GilaChess Blog

The face of the leader

GilaChess — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 08:18:13 +0000

A perfect 6 out of 6 !! Suhairi Hussein is leading the Stonemaster Amateur at the moment.

Should have known from his fierce demeanor before the tournament started was a sign

Two more rounds to go. Can Suhairi continue his perfect form?

Another loss

GilaChess — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 07:31:42 +0000

Relief. With another loss my chances for prizes is virtually nil. Now I can play for fun.

Have not seen who is the leader is but Sahir Sarifdin has 4/5. Yat 3/5.

A total of 108 players are taking part in this tournament.

Having a tough time at Amateur tourney

GilaChess — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 06:33:03 +0000

Things certainly isn’t not easy in this amatuer After 4 rounds I only have 2 points. The other bloggers like Yat Guo Jie (seeded first) is alo at 2/4. Firey Rook is at 1.5/4.

However it’s certainly exciting with the time control of 20 minutes where many of the games resemble blitz rather than rapid towards the end. I know many of my games there were time scrambles.

Stonemaster Amature: Before the first round

GilaChess — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 04:32:26 +0000

Arrived just before 9am to find Encik Suhairi in a fierce mood in a warm up game.

The playing hall at Pusat Kesukanan Cochrane, Cheras.

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Chess clocks, pieces, chess bags and other chess equipment being sold here too.

Arbiter busy re-checking and confirming the large number of players.

Old and young are playing. Age is no barrier.

Free water (with ice) to keep participan’t’s rehydrated and cool. A good idea.

Musical interlude

GilaChess — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 20:34:46 +0000

Got this email alert when the twins posted a new song on Youtube.
Condolences to Janice and Sonia on their grandmother’s passing.

Looking for more tin cans

GilaChess — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 18:18:57 +0000

I don’t earn much from blogging and chess. Most of my income are supplemented from ad-hoc website projects. I have often thought that if my chess was the same level as my programming I’d be a Grandmaster . However, I’m not really proud of my skills as friends my age have graduated from programming to become project managers or bosses of their own business. I’m still a lowly programmer. No business or company to call my own. To make matters worse, my former programming students are earning more than me. The good news is that I’ve connected with some old friends and students and through them I hope to find more similiar ad-hoc programming projects like the one I just finished.

I’ll still maintain my chess blogs but will not be as active as before. Like I’ve said before, with so many active chess blogs today, less one GilaChess blog will hardly make a difference. Tomorrow, I’m looking forward to play in the Stonemaster Amature. You can expect some live updates on that even on this blog.

Tin cans deployed

GilaChess — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 01:30:18 +0000

Yeah that’s the fancy word they use to copy my program onto their computers. ‘Deployed’.

Finished my ‘tin can’ programs and they are now installed in one of the computers in this network room. The room is freezing with air-con being cranked up high. It’s like this 24/7. Their air-con bills must be through the sky . There is even holes on the floor where air con air is being blown from below. That’s to make sure that the computers never overheat and important programs are always kept running.

It took the better half of the day testing the program to see if my program allowed the different programs to talk to each other. They didn’t tell me that my program was supposed to work with more than 2 applications.

I am happy as at the end of the day, despite having to spend a few hours in the cold server room tweaking my code, everything was fixed and is working fine.

Now this blog can get back to chess.

Tin Can phones

GilaChess — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 03:01:48 +0000

I recently got a funny programming project request that deals with connecting 2 computers for data transfer over a secure network connection. The program has to be written in PHP. It is strange because by today’s standard there are ready made hardware and software solutions for that particular task. In essence it’s like connecting two rooms with a telephone line. Easily done and you can even pay a contractor for that. However, the client requires a custom solution which means building the connecting programs from ground up. The result is analogous to using 2 tin can phones to communicate between two rooms. Primitive but workable.

I’ve taken up the job as the pay is equivalent to a month’s salary for me (with advance payment on acceptance). For 2-3 days work, that’s good pay. Also, easy ad-hoc programming projects like these are rare. I am also very lucky the project has been passed around to others for around 6 months but no one could complete it. I am confident of finishing it as the solution is technical but simple. Something like checkmating with Knight and Bishop.

I have to sacrifice though. I’ll have to give a miss to the Cheras Challengers (FIDE rated) tourney starting tomorrow. Was looking forward to that.

This blog is multilingual

GilaChess — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 02:14:06 +0000

Chess is a universal game understood by different cultures and races. Unfortunately chess blogs aren’t. English is common but there are other languages too. I found a new plugin that translates the blog into 48 different languages. Of course the translations are less than perfect but it gets the gist of the blog post across (most of the time ).

In Malay:-

In Chinese:-

You can access the translation tools at the sidebar (look for the group of flags)

Pictures from KL Festival Rapid 2010

GilaChess — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:55:31 +0000