BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base - BrainKing News and Events

Decentralization

nospam@example.com (Filip Rachunek) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:56:00 -0400

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.

Firefox 3.0 Release Candidate 2

nospam@example.com (Filip Rachunek) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:29:00 -0400

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.

The downtime is rescheduled

nospam@example.com (Filip Rachunek) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 07:59:00 -0400

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.

Firefox 3 news and a scheduled downtime

nospam@example.com (Filip Rachunek) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:45:00 -0400

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.

Fellowship smileys

nospam@example.com (Filip Rachunek) — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 05:31:00 -0400

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.

Set a Firefox World Record

nospam@example.com (Filip Rachunek) — Sat, 31 May 2008 17:38:00 -0400

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

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

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.

A possibility of unscheduled short downtimes

nospam@example.com (Filip Rachunek) — Wed, 28 May 2008 14:00:00 -0400

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.

Filter your poll notifications

nospam@example.com (Filip Rachunek) — Tue, 27 May 2008 09:36:00 -0400

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.

Changes to fellowship pages

nospam@example.com (Filip Rachunek) — Fri, 23 May 2008 12:31:00 -0400

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

it is located at the very bottom of the particular fellowship page, so it is not too convenient to scroll down to see it,
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.

And polls are still being developed ...

nospam@example.com (Filip Rachunek) — Thu, 22 May 2008 13:51:00 -0400

... 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.

Public opinion polls

nospam@example.com (Filip Rachunek) — Wed, 21 May 2008 15:52:00 -0400

Right, the former fellowship-only feature has been turned to a public one (as an addition, not a replacement of the previous version) and made even better with a help of the following improvements:

There is a new item Polls at the left menu column of all BrainKing pages. The Polls page contains a list of public opinion polls - polls which are open to everyone, ergo all registered BrainKing users (any level of membership) are allowed to participate and vote. Public polls are created by the same people who are already maintaining Team Tournaments.
A new public discussion board has been created. It is called Opinion polls and if you want to suggest a topic for the next public poll, this is the right place to post your request.
The Polls page can be used as a reference of new private (fellowship) polls you are eligible to participate in. The page lists open polls of all fellowships you belong to and it hides the ones which already contain your vote.
Nice blue bars have been added to the percent values of current votes of the selected poll.
If a new poll is created and you are allowed to vote, a notification would appear at the Main Page. The notification box contains a hide link, so if you are bothered with that and don't want to be notified about new polls, click this link to turn it off. Notifications can be turned on/off at the Settings page as well.

Please don't forget that although polls have been made public, their purpose is to give BrainKing users another possibility to express their opinions, but no poll results can influence our internal priorities of implementing new games or features. We can take them into a consideration but don't promise anything which could be based on the polls.

BrainKing polls revisited

nospam@example.com (Filip Rachunek) — Tue, 20 May 2008 13:05:00 -0400

Very well, BrainKing has a system of opinion polls (since yesterday) and it seems to be successful, thank you very much. I am already flooded with requests of new poll features and I think of some other improvements myself, so there is still a lot of work to do. However, the basic functionality should be OK a that's the most important thing.

A few additions or bugfixes are already implemented. Let me summarize them:

BrainKing smileys are supported. It means that you can use smileys in opinion poll names, descriptions and even answer options. Let's hope that it will be used reasonably and the polls won't become too animated and flashy.
There was a small bug which caused that an optional poll description did not appear at the particular poll page. It is fixed now.
The list of opinion polls at the Fellowship / Polls page has been changed to a table, containing more values - name, deadline, poll creator and number of voters. Yes, it is really voters, not votes, because it is possible to make poll with more than one answer option per user, so a simple sum of all votes would not be relevant to the real number of participating fellowship members. By the way, if your poll shows 0 as the number of voters, it is not a bug, it just means that the counter has not been recalculated yet (since the last poll system update) and it will be automatically fixed when the next vote is submitted.

That should be all, I guess. There are more ideas to implement, sooner or later.

BrainKing system of opinion polls

nospam@example.com (Filip Rachunek) — Mon, 19 May 2008 13:28:00 -0400

Since today, the system of BrainKing Fellowships contains a new feature called Opinion polls and its purpose is exactly as one expects an opinion poll to work. I would like to point out that this functionality is not fully tested yet, so it is more a beta version than a full release. However, unless I have missed or overlooked something, it should work fine, more or less.

Now, in details:

It is a fellowship only feature, so you won't find any opinion polls outside fellowships. Every poll is limited to the particular fellowship scope.
There is a new sub-page at every fellowship page, called Polls (next to Main Page and Waiting Games tabs). It contains a list of all opinion polls created within this fellowship.
Only the Big Boss or Little Boss of the fellowship can create polls.
There are two basic types of polls, which allow to select either just one option (answer) or one or more options. These two possibilities can be distinguished by an usage of radio buttons or checkboxes.
When a poll is created and released, its deadline is displayed next to the poll name at the poll list. Prior to this date and time, all fellowship members can make or change their votes.
When the deadline passes, BrainKing automatically closes the poll and no further votes can be made.
The number next to Polls tab header indicates the number of open polls where you didn't vote yet.

I am sure that there will be some bugfixes and improvements before I call this feature completed and finished. Meanwhile, all Bosses are welcome to test it.

Team BKR changes in match notifications

nospam@example.com (Filip Rachunek) — Wed, 14 May 2008 04:09:00 -0400

This improvement is small but useful for team captains who want to be informed about all aspects related to a team match result, especially the particular BKR change. BrainKing already provides this kind of information for individual games and since today it is available for team matches as well.

The outcome is that when a team match (whether it belongs to a team tournament or not) is completed, team captains are sent a system message with the match result. Besides standard values and information (who is the winner, match table, game type, fellowship links etc.), the message also contains previous and next BKR values for both teams, including links to respective BKR graphs. It should help to analyze the team performance, give an instant access to interesting data, and so on.

Regarding this point, I would like to make team BKRs more visible around the site. If someone has a good idea where they should be displayed too, please leave a comment.

Firefox 3 release date is closer again

nospam@example.com (Filip Rachunek) — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:13:00 -0400

Firefox developers announced that release candidate of the long awaited Firefox 3 web browser was made available for testing:

http://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2008/05/10/firefox-3-code-complete/

"Release candidate" means that all features of this version are already implemented and the final cycle is meant for bugfixing only. If someone wants to install this version and try it with BrainKing, it might be interesting to know the results. Actually, I don't expect too many problems because the previous beta 5 seems to be very stable as well.

Get it here: Nightly builds

By the way, does Microsoft hint that Internet Explorer 6 is doomed at last? That would be great news for all serious web developers who prefer to concentrate on a real programming work instead of applying numerous hacks to make their pages work with buggy and non-standard Internet Explorer 6 too.

Read the full story here: Microsoft warns of IE7 lock-in with XP SP3