North Island Champs – Easter 2009 – pt2

See the previous post for background and first few games.

One thing I noticed about central Wellington is that nowhere at all does a show sell any sort of can or bottle of soft-drink for less than $2.50 , I suspect it’s some sort of cartel of shopkeepers agreeing not to compete on the price. Anyway back to the chess..

Game 5 – White vs Lawrence Farrington ( 1603 ) – French – advance variation

Looking at this later I was probably a bit better off during the game than I thought I was at the time. I got a little tied up on the Queen side and black play c4, Bd7 and threat of Nb3. I spent a bit of time shuffling around pieces to deal with that and in the meantime black attacked on the Kingside. After some swaps of material he tried a king side rook attack but after a moved my king over and we swapped down to a King, Rook and 7 pawns each we agreed on a draw since his king side attack was stuck. However looking at it in the computer it looks like I could have started a Quuenside push which would have been very hard to stop. Still I was happy with the result at the time especially against a stronger player.

Game 6 – White vs Simon Ward ( 1717 ) – Sicilian Alapin with 2 ..d5

This was one of the first times I’ve played this opening in a competitive game and I managed to follow the right moves until a deviated on move eight. I was fairly even after a few swaps ( 2R+B+N+6P each ) but then wasted some time trying a king side attack with a rook along the 5th rank. There was then a bit of heavy manoeuvring in the centre with my opponent getting ahead and me into trouble. before things swung a bit my way and things were probably a draw with scatted pawns and a minor piece each. However I looked at my clock and it had run out ( either I forgot to press it or it hadn’t registered the press) and I had lost. I was pretty disappointed since I almost certainly had a draw against a higher rated opponent.

That night ( Easter Sunday) we went to a little middle-eastern sort of place. Nice enough but a bit short of menu options due to the weekend. We also had a coffee and cake afterwards.

Game 7 was a 1 point bye for me which put me on 3 points ( 2 draws, 1 win , 1 bye and 3 losses )

Game 8 – Black against Bill Forster ( 1953 ) – Petrov 3 Nights

My opponent played a weak move in the opening but I didn’t really take advantage of it and things were fairly even until I got a pawn up around move 13 and then picked up another fending off a queenside attack although I missed a move at the end which would have left me another pawn better. After a few swaps we each had 3 pawns on the king side plus a rook and I had a extra “b” pawn. However I blundered and let my opponent take a couple of my pawns for nothing. I was pretty lost when my opponent totally blundered and gave me a rook for nothing! and then resigned a few moves later.

So overall in my 7 actually games I got 3 points against an average strength of 1788 and played to a rating of 1731 or 457 points above my actual rating. I definitely had a bit of luck in the last game though. My 4 points for the tournament but me in the middle of the field at 14-equal and half a point behind the “C grade” winners.

Overall I was fairly happen with my tournament. I still have lots of room to improve in several aspects of my game but being able to play okay games against 1600-1900 players shows that getting to that sort of rating is not beyond my grasp.

As far as the tournament itself I liked the venue but can’t say I was too impressed with the organisation at times. The full official results still don’t appear to be up but I did a little post to the Auckland Chess Centre website summarising the results of the ACC players.

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North Island Champs – Easter 2009

Over Easter 2009 I went to the North island Chess Championship in Wellington. The event was 8 games over 4 days ( Friday to Monday ) and a single Swiss draw of 31 players. The field was fairly strong with the top 7 players in the field being in the top 20 in New Zealand. I was ranked down the bottom at 28th on a 1274 rating.

I took Thursday off and flew down first thing with my partner. During Thursday we wandered around Wellington ( Checking the buses to the venue ) went to some shops and went to the Terracotta Warriors of Qin which was pretty good. That evening I went to Wellington Thursday Night Curry.

On Friday the games started. Things were a little disorganised ( which the Wellington players joked about ) but we eventually got goine. Games were at 9:30am and 2:30pm each day.

Game 1. Black vs Ross Jackson ( 1972 ) – Exchange Slav

I was fairly equal for most of the game and eventually got an endgame where material was even but I was much better and was winning. However I wasn’t sure how to win so I offered my opponent a draw which he accepted.

Game 2 White vs Nathan Goodhue ( 1897 ) – Double fianchetto opening by Black

The unusual opening by black confused me quite a bit and I was in a bit of trouble. The game was fairly even but after we swapped off most of the pieces I played the endgame badly and ended up losing.

Unfortunately my girlfriend picked up a sour throat / cough in Wellington so was stuck in bed most of the weekend, we went to one of the Malaysian places near Cuba St for dinner though. It was fairly nice.

