewicki, this time.

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Name of the game: Forky

• The game starts with 21 domino stones by removing all the doubles.
• BrainKing draws one of the stones, opens it in front of the players and the player that faces the bigger half of the stone, starts the game.
• The drawn stone is placed
  on the left side of the screen in such a way that the bigger half is closer to the middle of the screen. This tile is the beginning of the whole "train" and other stones can be attached to the this stone only from one side, starting from the bigger half.
• The winner of the initial draw may match the bigger half in a specific way only: Let's say the bigger half is an odd number, for example 3. He can match this stone with another stone bearing number 3 and the other half MUST be an even number or zero - so, now we have the situation that an even number is exposed and the next player has to match it, exposing an ODD number or zero.
• The game alternates, matching one half and exposing either even or odd numbers on the other half.
• A zero plays a special role. When a zero is exposed it plays a role as a joker - any number, either even or odd can match it and of course another zero.

This game is kind of open game, although, opponent's pieces are not exposed during the game. We have the situation with perfect information and the whole idea is to outsmart the opponent and play all the pieces before the opponent or block the game with fewer points on hand.

This game doesn't require good memory, since everything is clear from the very beginning and this fits perfectly for a turn-based site. The name Forkt reflects the skippy idea of allowed stones to be exposed.

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I would like to remind that opinion poll results don't make us obliged to do anything based on them, so although we plan to make some domino games in the future, nobody promises any dates. But it is a nice game proposal, anyway.

As I mentioned in the past (and not only once, I guess), I like to browse Firefox Add-ons page to look for new and useful extensions of this great web browser, and I give a special attention to the ones which address a problem of multiple languages, national characters etc., since BrainKing partially lives on it, regarding its 20 localizations (and I hope to increase this number in the future).

The extension I am writing about today is called Zombie Keys and it can be a very useful tool for everyone who needs to write non-ASCII characters (e.g. ä, õ, ¿, Ø) on an English only keyboard or a computer which does not support the particular language keyboard layout. Shortly set, this add-on implements Microsoft's Keyboard shortcuts for international characters (see http://office.microsoft.com/assistance/hfws.aspx?AssetID=HP051865621033), which means that it allows you to write any character with a help of a special combination of standard keys. Since I use an English keyboard almost everywhere, I find this tool very neat, especially when I have to include a non-English name to an English text, and don't want to make a complicated copy/paste from a Unicode character map.

Please visit the official home page for instructions or download and install it directly from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2335.

The entry of the day consists of several disarranged messages of different kinds:

• Our serverhousing provider has announced a firmware upgrade of Cisco switches, which are a part of our connection to the rest of the world. As a consequence, there might be a few short downtimes of the line, ergo BrainKing sites would not be accessible during these events. I hope that no serious connection problems will occur tomorrow and the process should last from 28th May 2008, 20:00 p.m. to 29th May 2008, 05:00 a.m. GMT+02:00. We apologize for any inconveniences (not caused by us this time).
• Recently released Firefox 3.0 RC 1 seems to contain a couple of serious bugs, which might result in a release of RC 2 version before the final one is completed and ready to go (with a certain delay, most likely).
• Since I like to use a keyboard only while typing a message in games, I have added another key shortcut Alt-Enter which works like the Move and go to *selected-game* button. It is an addition to the standard Ctrl-Enter shortcut, calling a normal submit action. I guess that I should start to write a list of all shortcuts because they are not fully documented yet and it is likely that more of them would be added in the future.

And that's really all. No new opinion poll features today.

The solution of the day is intended to help those BrainKing users who think that they are being abused by too active poll creators in some fellowships, and they don't want to solve it by turning off all opinion poll notifications because it is nice to be informed about "normal" polls from other fellowships or public category. The trick is to mark the "problematic" poll creator(s) as ignored, so you won't see any other poll notifications from the particular user at your Main Page. It works as follows:

• Open any poll created by the user you want to ignore (block). The easiest way is to visit Polls / Fellowships page and click the right poll name.
• Click ignore this creator polls link below the "creator" section at the top-right corner of the poll page.
• And that's all, you won't be notified about this user polls anymore. However, if you decide to vote anyway in the future, all polls you are eligible to use (ignored or non-ignored) can be found at the Polls page.
• Your list of ignored poll creators will appear at the bottom of the Polls page, so if you click the ignore link by a mistake, you can easily "unignore" the particular user with this simple form.

I would like to add that the most straightforward way to solve a problem with a problematic fellowship owner is just to leave the fellowship - in other words, to solve the cause, not the effect. It is really not mandatory to accept all fellowship invitations without thinking about it first.

