tasuki’s blog

Actually, I ain’t. I’m more of an agnostic. But it’s a cool quote from Luis Buñuel.

Here, let’s throw a couple random links:

• An atheist at Virginia Tech (if you have no time to read all the links, read just this one)
  
• Douglas Adams: Radical Atheist (look at the responses too)
• Atheism (quite a popular video on youtube)
• A few interesting quotes from Adolf Hitler
• More on Adolf Hitler
  
• The Murder of Larry Hooper
• Atheist’s Wager (most wars are fought because of religion)
• Religion on Wikiquote (if you scroll down, there are links to further related pages)

Flame me.

I tried registering on eBay today. Their help pages say that there are two ways to verify an account — either credit card (I don’t have any) or certain email address. First I tried my gmail account, which obviously didn’t work. The next step was an email on the domain tasuki.org, which I own (it is easily possible to verify that by a whois search).

That didn’t work either, so I decided to contact eBay Live Chat for help:

Vit Brunner	hello
Vit Brunner	I want to register
Marnie B.	I’d be glad to assist you on that!
Vit Brunner	I don’t have a credit card, I have a paypal though
Vit Brunner	and I wonder what kind of email address I have to enter so that it verifies me
Vit Brunner	I tried a gmail address, which didn’t work, then I tried address on my domain that I own, didn’t work either
Vit Brunner	I have a school address, but I’d prefer not to leak the information out
Vit Brunner	(I don’t want my school to have any info about my ebay account, that is)
Marnie B.	I’m sorry to hear of the trouble. Let me see what I can do on my end.
Vit Brunner	could you tell me what kind of email is enough to verify me?
Marnie B.	Thanks for asking. What I can suggest you to use is your work email or paid email address if you have one.
Vit Brunner	well, the email address on my own domain is not enough?
Vit Brunner	I think that is a paid email address
Vit Brunner	and the owner info for that domain is publicly available
Vit Brunner	but it still asked me for credit card information
Vit Brunner	the domain is tasuki.org, if it helps you
Marnie B.	I see. Actually paid email address can be use as an alternative because it may reduce the chance of being asked for a credit card…
Vit Brunner	a whois search shows that tasuki.org is indeed owned by me
Vit Brunner	isn’t that enough to verify me?
Marnie B.	But if you’re still being asked for it, I believe you really have to enter those information. But you can try your school email if you want.
Vit Brunner	how is it decided which email is good enough?
Marnie B.	Honestly I’m not sure because our system is the one who verifies the email address.
Marnie B.	You would only know if you won’t be asked for a credit cared.
Marnie B.	*credit card
Vit Brunner	sigh…
Marnie B.	I appreciate your interest in doing business with us.
Vit Brunner	so I am going to try my various random email addresses… but I think it’s pretty strange that my email address on a domain which I apparently own is not good enough
Vit Brunner	that’s actually about the best verification you can get

The rest of the chat sadly got lost because the chat was ended by Marnie B. which caused the window to close suddenly. Anyway, I think this is enough to see what the conversation looked like. The answers were either rather general or completely off. The typo and its correction is a bit suspicious though — would they really create a bot this sneaky? To be sincere, I am not sure.

I tried it once more and got to talk with Joy D. That was quite tiring, as Joy D obviously didn’t understand my problem with verification very well and kept insisting on me trying a different browser (I use firefox and Joy D said I should try Internet Explorer). This is exactly what bots do — when they don’t know, they switch to a different topic. On the other hand, Joy D seemed a bit too confused to be a bot. So, I really don’t know.

I hope I persuaded you to try eBay Live Chat yourself, please share your experience!

Call me biased.

As much as I love cheese, I hate chess.

Chess is often regarded as “the best board game”. Some say that chess is profound, that it requires more skill to master than other board games, and chess players often act arrogantly (take that, bastards, I can be arrogant too).

What I dislike the most about chess are the completely stupid and artificial rules, where each piece moves differently. It’s a huge mess, not elegant a single bit. Chess players say it adds depth to the game. I say bullshit. If depth means a lot of variations, then go has way more variations then chess.

Strategy (long term planning) is almost nonexistant in chess, it’s all down to how far you can read (Chess is 99 percent tactics. –Teichmann).

Ok, now I’m done with chess, let’s look at some more interesting games:

Go has the most possibilities, but I also find it to be the most beautiful game (Go uses the most elemental materials and concepts – line and circle, wood and stone, black and white – combining them with simple rules to generate subtle strategies and complex tactics that stagger the imagination. –Iwamoto Kaoru). Nuff said.

TwixT and Hex are connecting games. The two players try to connect their sides – one vertically and the other one horizontally (which creates the conflict). Both these games have simple enough rules for a small child to learn yet the tactics and strategy are fairly deep. I am not so sure about Hex, but TwixT is a largely unexplored game. The level of TwixT play on littlegolem (where the world top players play, as it’s almost the only place to play TwixT) has risen quite dramatically during the last two years.

And then there are many other games with simple rules yet profound strategy, and I think that they all deserve way more attention than the omnipresent chess, which suffers from being inelegant with its too complicated rules and which is based solely on one’s reading and involves almost no strategy or long term planning at all.

Yes, I know that this post is not going to convert any chess players, but hell it made me feel better.

I think I should create a category called “rant” in my blog.

I think you also read all those funny stories… Secretary: “I have a problem with Windows.” Support: “What do you have on your monitor?” Secretary: “A flowerpot.”

It’s funny as long as it happens to other people, but I get a lot of similar questions while admining on KGS, and believe me — it’s not funny, it’s just very very tiring.