Game 3 Black vs Han Gao ( 1268 ) – Petrov’s Defence – Cochran’s Gambit

I got into a bit of trouble at the start. Cochran’s Gambit gave my opponent a pretty good attack and since I didn’t defend properly I was even but very low on time. However it turned out my clock was setup wrong ( see organisation problems above ) so I got an extra 15 minutes added to my time. I was able to win an endgame with bishop and 5 pawns vs 8 and 8 pawns.

Game 4 Black vs Quentin Johnson ( 2109 ) – Slav

I made a mistake in the opening which put be on the back foot pretty quickly. I made lots of little mistakes after that and my opponent’s position just got better and better until my position was completely lost and I resigned

That night went out to Indian Malaysian with some friends followed by some tea from and Asian tea place ( which is strangely much less asian than the ones in Wellington). [ to be continued ]

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A week of Twitter

So about about a week ago I signed up a twitter account and started micro-blogging . I’m on 89 updates which is around a dozen a day although this week things are busy with the Blackout Campaign against Section 92a of the new Copyright Act so in a typical week their will probably be less (especially when the novelty wears off). If possible I’m trying to make tweets that might be of interest to other people  especially doing things like links to good articles which in the past I sometimes posted to the main blog.

Following people is interesting, for now I just look at the last page that somebody has posted and if it looks interesting (on average) I’ll add them. So I’m following around 50 feed so far and I’ll see how it goes, but since on average the impact of each feed is less than a RSS feed ( ie I’ll usually not scroll back to stuff I missed overnight) I’m not overwhelmed yet.

So far I am using the web interface a bit (which is good for looking at people, their followers and history), twitux at home and twitterfox at work. If you go to my actually blog website you’ll see I’ve added a RSS feed of my tweets (it only updates every hour or so) and I added the Twitme wordpress plug so every time I post to my blog I tweet is sent.

Earlier today I was inspired by nzpolice feeds that Sam Sargeant created and decided to create my own. So I’ve made the nz_quake twitter bot which updates whenever a new Earthquake is reported on the geonet website. The actual bot is just a shell script that checks every few minutes to see if the status page has changed and if it points to a new earthquake (they have unique IDs) it’ll just use curl to connect to twitter’s simple web interface.

It took me around an hour of playing around to implement in around 35 lines of shell script. I’ll have to wait a few days to see how well it works since the webpage only reports the earthquakes that people might have felt rather than every tiny little one.

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Strike 1 against APRA

The big thing this week has been the protest against the new section 92(a) of the New Zealand Copyright Act which will cut off the Internet for people or organisations repeatedly accessed of copyright violations. The new law says that after repeated infringement complaints (4 strikes is the current proposal in the code of practice) ISPs will have to close the account of their customers.

So I thought I’d have a look around the website of APRA (The Australasian Performing Right Association) when I came across this page which is a cut-and-paste of a recent New Zealand Herald story. After I started poking around it looks like the story has mostly been removed (which indicates APRA did not have permission to host it) but there is a google cache of it here (mirrored below) and the original page still has a photo from the Herald story.

So it appears while APRA is happy to on one hand to write press releases about about how “Those working in the creative industries need the protection from theft of their work” but on the other hand it is quite happy to rip off material from websites when it thinks they might be of interest to it’s members.

Of course the Law hasn’t come in force yet so APRA has managed to avoid the threat of having it’s Internet cut off and instead just gets a bitchslap from the Herald but it is certainly an interesting combination of hypocrisy, stupidity and arrogance on their part (they can’t claim ignorance I’m afraid).

APRA ripping of the NZ Herald
APRA vs NZH. Click for full size image
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MIT Waitangi Rapid – 7 Feb 2009

As part of my chess goal for 2009 I’m am working on entering as many tournaments as possible. My first one was a 6 round 25+5 at The Manukau Institute of Technology on the Saturday after Waitangi Day. The venue is close to the Otara Markets so my partner dropped me off and went shopping and I caught a rid back into town afterwards.

The tournament was divided into 4 grades ( A-C plus a Junior under 14 years and under 1300 rating ) with  97 entries fairly evenly divided into each. In the previous tournament I went into C grade ( 1400 and below ) but I decided to go up a grade into the 1400-1700 grade ( my rating is 1314 but I’m a little underrated) since I would get better games, have a better chance to increase my rating and also be upstairs with the “adults” rather than downstairs in the same room as the noisy juniors (and their parents).

Since the time control is fairly short and I forgot to bring a pen I only recorded part of two of my games.