Firefox is a powerful and robust web browser, but sometimes it can cause problems to less experiences users who accidentally turn on certain security blocks and don't know how to unblock them. It is not a rare situation in these times when annoying popups and different kinds of attacks threaten people on a daily basis, and since I was solving a real "my BrainKing images have suddenly disappeared" issue of one BrainKing user, I have decided to write this short article because it could happen to more people.

All right, what to do if you are using Firefox, an "ignore images from this domain" appears, you click on it and then want to make the particular images visible again?

• Go to Tools / Options menu of your Firefox window.
• Activate Content tab of the Options window and click Exceptions ... button next to Load images automatically option.
• Wait until a list of blocked sites appear. Warning! If you are using Spybot - Search & Destroy or similar anti-spyware program which automatically blocks blacklisted sites, it can take 10-20 seconds to activate the blocked list box, so don't panic and be patient.
• Find the i.brainking.com line and remove it.

That's it, you should observe no further problems with BrainKing images.

Right, Mr. Andy Lewicki strikes back again. This time we have a proposal of a dice-only game, which might be welcomed especially by players of Dice Poker and similar "no board, no pieces" games.

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Name of the game: Risky Die

• Each player has 6 dice, which are grouped to 3 sets of 2 dice.
• A game consists of 10 rounds. BrainKing randomly sets values of all 6 dice in the beginning of every round (for example, 4/2, 6/5 and 1/1). It is important to point out that both players get the same combination of dice values.
• The goal is to make the least possible "gap" (difference of values) between dice of each set.
• During a round, a player has 2 options to do with every set of 2 dice:
  • Do nothing and just use the current "gap" as a score.
  • Select one die and roll it. If the rolled die shows the same number as it had before the roll - the player is busted and gets a penalty of 5 points. Otherwise, the difference of values is counted as a score.
• The player collects points from every set of every round. When all 10 rounds are completed, the player with smaller total score is the winner.
• (Optional rule to be discussed) In order to avoid "empty rounds", a player is obliged to make at least one roll per round, even if it means to destroy a good pre-rolled combination.

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Comments?

I think that every fan of Firefox web browser should check the official page of Firefox Add-ons and spend a couple of minutes there, at least four times a year, because nobody knows what interesting ideas can appear there as simple extensions to download and install and one could think "why didn't I use this neat tool a year ago?". Actually, I do it almost every week and even if no new add-on catches my attention, at least I get inspired for my own work - BrainKing Bookmarks add-on is a result of one of such browsing sessions.

I like when I can pass a boring action to machines which never get tired of a repetitive operation and I guess that one of the most annoying events to happen while browsing favorite web sites is when the particular site suddenly goes down (yes, BrainKing is not an exception). TryAgain is an elegant solution of this problem, because it does this "reload the page to check if the site is up" job automatically for you, so you can concentrate to another things until the desired site/page comes back to life. And it should work with Firefox 3 as well (at least Beta 5), which is good news too.

Download here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2462

At least I can post something which is not about opinion polls because all important features of this recently introduced functionality are already implemented and tested (or aren't they?). Of course, there are still some pending issues, e.g. to allow translators to maintain localized versions of public opinion polls to make them accessible to non-English speaking BrainKing users as well, but since we don't have too many public polls at the moment, it is not absolutely necessary to do it immediately.

Since the fellowship pages contain really many information and became not too well organized, time has come to make a little refactoring (something what had happened to user profile pages in the past). I have decided to start with team matches section because

1. it is located at the very bottom of the particular fellowship page, so it is not too convenient to scroll down to see it,
2. it occupies too many space when all team matches are shown at once,

so it is moved to its own sub-page and a little reorganized.

The new matches section of a fellowship page displays only open matches by default, in order to find them by a couple of clicks if a team match invitation message is accidentally deleted before accepting/rejecting a challenge. The page also includes a simple form to located matches by their type, game or name pattern. I believe this improvement will be a positive change for everyone who wants to track his fellowship team results and search archive data, from time to time.

... although I thought that today's entry would be about something else.

Never mind.

• The Polls page is organized just like the Ponds one - the page is divided to Public and Fellowships sections, which gives a better overview of all polls you are eligible to participate in. The selected poll list also indicates which polls are still waiting for your vote and which of them you decided to ignore (see the next point).
• Instead of hiding the poll notification box at the Main Page once and forever, it might be more convenient to mark selected polls as ignored - once it is done, they will stop appearing at the Main Page, so you can be notified about polls you are really interested in. However, you can still vote in ignored polls, if you find them at the Polls page.
• When a poll is finished, BrainKing will automatically send a notification to the creator and all participants. The message contains the final number of voters and a link to the poll, so it can be easily checked for the final results.

Now I hope that everyone (or at least almost everyone) is happy with the result and there is still a chance to add an improvement or two, if someone has a good idea of a new feature.