October 2008 – Simon Lyall's Blog

Newspaper Links

Some links from the world on online newspapers.

The Christian Science Monitor today announced that it was going to stop publishing a daily print edition, switch to a weekly print edition and expand it’s online edition. I’ve been following a bunch of the the Monitor’s RSS feeds for a few years now and I find it’s independent voice ( it doesn’t tend to use wire feeds) interesting. See also the New York Times story on the news.

Journerdism has “10 ridiculously cheap, relatively easy, small steps you can take to change an old school newsroom culture to be more forward thinking and web friendly” . I’ve added Number ten to my todo list.

and Xark has 10 reasons why newspapers won’t reinvent news .

Nothing much close to home although I did see Keith Locke campaining on Saturday and took a couple of photos of him for Wikipedia. I mentioned that it’s a shame that the new Green’s Website has a default ( meaing “all rights reserved” ) copyright on it unlike the old one which allowed photos of MPs and other stuff to be used. I mailed their webmaster a few weeks ago but nothign back, maybe I’ll try again in a few weeks when things calm down after the election.

Merv Morrison 2008 – Day 1

Over Labour Weekend I was in the Merv Morrison Chess Tournament at my local club, The Auckland Chess Centre. I was in the under 1700 rating division. I thought I’d post a little about it. It also gives me the excuse to test the Chess by Blog plugin for wordpress.

The Tournament was 6 rounds over 4 days ( 1 game Friday evening at 18:30, then 2 games at 09:30 and 16:00 on Saturday and Sunday plus one game at 09:30 on Monday) with 90 minutes for each player plus an additional 1 minute added for each move.

There were two divisions, a over-1700 ( NZCF rating points ) with 11 players and an under-1700 with 21 players.

The New Zealand ratings are due our at the start of November so I was hoping for a good result to push up my rating a little. I’m currently at 1261 by I’m probably playing closer to 1400.

My first game was against Bella Qian, who has a 650 rating against my 1260 rating, which means I should beat her 90-something percent of the time. However I wasn’t being careful ( silly really considering the fairly long time control ) and completely blew the game. You can follow the game below and my comments below.

[Event “Merv Morrison 2008, under 1700”]
[Site “Auckland Chess Centre”]
[Date “2008-10-24”]
[Round “1”]
[White “Bella Qian”]
[WhiteElo “646”]
[Black “Simon Lyall”]
[BlackElo “1261”]
[Result “1-0”]
[JsCom “startply 0”]

1. e4 e5
2. Nf3 Nc6
3. Bc4 Bc5
4. Nc3 Nf6
5. d3 O-O
6. Bg5 d6
{ I probably should have played Be7 here to prevent the bad pawn structure after Bxf6 and gxf6 }
7. h3 a6
{ Na5 was a better way of attacking the Bishop on c4 }
8. Nd5 b5
9. Bb3 Nd4
{ This is a bad idea, I should be swapping this Knight for the Bishop , not White’s inactive Knight }
10. Nxd4 Bxd4
11. Nxf6+
11. … gxf6
12. Bh6 Re8
{ I’m down but 12 … Bxb2 13 … Bc3+ at least gets a pawn and forces White’s King to move }
13. c3 Bb6
14. Qh5
14. … Be6
{ This move loses the game, The rest is a force mate by white }
15. Bxe6 Kh8
16. Qxf7 Rg8
17. Bf5 Rg6
18. Bxg6 Qg8
19. Qxf6+
{ and I resign, Mate next move }
1-0

Split RSS feeds

In the past this blog has been mostly a tech orientated one with around 2/3s of the posts I make being about computers and the Internet. With the new software I’ve decided to split things a little so I can post on some other subjects. WordPress makes it fairly easy to provide alternative feeds on a per-category basis so I’ve split things as follows:

Tech is anything Computer or Internet related, benchmark here is stuff that I think people on somewhere like planet.linux.org.au might be interested in. ( I’ve asked the maintainers of that planet to switch their feed to this)
Chess is chess related stuff
Misc is general stuff not in the above two categories like what I did last week, posts on random junk etc, the sort of stuff random family and stalkers might be interested in.
Everything just covers every post andis what the old RSS feeds redirects to.

Posts ( like this one ) that cover multiple topics will be posted to multiple feeds. But I’ll guess I see how things go.

Blog Moved to WordPress

I’ve just moved this blog’s software from nanoblogger to wordpress.

Things appear to be mostly working but I’ve got a bit of tweaking to do, plugins to add, tags and categories to create etc. However old article links mostly work.

Also as covered in techcrunch bloglines appears to be having serious problems with at least 10% of feeds completely broken and other unreliable. So if you are using bloglines you probably want to seriously consider moving to google reader or some other alternative.