The name has been changed to protect the guilty. There is a menu called “Rooms” on KGS, and right in this menu, there is a button called “Open Games”:

leebark: I accindently exited out of open games! How do I get back?
tasuki: Rooms > Open games
leebark: what catogory though?
leebark: main?
tasuki: no room list, no category
tasuki: just click on “Rooms”
leebark: I’ve clicked on rooms but it’s not there
leebark: :.[
tasuki: look carefully
tasuki: it's in the rooms menu here
tasuki: not in the room list
leebark: I got it
leebark: thanks
tasuki: great...

He didn't even say hello or hi (I respond very reluctantly to users who ask stupid questions and don't even bother to greet me). He asks me something he could find out by himself, and then fails to follow the directions I give him (he searched in Rooms > Room List > [Various Categories]). I had to repeat it three times for him to get it.

The second one was even worse:

tomoyuki: Please help me, how can I enroll the outcome?
tasuki: go to http://eygml.tasuki.org/
tasuki: log in
tasuki: proceed to the league page
tasuki: find the game in the table, click “sgf”
tasuki: and upload the sgf file of that game
tomoyuki: thank you
[ half an hour of silence ]
tasuki: so will you upload it?
tomoyuki: how can I upload my game?
tomoyuki: from what?
tasuki: the sgf file
tasuki: you can download sgf of a game from kgs by right clicking on it in your gamelist
tomoyuki: It says “The game should have been played between tomoyuki and VincentV but it was played between VincentV and Prodigious. ” What can I do?
tasuki: you should upload the game played between tomoyuki and VincentV, NOT the game between VincentV and Prodigious
tasuki: each user can only upload their own games
[ tomoyuki has logged out without uploading the game ]

I think this requires no further explanation. I could upload the game for him, but am I expected to upload all the 250 games that we are going to play in the league?

I have enough of people complaining that the game uploading procedure is too difficult (it isn’t, it takes one click to choose which game to upload, one click to select the game file, and one click to actually upload it; could it be any easier?). I have enough of people using different KGS nicks than they chose in their profile (which they can edit anytime) and complaining that they can’t upload their game. I have enough of people writing their nickname in ALL CAPS once and in lower case the other day and being surprised (remember kids: Capitalization is the difference between “I had to help my uncle Jack off a horse.” and “I had to help my uncle jack off a horse.” (if you don’t know what the second one means, good for you)). Just choose one capitalization of your nickname/password and stick with it, mmkay?

Simply put: I don’t enjoy providing free tech support for idiots in my free time. I enjoyed creating the EYGML site, I learned something and created something useful. I think I spent few dozens of hours doing that. Now it’s the users’ turn to do some work (the navigation is intuitive for most people, however, the few who don’t find it intuitive should first try it out, or try thinking, before asking me silly questions).

With love,
tasuki

I want to have some real Hex and TwixT boards, so I’ve been playing around with PostScript a bit.

I found Larry Doolittle’s Hex board and started editing it without knowing almost anything about PostScript. The results were – you guessed it – disastrous. PostScript is not really intuitive language (for me, at least). But then I found a great PostScript tutorial, which helped me immensely.

First I edited Larry’s Hex board – I added black outline to two opposite sides (for the sides not to get confused), and scaled and rotated the 13×13 board (which is littlegolem standard, therefore defacto universal standard) so that it’s playable with normal sized go stones and fits on A3 sized paper (I am very happy that it fits). You can download my 13×13 hex board on A3 for use with go stones.

The next thing I needed was a TwixT board. This time I only found a pdf, which was exactly not what I wanted. So, with a lot more help of the PostScript tutorial mentioned earlier, I created a PostScript TwixT board.

I made it to be highly customizable, you can find parameters on lines 10 to 21. You can easily change size of the board (the number of holes), the space between holes, holesize, color of holes, filling of holes, color of the guiding lines (or whatever they are called, you know, those lines that help you choose the right move ), width and color of the border, basic line width, and finally horizontal and vertical offset. I sincerely think all those settings could be quite useful to anyone who wants to print a customized TwixT board.

I agree that the code is not really great (I stay true to the “it was difficult to write, so it should be difficult to read” principle), but it works and I think that’s what counts.

Here is a short example of PostScript language:

1 step mul dup moveto
boardsize 2 div 1 sub step mul bs 2 sub step mul lineto stroke

Which means, rewritten to human language:

move_to(1*step, 1*step);
draw_line_to((boardsize/2 – 1)*step, (bs – 2)*step);

In PostScript, everything is based on LIFO (last in first out) stacks, so when you want to do 3+4, you have to write 3 4 add (3 and 4 are put into the stack and the function “add” takes two values from the top of the stack and returns their sum back on the top).

I could show a lot of other PostScript examples but I think it’s better for you to have a look at the code yourself (it’s heavily uncommented, I didn’t want to take the fun out of it).

KGS was founded in 2000 by William Shubert.

The first Czech on KGS was probably makov (registered on 3.9.2000).

I registered on 2.12.2001, I’m not sure how I got to know KGS, but I think I was told by makov.

I have no idea when I founded “Český pokoj” (the Czech room). It was probably later than in 2001 and definitely earlier than 2004. But all else remains unknown… I am not even sure who were the first people in it. If anyone knows the details, tell me!
I became owner of the rengo room around the end of 2003
The next big thing was summer 2004 – Czech version of CGoban (translated by me). That’s also how I became an admin (actually there was one more reason for me to became an admin – several of my friends were already admins).

I spend a great deal of time chatting and idling on KGS, I have many friends there (most of whom I’ve met in real life), but also many that I only know online.

This must have been a boring post for you (at least it was rather short), but it was very enjoyable for me.