ZEROZERO and wekke's Membership Tournament

Can anybody try it please?
http://brainking.com/cz/NewsRSS/news.xml
Of course, replace the "cz" by the language code you use.
It seems to be working fine with Mozilla Thunderbird but I didn't test it with other RSS readers.

Fencer: this is what it says when I click on it....

This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.

and then it shows info listed

Fencer: P.S Im on Mozilla Firefox

Lamby: You are not supposed to click on it but to use this URL in your RSS reader :-)

I get what looks like your programing on both the link and in the address bar

Oh.. what is RSS reader?

With WebTV, I saw a version of the Server News page with all the HTML showing.

Fencer: :oD oh ok, sorry was trying to help but Im not very technically minded, just thought it was a link! :oD

Web-tv.
These are the first two lines that I get when connecting with that link.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="windows-1250"?>
!DOCTYPE rss PUBLIC "-//Netscape Communications//DTD RSS 0

Never mind. Please, only those who know what RSS is and how to use it.

Fencer: I'm using a reader from RSSReader.com and it works for me.

ArtfulDodger: Thank you :-)

BTW, I have Explorer 6 with XP. I am able to display the info into the browser. ;)

RssReader is a program to read RSS and Atom news feeds.
RssReader collect news in the background at user configurable intervals and warn with a little popup in the system tray that there is a new message arrived. You can click the news headline to see a short description of the news and click or open the original news web page in an RssReader browser or default browser window.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format for syndicating news.

Fencer: one can also get an RSS reader plugin for explorer: http://www.pluck.com/

Works great too.

Btw, there is also a small printer icon at the bottom of each page. Clicking on it will create a "printer friendly" version of the page with removed navigation columns. Then you can use the link "back" on the page top to return to a normal mode.

Fencer: I'd like to suggest that the Printer Friendly version of this page didn't have the message box in it. No point to have a message form on paper is there? ;)

Haven't checked the rest of the site yet, but I like the idea...

pauloaguia: Good idea.

Fencer: Another suggestion. On some pages there is some sort of special code that makes some browsers react to it. For instance, in Opera, whenever I visit a page that somehow has some RSS connection, A small blue RSS icon appears on the address bar. If I click on it I immediatelly get the option of subscribing that feed.
I think it has something to do with code like
<link rel="alternate" href="ADDRESS/news.rss" type="application/rss+xml" title="Server news"/>

I think it could be a nice thing to implement here as well, and that code could go on the ServerNews page. At least while there is no reference to the RSS feed anywhere on the site (that I've seen, anyway).

pauloaguia: Have a look at What's New page now.

Fencer:

I don't know if it's the right place to ask, but: How do I use italic fonts here on BrainKing and is there a way to change the size too? or maybe the color?

Use <i>italics</i> to get italics and <b>bold</b> to get bold.
You can nest the two <i>it<b>ali</b>cs</i> gives italics

Sorry, I don't know how to get font sizes and colors - the standard html tags are simply converted to text:
Not working:
<span style="font-size: 24px">Big</span>
<font size="24px">Big</font>

playBunny: how about bold italic? And, for the size and color, please tell me how I should write the code and what I want the code to have effect on. For example if I want to type Reza with a font sized 20 and in Red, what should I type?

Thanks so much

reza: You cannot set a font size here. At least not now.

Fencer: How about color and BOLD ITALIC?

reza: As playBunny said, bold italics are acheived by nesting the tags.

Color... let me test: <font color="red">test</font>

BuilderQ and playBunny and Fencer: Thanks for the replies.

who want's to play a game of line4 or froglet with me?

if anyone want's to play backgammon or any varient's of it with me invite me

Saruman: How about grabbing one of the games in the Waiting games area, or creating a few of your own?

You might like to change your profile message too, lol. Glad to see you're back into a bg frame of mind. ;-)

It seems like I am running into a lot of profiles lately where their first login to the site is later than when their membership started. (For example, someone's rook membership would be June 1, 2005 to December 1, 2005. Then lower down it says their first login was July 11, 2005.) How can this be? I have run in to at least 4 or 5 over the last couple weeks.

rod03801: Who is it? I looked for "someone", but found only "someonespecial" who is a pawn.

LOL.. "someone" was just a general term. I didn't want to necessarily mention names. But Saruman below is an example.

rod03801: do you think it could be from a change in a nic?

I was thinking that. But, it shouldn't change the "First login" date, in my mind.

If it IS that, then I'm thinking it's probably a bug, because I don't recall that happening in the past, when someone changed their nic.

