Upgrading the system and the templates, should be done by Thursday Friday morning. Things may look funny but comments posted tonight should survive the changes. Should.
Meanwhile, open thread and a few pics from Kasparov's trip to NY and DC this week. First two from his simul at the Harlem Children's Zone and then behind the scenes at the Glenn Beck taping yesterday. (Where, for the first time, people incorrectly thinking I'm his bodyguard worked to my advantage. I need a t-shirt that says, "I'm a writer, shoot him first!") Last is from his signing at Borders, where a girl came in with her parents and her dad's 20-year-old Kasparov chess computer for him to sign. Vintage!
Arrange like a Grandmaster. Getting ready for board one against US girls' champion Medina Parrilla.
With Glenn Beck at the CNN studios in Manhattan. When asked about the US financial crisis and the proposed bailout, Garry replied, "you should make sure you've fixed the hole in the bucket before you put more water into it, especially 700 billion dollars worth of water." Garry's passport was at the consulate for visa renewal so when asked for photo ID at the security check at CNN he had to flash the copy of "How Life Imitates Chess" he'd brought to sign for Beck.
Ah the good old days of computer chess. 16K! Garry guessed that "Kasparov" model was from 1988 or so, certainly long before this fan was born.
About time!
Btw, very sorry to hear about your now permanent tinnitus. I just hope it isn't too much of a mental strain. I think I'd rather lose a limb.
So, any pronostic from Kasparov about the Anand-Kramink match? I'd like to hear what he thinks.
If I understand http://www.chessbase.com/espanola/newsdetail2.asp?id=6395 correctly, he considers Kramnik slight favourite because he is a bit stronger than Anand mentally and the latter doesn't have a long time to recover from Bilbao.
I have one of those computers!
Kasparov says [translated]:
I think that Kramnik is passing through a difficult time. Anand is different. Kramnik may be able to separate these bad results from his coming match with Anand. Anand did very poorly in Bilbao. This could be much more dangerous because he has little recovery time. Psychology has always been more important for Anand. In fact, Anand is psychologically more vulnerable than Kramnik, although they are both vulnerable. In this match I would say Kramnik has a slight advantage, perhaps because Kramnik is a little tougher, more equanimous too. But the match is more or less equal.
Kramnik is psychologically vulnerable?
It's hard to think of anyone less so. Minutes after getting forfeited in Elista, for example, Kramnik appeared at the press conference as calm as a walk in the park.
Look back to London 2000 and compare the "psychological vulnerability" of the guy playing his 8th WCC match with that of the guy playing his first.
The paradox of technology as nostalgia makes this a classic photo. Garry K. seems genuinely amused as he signs the archaic chess computer. The girl senses something special about the moment, but she's not quite sure who the old guy is.
Circa 1988 I had a discussion with a friend of mine, a computer geek who worked at IBM at the time. He was convinced computers would soon be crushing the strongest GMs. I laughed at the idea. Litte did I know...
Well, ed, it's a question of how you define "soon" and "crushing".
And, if I may ask Mig: Why was being considered Garry's bodyguard to your advantage?
I opened the site and just sort of froze. I like it though (I can see all the articles). Thanks.
Thanks, although there is still lots to come both in appearance and features. I just wanted to make sure the database was working under the new template system. Ground-up new 4.21 installation of Movable Type and completely new hand-coded MT 4 templates. Ugh!
I use a tricky javascript anti-spam solution, the CCode plugin-tag combo, that was a little buggy on my old install. (Wouldn't save personal info and caused trouble in the comment preview page.) But it seems okay so far here. I hope so, because the keyword/filter spam solutions are a pain in the butt. And the captcha stuff is also often buggy and a hassle for users. I don't want to require registration for comments either.
However, it will be offering registration soon, which means you can pick an avatar and such. This system also incorporates threaded comment replies, so you can respond to another comment instead of to the post, which can be handy in long threads with many posters. There are a few other plugins and such I'll be fooling around with to add functionality and several templates haven't been customized yet. Again, still making sure the basics are working right now.
It was a bit dramatic switching everything over. I couldn't clone the blog because my server kept timing out when I tried. It choked on the 52,000+ comments (well, haven't we all...). Of course it would time out around 45,000 each time... So I had play a bit of a guessing game recreating the look on a new blog and then copying over all the old templates in a mad rush. Anyone who came by in the middle of that probably saw some strange things!
But it's much, much faster so far, front and back. The only problem I've noticed is an old one, which is sometimes your page doesn't refresh to show your new comment if you use Firefox. It's because the way Firefox caches pages, from what I understand. Trying to see what the best workaround for that is, but at least it's non-lethal. It might lead people to double-post on occasion, so I'll see about it.
I just noticed the "recent comments" on the left side of the homepage include multiple comments from the same entry, which is stupid. I wonder why they changed that from the natural "latest from the most recent x posts" functionality. Sigh. I'm sure that's not hard to configure in the widget template. Going to be lots of little things like that to tweak. Thanks for your patience and suggestions, everyone.
Nice look Mig! I thought we'd converted you to Wordpress. Darn it!
Great pics from Harlem!