  1. I was white against Phillip Logo (1568) , ended up a bit behind and eventually lost
  2. I was Black against William Li (1371) and was going fairly even until he missed a pin at the end of an exchange I I ended up a Bishop ahead.
  3. White against Philip Mukkattu (1298) who is a bit underrated, this was fairly even and I was a pawn up towards the end of the middle game. However after an endgame with a Queen and a bunch of pawns each Phillip captured more of my pawns before forcing a queen swap and won.
  4. Black against Vivian Smith (1582), I played pretty weak here, got myself all cramped up and made weak moves and eventually Vivian ended up a rook ahead and I resigned.
  5. White against Gary Judkins (1409) was interesting, I ended up with an interesting opening and got a little ahead with a good attack on the king side. He then gave me an opening to attack and after I thought about it for something like 15 minutes I did with the e-pawn and then sacked my bishop against h6 for a very strong attack. He got out of the attack but ended up behind in material and eventually I finished him off with only a little time on my clock.
  6. Black against Thomas Gothorp (1296), I was going okay but he made a strong queen side attack which I didn’t defend well against and he got ahead. However he captured in the wrong order so we ended up with a fairly even endgame. However he made a blunder and I got a piece ahead and won after a few close calls.

In both of the last two games I was very short on time, less than 30 seconds on the clock and having to move within 5 seconds ( each move gives me an extra 5 seconds on the clock) in order to prevent it going down. I’ve found however that I can play reasonable well on this sort of time and that often my opponent is demoralised by my fast (and reasonably okay) play. In the case of game 5 I used up a lot of time checking a speculative move that turned out to be good but as a rule I’m still not managing my time well.

Overall I ended up getting 3/6 or 50% and playing to a 1420 or around 100 points over my current ranking and playing okay in every game except the one against Vivian Smith. Still I need a lot more practice to get my rating and ability over the 1700 mark.

The tournament itself was pretty good though, nearly 100 players and nice surroundings makes it a good start to the year and the A-grade especially was quite strong.

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LCA09: Day 5 : Friday plus bonus Saturday writeup.

The keynote this morning was from Simon Phipps from Sun. I thought he was quite good especially since he was in front of an audience that was not 100% friendly. One of the interesting statements he made was pointing out that it was hard for a company to install a free version of Redhat ( say Centos or Fedora ) and then later start getting commercial support for it. As things are right now you would have to reinstall all your servers with RHEL in order for it Redhat to support you. He felt that sooner or later Redhat would have to change their policy in order to allow easy transition for people, although at least one redhat person in the audience either missed his point or completely disagreed with it.

Next I went to a talk from Mathew Wilcox on Solid state drives. It was pretty interesting although a little over my head.

Afterwards I hosted ( to the extent I stood up, wrote notes and pointed at people) a BOF for Miniconf organisers. Around a dozen people showed up including about 3/4s of this year’s miniconfs plus at least one perspective on for next year. We had a good round of discussion and I wrote up a few notes (not really for public sorry , but contact me if you have a special interest) and somehow volunteered to help setup a Miniconf Organiser’s howto document.

After lunch I went to sessions on Power management and usability. Bother excellent and giving me a chance to pick up some information in areas outside of what I normally do.

Then it was a presentation from Terri Irving at Dreamhost, she did some overview stuff about how they do things and then a little bit about how they use their internal “servicectl” tool to provision and run their services but not a lot of technical nitty gritty. She used the second part of her talk to introduce the Ceph distributed file system that one of the Dreamhost people are working on ( which is publicly released) so the talk wasn’t a total loss though.

I had a bit of a headache so I skipped the lightning talks and the wind-up and announcement for next year. As expected it’ll be in Wellington. Generally I think this should work out okay, the extra distance for Australians should be balanced by a good number of locals attending, I did hear some concern about lack of the publication of the bid documents and the fact that the Wellington organisation seems to be a “company led” rather than a “community led” . Also I am not sure if cheap accommodation is going to be available, having the college dorms like in previous years is great, lots of space, security and closeness to the other attendees at a low price. Hopefully Wellington can do something similar.

Anyway I missed all of that and had a snooze till after 7 when I got up and went into the Sandy Bay shops with a few guys. On the way we went via the party but it didn’t seem to be much fun. The drinks were “buy your own” (probably to avoid problems from previous years) and the food was of the sausage roll type ( I heard that Google was unimpressed with the food quality after having dropped a lot of $$$$ towards it).

Ended up going to a nice pizza place with 4-5 other guys and having a really nice pizza at a good cheap price (low $20s per head) . The manager even gave us some shots at the end free ( cool, although I don’t drink so just had a small one).

Next day was the the semi post-conference with the Open Day being the only real official thing happening plus a cheesy sounding “march” from Salamanca place to the Open Day ( at the Casino). I decided to skip these and went to the Salamanca market instead. I was really impressed with the whole thing, 2-300 stalls of mostly high quality with plenty to choose from, since I was flying back to NZ I couldn’t buy much food to take away but I got some nice fudge and ate at a couple of vendor stalls. Couple of galleries by other people here and here.

And apart from an uneventful trip back that was my linux.conf.au for 2009.

Overall I felt the whole event was on par with previous years, I understand they had a few speakers and attendees drop out at the last minute which was a bit unlucky and the extra travel distance probably put some off. I got them impression there were not as many locals as in previous years but I guess Hobart isn’t a big place.