Hm...that's intersting. The only explanation that comes to my mind right now is that Fencer set the start of the membership to June instead of July since the Czech names of these months are very similar (červen, červenec).

maybe one of the recent changes counts the first log in on the new nic!

tazman7474: I doubt that...look at Chuck's profile for instance:
http://brainking.com/cz/Profile?u=5745
He's definitely changed his nick since logging in for the first time.

i was thinking that if it was a recent change, it might only work on recent nic changes.

Right, but it shouldn't! I like to see how long someone has been playing on brainking. And I am also proud that I have been here for quite a while, and don't want that to change if I ever decide to change my nic.

i can see you're point! i was only tossing out ideas that could explain what you were seeing. maybe it is just a bug! got any computer-compatable ani-biotics? lol

OK, I'll change my nick now. Let's see what will happen.

It might take a while. I think all nic changes are approved by Fencer now. Though maybe that is just the profile part..

Yes, we'll have to wait for Fencer to approve it. I changed it to Pedro Martínezz.

Every now and then someone on one of the boards has an issue with the backgammon dice. Usually the complaint is that someone who was losing rolled a highly improbable cascade of doubles and won at the very end of the game.

I am not a gammon player, but I have done some research on "randomness". It sounds odd to most people, but randomness is actually a subset of the domain of artificial intelligence and programming, and it is important to have certain processes simulate randomness.

For example, a chess program that uses a transposition table to store positions that are encountered frequently can actually stuff more positions into the same amount of RAM with a better random number generator used to stamp the tokens used as the masks. Better randomness in these "hash tables" can also allow for faster retrieval of the data in these RAM buffers.

Getting back to the dice...

I was doing some more research recently, and I also saw this is someone's profile here on BK:

not playing it for a while due to so many losses of people getting stupid double's at the end of the game and winning everything. My favorite game now is froglet and I'll try any other game but backgammon.

Using different ideas from a few papers I read, there is a way to make everyone on here happy, without having that long cascade of doubles, or other scenarios (maybe lots of 1-2 rolls in a row can also be bad.)

Arrange all of the dice like this:

1-1
1-2
1-3
...
6-4
6-5
6-6

Now
, take a poll among the gammon community. What should be the maximum number of rolls of any particular combination that should be tolerated consecutively?

Say, a 6-6 should not be rolled more than 3 times in a row by one player, but maybe a 3-3 or 4-4 can be rolled more often.

Poll the entire community for every roll.

Next, create millions of "tapes" of thousands of consecutive rolls where all of the consecutive criteria are not exceeded, yet all other dice rolls are, for all intents and purposes, purely random.

Every player at the start of every game gets one of these tapes. No two tapes are every re-used.

When you run low on tapes, crank out more.

I know players object to pre-rolled dice, but the good thing is, you won't ever have someone run 8 straight double 6's on you when you are ahead by a mile, nor will you get snagged with 1-2, 1-2, 1-2, 1-2, when you are almost home.

And, unlike other pre-rolled dice websites, the tapes are destroyed after each use, and never re-used, so the overall result would be "truly random" but with those nasty rolls totally removed.

Grim Reaper: I don't object to pre-rolled dice at all, in fact I'd like it. I'd like to be able to decline a doubling cube and then know what rolls my opponent and I were going to get so that I can sigh with relief or kick myself.


"For example, a chess program that uses a transposition table to store positions that are encountered frequently can actually stuff more positions into the same amount of RAM with a better random number generator used to stamp the tokens used as the masks. Better randomness in these "hash tables" can also allow for faster retrieval of the data in these RAM buffers."

Congratulations - you've achieved a very high technobabble score! .. Getting back to the dice... ;-)


I don't think "Mr Profile"'s objection is to runs of doubles as such. I'd say it probably refers to cases where a couple of doubles during the bearoff (consecutive or not) has made a losing difference. Perhaps he doesn't appreciate that doubles occur, on average, once in every six rolls.

The issue of doubles, and lucky dice in general, is more a function of the mind than of the dice themselves. Fix the rolls in all sorts of ways and there will still be an ever growing selection of people making assertions about their "The dice are fixed" perceptions, not realising that they are cataloging and remembering the rolls inaccurately. Four "consecutive" double sixes, for instance, may have actually occurred with a 3-4 rolled in the middle. The cry that goes up whenever someone complains about unfair dice is always "Don't just say it, show us the record". And rightly so.


It's an interesting idea, tampering with the random sequence. I've never seen 5 consecutive double-sixes, let alone 8, so I wouldn't care about removing those sort of patterns. What I'd be more interested in is not being stuck on the bar when there's an open point. Nine rolls on the trot and I can't get one of the 11/36 rolls that will let me in? That's beyond belief! But it "happens regularly" (), so let's fix that one please.

rod03801: Nick changed, my profile still says "First login: 23. July 2003, 02:09:52"
Changing back...

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