Entries by Filip Rachunek

This is a PR article. BrainKing is not responsible for the content or any provided information.

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The new age shows that the future technology explores all kinds of the communication from simple telephone to the internet. As everyday brings the new releases of different products, we do not imagine life without internet. The access to it is easy and no matter where we are – train, car, work, and home – there is not any problem to get connected.

Just two decades ago no one would think that the computer technology would bring so much to everyday's life. But, what do we look for mostly in the internet, is daily information about what is going on around the world, but also many try their luck to earn money over the net. This may occur in different ways. Some will try their luck on on-line stock exchange and some simply by playing on the net, other words, by online gambling.

Every year brings number of new portals where we can play and win. This kind of home entertainment keeps us busy at nights and even very often during the hours of our work. Today we find online casinos and online poker without any problem. It is enough to search the browser for a site that will fulfill our requirements. And the choice is very wide.

Online gambling has nearly doubled every year since 1997 and just in 2001 it exceed 2 billion US Dollars. But to gamble on the net is as dangerous as to gamble in real casino or poker room. According to the American Psychological Association the Internet could be as addictive as drugs, alcohol, and gambling. Many good sites offering these types of games try to have good protecting program from being addicted, but the last word always belongs to us. If you gamble on the net you should know the warning signals letting you know something goes wrong. These, among others, are: increased preoccupation with gambling, wide mood swings, relying on others for money to relieve a financial problem that arose due to gambling, lying to family members or others to hide the amount of gambling. The research shows that four to six percent of those who regularly gamble will eventually become problem gamblers or compulsive gamblers. Great number of the addicted people will never ask for help.

It seems that we had an unscheduled break of publishing new blog entries for a couple of days. Yes, everyone needs a rest, especially when the number of articles exceeds 550 and the former determination to publish at least one article every day is not always in a corelation with many other important tasks to do. Anyway, I would like to make an official statement that we are still here, regardless on a frequency of releasing new information or updates.

Very well. Now, this is important. In order to find the best solution to several aspects of our future plans, I have decided to make some of our services separated from the main BrainKing outpost, and when I say "separated", I really mean it. Here are the details:

• The current physical location of BrainKing.info and BrainRook.com sites is somewhere in Richmond, Virginia (United States) (see the map). Of course, it means no visual changes to an ordinary visitor of these web sites. American users might experience a better speed of page loading, but otherwise, the sites are still the same and with the same content.
• After a comprehensive research of many different web hosting services, I selected HostICan as a new home of BrainKing.info and BrainRook.com sites because their portfolio of services, unlimited bandwidth, virtually unlimited disk space (how long would it take to consume 3 thousand GB?) seemed to be the best option for my purposes.
• One of the reasons of this action is to keep this blog site (BrainKing.info) at a place where
  • It is guaranteed to be up and running, even if BrainKing's main hosting place is temporarily unavailable from certain parts of the world, ergo people still would be able to read BrainKing news and be informed about latest events.
  • We are no longer responsible for possible hardware failures, causing the worst kinds of downtimes. If it happens, the hosting company is obliged to fix it as soon as possible, while we can sleep well.
  • Thanks to this remote hosting, we can prepare better and more sophisticated actions of speed tests.
• Regarding HostICan web hosting, I tested their customer service with several types of questions and requests and I must admit that everything was addressed and solved very quickly and to my full satisfaction, even during Saturday and Sunday, so I believe it was a good decision to use their services. Since the contemporary situation of web hosting and server housing belongs to my interests, I might publish a longer and more detailed review of HostICan in the future, based on my further experiences with them.

And, please, don't forget that Firefox 3.0 Download Day starts tomorrow, 17th June 2008.

Mozilla Corporation officially released Mozilla Firefox 3.0 Release Candidate 2. It means that the final version of this popular web browser is a little closer again. As we informed a week ago, this new test version was created due to a number of critical bugs found at the previous RC 1, so it would not be wise to launch the full version until they are hunted down and fixed.

Good news - if no serious problems are detected in RC 2, it will be most likely turned to the official final version of Firefox 3 and BrainKing will start to recommend it instead of Firefox 2. Speaking of versions, BrainKing itself could be called at least BrainKing 2.5 (or maybe 3.0 too), according to development milestones during 6 years of its existence. But this version counting is mostly for my internal purposes.

And a quick reminder - the (re)scheduled downtime of BrainKing sites is going to happen soon, more precisely 11 and half hours in the time of posting this article. If nothing goes complicated, it should not be longer than 60 minutes, so we just ask for a patience and apologize again for this inconvenience.

Although I announced a downtime which should have happened today in the morning (GMT+02:00), you might have noticed that nothing like that has been done at all. The reason is that the process seemed to be a little more difficult than it had appeared, and because the safety and stability is very important to us, we have decided to make this action another day.