The organisers seemed pretty on the ball most of the time and largely kept in the background compared to previous years. The weather was pretty good (apart from some sprinklings of rain) and not enough to extremes to cause problems. I’ll definitely be back again.

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RHEL 5.3 + HP = kernel panic

So I was upgrading an HP server to the latest Redhat Enterprise Linux 5.3 today. However I rebooted the machine after the kernel upgrade it died with a kernel panic. I wasn’t anticipating this since RHL5.3 has been in beta for months and the kernel is over a month old which should have shaken all the bugs out.

It turns out there is a Redhat Knowledgebase article for it. The problem is that the ProLiant Support Pack (PSP) tools which we used to monitor the hardware ( raid, fans, heat etc) from the OS use binary kernel modules. So when the HP daemons run and load the modules into a different kernel than what they are written for everything dies.

Even worse HP have yet to release updates to PSP which supports the new kernels. Pretty slack and some people in the HP forums are not impressed. So roughly speaking I now have high-price enterprise hardware that won’t run the current version of the most common enterprise Linux distribution unless I disable all the software that lets me talk to the “value added” hardware.

Makes me wonder what I’m paying the extra 50% per box for.

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Computerworld recycling old stories.

I was reading the computerworld.co.nz this morning when a story seems familiar:

Unix-to-Linux migration not always needed: users
Many continue to be well-served by the older OS
By Robert L Mitchell Framingham | Monday, 2 February, 2009

Migrating business applications from high-end Unix-based systems such as Sparc/Solaris to commodity x86/Linux platforms has been a popular idea for the past few years, but not everyone thinks going full-on with Linux is the best solution — at least not yet. [rest]

in fact it appears to be a world for world copy of this article from two months ago:

Unix to Linux migration not always worth it
Some organisations are bucking the trend, thanks to Unix advances
By Robert L Mitchell Framingham Monday, 1 December, 2008

Migrating from high-end Unix-based systems to commodity x86/Linux platforms has been a popular idea for the last few years. But it turns out that not everyone thinks going full-on with Linux is the best solution — at least not yet. [rest]

Looking into it further the original on computerworld.com appears to be recycled as well:

I had a look around but couldn’t see any other examples. I wonder if Bob Mitchell got paid for both of them?

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LCA09: Day 4 : Thursday

I noted that a couple of things were different about the start of each day than in previous years. The first was that the doors to the main area didn’t open until after 9am each morning. So the actual start time was something like 9:20. This was compensated by there being a smaller “pre-game” show than in previous years but the tone of things felt different. I also noticed that the sponsors seemed to be getting a bit less publicity than previously. Usually they hang a couple of sponsors have their banners in the main hall and on the pre-start slide show (along with useful announcements) but this year I didn’t see as much and the slide show seemed to be mostly about the art-project thing.

The keynote today was from Wikimedia person Angela Beesley Starling talking about various wikipedia and wikimedia stuff. I didn’t feel I learn’t a lot but I follow wikipedia a bit already so I am perhaps not a typical person. The speaker was also a little quiet.

Next was a good talk by Paul Wayper about how he contributed to the lmms ( linux multi-media studio) project with general observations and advice for both projects and potential contributors. Very interesting and useful. I liked Paul’s rendition of  the poem “How McDougal Topped the Score“.

I went to a a bit of a legal thing next on how the lawyers have problems grasping what the free software people are coming from. Interesting enough.

After lunch there was a bit of a change in the session I went to and it was split in two, the first half was on problems with the kernel API process, mainly with how new syscalls (and other kernel interfaces) are getting created and pushed out (and once the are live they are set in stone) and then people have second thoughts about if they were the best way to do things. The problem was highlighted ( and Michael Kerrisk mentioned that he would shortly be losing funding so his documenting of the calls would suffer) but solutions were missing.

The second half was a talk by OpenSUSE guy (and former journalist) Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier on publicising your project. Lots of good stuff on press releases, websites and setting priorities with a few good and bad examples.

I skipped the proper sessions next and went to a Puppet BOF. Some advice there for people implementing puppet ( which is a big item on my TODO for work this year).

Last up I went to a talk highlighting some tricks the speaker had learned from others. Interesting enough but I didn’t really pick up many I could use that I didn’t know already.

The Professional Delegates Networking Session ( pdns, not to be confused the powerdns ) was held at the Cascade Brewery’s visitors centre. Pretty nice place with lots of drinks on tap and nice food. I’ve decided I quite like the Cascade soda drinks , especially the raspberry. The main problem was the the weather got a little cold and wet ( actually it was raining) after an hour so almost everybody was crowded inside rather than being spread out. I thus found it a bit noisy and crowded so I perhaps didn’t enjoy it as much, however nothing much you can do about the weather.

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