A goban with some tsumego.

Been playing Go. Because like the Lisps, it’s a whole lot of neat shit that stems from a simple base. Enough neat shit that, unlike Chess, humans still dominate vs computers by quite a margin. Playing a computer on anything larger than a 9×9 beginner’s board is pretty much universally considered as conductive only to hurting your playing style. With enough horsepower a top professional can be matched on a 9×9. http://senseis.xmp.net/?Fuego :

Fuego was the first computer program that won an official game of 9×9 Go against a 9-Dan professional player. The game against Zhou Junxun took place at the  Human vs. Computer Go Competition at the Fuzz IEEE 2009 conference. The second game was won by Mr. Zhou.

The usual game is played on a 19×19 board. It holds dan ranks on OGS, and there’s some bots running on clusters holding dan ranks on KGS, but they’re never the highest, and ranks on amateur servers mean a great deal less. They’re only relative to the other players on the given server.

And there’s a somewhat slow but alive Go club in Second Life (http://www.notabene-sl.com/slgc/) which seemed a suitable excuse to check out SL, although for general play I prefer KGS (http://www.gokgs.com/).

There’s sometimes classes in the SL club on sundays. The usual teach had other shit to deal with so I volunteered to try to cover it though I’m usually laggy as hell. KGS works fine, including voice, on a dialup connection that hits 3k/s on a good day. But efficiency is an important concept in Go .

Since all I can really do teaching wise at my level is run newer folk through Go problems and I’m too laggy to keep setting up the board each time for a new one, I made one up with a few possibilities that I could just throw down and work with in case anyone showed. No one did, Chess is far more popular in SL… as it is in most of the west. But then there’s that saying about cockroaches and humans…

Here’s a shot of it in SL. Note that I’m on a netbook, on a slow connection. SL is probably prettier for most folk. And lest there be any confusion, it’s only the pattern of the stones. The virtual board and stones and such you see are SLGC‘s.

Prael's tutoring goban, v1. Click for full size.

And here it is, in SGF format (which suitably starts with the paren):
(
;
FF[1]
GM[1]
SZ[9]
AP[Jago:Version 5.0]
AB[ga][ib][hc][gc][fc][fb][hd][dg][dh][di][cg][bg][ag][ba][bb][bc][bd][ad][gi][fh][gg][hg][hh][ih][ii][db][dc][dd][de][ee]
AW[he][gd][fd][ec][eb][ed][ge][ha][cf][df][eg][eh][ei][bf][af][ef][cb][cc][cd][be][ae][gf][hf][ig][ff][if][id][ea][ce][ca]
C[Prael's tutor board for SLGC, v1.

Besides 4 or 5 30k-20k problems there's a miai, a couple potential ko's, a potential seki, and an underlying lesson: Both players have 30 moves down, but there's no way for black to win with all of these unsettled groups. With GNU Go 3.8:

$gnugo --score aftermath -l tutor.sgf
0 black (X) move B1
1 white (O) move H8
2 black (X) move A8
3 white (O) move F1
4 black (X) move F3
5 white (O) move PASS
6 black (X) move PASS
White wins by 27.5 points

That is: Black saves lower left, White kills upper right, Black saves upper left, the lower right miai is played out, and the middle black chain is already toast.

Resolve the right 2 groups and play F9 for seki.
Move H5 to J7 for a throw-in to a false eye.
Show what happens if black gets J6 first, "There is death in the hane".
Six in the corner can be quickly tweaked to bulky 5, pyramid 4, bent 3, L shapes...
If the upper right is too hairy it can similarly be simplified with black F9.
There's a few common shapes in here. B1 is sufficient for LL group, but LR needs that H2.
There's also a "dog's head" in the UR group, G9,H7,J8. Note the vital point.
Counting problems may be posed: GnuGo gets the order correct. ]
)

Happy new year!

Yeah, it’s a few days late. Oh well.

Havn’t really done shit as far as code lately other than work on reinventing yet another lists library for C to better grok the relation of lisp and implementation, and some playing around with hash tables.

In other news, I’ve got a temp blog running here.

Dude makes vids on Baguazhang, folks write about working with ‘em. I’ve already got gigs of vids and an entire shelf of books on such matter, but what the hell, I won’t turn down basically free shit.

Other than that, life’s a haze of eggnog between shifts at work.

Phone update

Looks like an official over the air update to bring the Eris to 2.2 isn’t going to happen. So I’ve rooted the bitch and installed Ivan’s ROM (http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=652044). It’s kicking some serious ass so far. I’ll have to give the tethering a try this weekend at work.

Springtime

Camera’s not too shabby.

New phone: HTC Eris

And all the apps I give a shit about are free in the android market. Including one for WordPress =). Really digging andirc, connectbot, andftp, compass, and a few others in particular. Sometimes have to fight with the soft keyboards spelling correction but its usually dead on. All in all I’m happy as a baby in a topless bar.

FreeBSD 8.0 on eee 1000HA

I’ve given Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10 a spin on my netbook for a good while now, and while I was mostly happy enough with them, I had to manually add a repo just one to many times, and had it stuff shit in /etc/ waaay too many times. So we’re hopping back to FreeBSD now. Which also now has memstick images available for download; handy.

Alas, some snags. Namely audio, X, and wifi.

Far as audio, echo ‘snd_hda_load=”YES”‘ >> /boot/loader.conf and you’re done.