Here is the message again, updated:

Since we need to make an important upgrade of our database server system and BrainKing does not work when the database is down, this process requires to turn off the site for a while, in order to perform all necessary tasks as quickly as possible. Ergo, a scheduled downtime of BrainKing is planned on Friday 6th June 2008, 7:00 - 9:00 a.m. GMT+02:00, because our access log says that the site is visited by the least number of visitors (relatively) during this time range. And, as always, if the total downtime exceeds 60 minutes, BrainKing will automatically disable game timeouts for the following 24 hours. Thank you for understanding.

This is a PR article.

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Microgaming is one of the largest casino gaming software providers on the Internet. The company powers more than 120 online casinos and 40 online poker rooms, along with land based and wireless gaming platforms.

The Microgaming online casino software comes both in a downloadable version and a Flash version – the Flash casinos runs directly in your browser. Microgaming has over 300 different casino games to choose from ranging from Roulette and Craps to Video Poker and numerous different slots variations. Both front and back-end supports multilanguage, multiplayer games.

Microgaming software powers two of the largest gaming networks online. The online casino network shares progressive jackpots between the different casinos – these are some of the biggest jackpots you can find online. The casinos in the network have paid out over $200 million in jackpot since the start. The poker network is also quite large, connecting poker rooms such as GNUF, Betway and Doyle’s Room.

One thing is for sure, Microgaming is in the forefront when it comes to creating innovative and safe internet gaming software. In 2006 Microgaming won the Gambling Online Magazine Silver Award for best casino software. The company is constantly evolving the gambling online, making Microgaming one of the leading gaming software providers in the business.

Since we need to make an important upgrade of our database server system and BrainKing does not work when the database is down, this process requires to turn off the site for a while, in order to perform all necessary tasks as quickly as possible. Ergo, a scheduled downtime of BrainKing is planned on Wednesday 4th June 2008, 6:00 - 8:00 a.m. GMT+02:00, because our access log says that the site is visited by the least number of visitors (relatively) during this time range. And, as always, if the total downtime exceeds 60 minutes, BrainKing will automatically disable game timeouts for the following 24 hours. Thank you for understanding.

To change the topic a little, I have noticed some news about upcoming Firefox 3 and since I am a big supporter of this web browser, I am always glad to mention this kind of information:

• Although the final version is not released yet, its market share is very close to the one of Opera 9.x, which is not a bad result, regarding the fact that many people don't want to replace their Firefox 2 with the 3 version because of many extensions which still don't work with it. An interesting table can be found here.
• I mentioned Flock web browser 11 months ago. Its forthcoming version 2.0 (should be available in a couple of months) is going to be built on Firefox 3 system as well. If someone wants to try it out, it is possible to download nightly builds.

And yes, feel free to click this nice Firefox 3 promotion button.

The system of smileys is a significant feature of BrainKing discussion boards and although we currently have more than 400 different small images to use in posts or messages, no collection can contain everything to please everyone. Furthermore, sometimes I receive requests from fellowship owners who wanted to add smileys to some specific discussion boards, and it would not be the best idea to make such special images public and waste the space of smiley popup window by something what might not be used by anybody else.

In order to address this issue once and forever and let the respective people maintain it themselves, Fellowship smileys have been introduced. Please note the new Smileys section at your fellowship page. If you open it, you should see smileys which were added by your Big/Little Boss to be used within the particular fellowship.

All right, let me describe how it works:

• Smileys can be added by Big or Little Boss only. The process is very similar to adding photos to albums - a new smiley is submitted as a local file from the user's computer or as a remote file URL.
• After a smiley is added, its status is not released to avoid situations where a wrong image is accidentally submitted and someone could use it before the mistake is recognized and resolved.
• When the Boss decides that the smiley is correct, clicks the Release button and the smiley becomes accessible to all fellowship members, otherwise clicks Delete to remove the image.
• The page displays all released smileys with their asterisk codes. The code structure is very similar to that of photo thumbnails - it contains the fellowship ID and the smiley ID, prefixed by f. For example, code *f:12:3* means smiley 3 of fellowship 12.
• Once a smiley is released, it cannot be deleted. The reason is that it can be already used in discussions and deleting the corresponding image would cause broken image tags in the text.

And there are, as always, some restrictions:

• Only gif images are supported, in order to enable transparency and animations.
• Maximum size is 100x100 points. Larger smileys will be refused.
• Maximum image file length is 100 kB.
• Smileys work only in the particular fellowship discussion boards. It is not possible to use them outside the fellowship they belong to.

Please note that this feature is in a very basic status at this moment, so the only way how to use fellowship smileys is to copy and paste their asterisk codes to the text to post. An optional popup window will be added soon, next to the standard public smileys one.

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.