Moving on… X. FreeBSD 8 doesn’t include X in the base install anymore. I can’t decide if I like this choice or not. On the one hand… it really is just an application, and not one which they author. On the other hand… so are Bind and Sendmail. Anyway we just:
portmaster x11/xorg && X -configure && mv xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/

If you like, enable moused in rc.conf beforehand.
And for whatever reason (possibily because I actually used xorg-minimal and installed the rest of the bits nessesary?) I had to tack this to the beginning of my xorg.conf:
Section “ServerFlags”
Option “AllowEmptyInput” “off”
EndSection

Which leaves wifi. The pain in the fucking ass AR2425. It still doesn’t work automagically, but the solution was:
echo ‘wlans_ath0=”wlan0″‘ >> /etc/rc.conf
and then proceed as usual using wlan0.

I’ve not dicked with the SD card reader or webcam yet, but both have worked in NetBSD and Ubuntu… they’re just USB devices… and I installed from a 4GB SD card, so…

That’s pretty much it. If anyone else hits any of these, I hope this helps.

For ports in general, remember to pass -j2 (or -j4, or whatever) to make when building. If you’re using portmaster, you want to use -m’-j2′. This just tells it to run a couple compilers at a time, otherwise it’ll only use one of the silly ass ‘hyperthreads’, effectively only using 50% CPU. Or recompile the kernel without SMP support and not worry about it; the Atom doesn’t really have enough redundency for SMP on it to make much sense anyway.

For those preferring packages vs. compiling, remember you can add -P or -PP to portmaster or use pkg_add -r, but I generally pass -g to portmaster to let it build packages in case a reinstall or rollback is nessesary.

Just ordered…

A bunch of books off Amazon. Some classics, some geeky stuff, some that are both. When they get here I’ll be happy as a baby in a topless bar.

Phone update.

Their sims aren’t interchangeable. Might be ’cause the old phone was a Cingular, before AT&T bought Cingular. Oh well. If I ever give enough of a shit, I’m sure I could find someone with suitable hardware to unlock it.

On the bright … or totally fucking evil… side, I was bitching last night over txts about the phone’s constantly popping up “The last transaction cost you 0.00″ messages with every send/receive, there being no way to get rid of them, and considering getting it unlocked and switching to Verizon or such in the future. Today it seems to have decided of its own accord to nolonger do that.

So either it quits bugging you if the phone’s actually registered with your own name, they’ve quit that annoyance on unlimited accounts, or one of my txts got flagged to be read somewhere.

Just sayin’. All in all, I’m happy enough with it.

Phone fun.

Got a Samsung A177 (prepaid AT&T) on the way home from work today. Mostly got it just for text/IM/etc…, I’ve already got a different AT&T that I use like hell on nights/weekends, which for various reasons I cannot simply add texting to. If I can, however, I intend to ditch the old phone and just swap the sims in the A177 as needed.

I’ve just put it back together (well, I went to add the battery, and the screws were right there… I had to peek…) and finished activating it so now I’m waiting for the $15 credit it comes with to get added to it, after which I’ll add the $15 card I got as unlim texting is $20.

Once I confirm texting works, I’ll attempt the sim swapping.

PayPal just fucked me.

Been busy the last couple months, working on houses, getting some cash together. Finally did, and got a few books regarding web design. Just made a simple site, it came out quite nicely. Got a PalPal account so they could pay, and they did. Went to add my bank acct and verify it… whoops, “You are currently not allowed to add a bank account because your account access has been limited.”. Everything in PayPal’s help area regarding such, with the steps for fixing it, don’t work. There’s nothing in the “Resolution Center” most of them reference. I just confirmed my cell phone, upgraded it to Premier, and still the same deal.

What. The. Fuck?

Yes, I’ve tried to call them. It’s a bunch of voice prompts, all the options being things already on their site.

Yes, I’ve tried to email them, it says 2-4 days for a reply which will probably be canned anyway.

Update: The resolution seems to have been to upgrade to a business acct. Can’t imagine why… bank acct in my name, I wasn’t planning on switching to a business PayPal acct until I got one as such from my bank. Go figure. Waiting for the deposits to verify the bank acct now. Any more problems and I’m going to just drop PayPal and get a merchant account.

Update: Woke up, checked to see if the two little deposits paypal makes to verify account had been made, and they hadn’t been. Nothing unusual, it can take 3-4 days and I started it on a weekend anyway. Checked paypal acct, and I see this:

We recently reviewed your account, and we need more information about your business to allow us to provide uninterrupted service. Until we can collect this information, your access to sensitive account features will be limited. We would like to restore your access as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Why is my account access limited?

Your account access has been limited for the following reason(s):
Sep. 22, 2008: We have detected suspicious activity regarding the receipt or withdrawal of funds.

Apparently, there were two refunds. Except my one customer swears they didn’t request one, and the 2nd one is… a whole 10 dollars, which was from my self when I set up the acct to make sure I could accept $ with it. I fucking know I didn’t request a refund from my self. Again: What. The. Fuck?

Needless to say, I’m not fucking amused at all. I will attempt to get my fucking money out of this situation, but considering their well known history of this crazy shit, I’m not expecting much. Damned thing is I knew about this going in. It was just the only real way I could accept a payment at the moment. I was so happy, too. Was going to use the cash to get a business license, open a new bank acct for it, get a proper domain and hosting, and buy more books to study, particularly regarding PHP5, as most of my PHP knowledge is from when PHP4 was new. Now I have nothing.

I’ll just have to borrow the cash I need, and work my way from there. Which is precisely what I was trying to avoid having to do. Needless to say, no more of my earnings will be trusted to PayPal.