Twixt Commentator moving again.

Apparently, the guys at DynDNS like money. Unfortunately, I like money too, so I am moving Twixt Commentator to a different free service. I'm letting Richard know separately, but I wanted to announce here just in case anyone has bookmarks or web links, or would have their world shattered by a sudden web url change. Both will work for a couple of weeks, and then it will be DuckDNS only, for the foreseeable future.

Old: http://twixt-commentator.dyndns.org/

New: http://twixt-commentator.duckdns.org/

What free web hosting would you recommend for your fellow cheapskates? DUCKDNS?

Thanks again, Alan, for doing all of this. It is a great service to the twixt community.

Thanks, dushoff. It was all just playing around with Linux and Ruby on Rails. Glad I could provide a useful service in the process.

@mtbikesman, I don't know much about free web hosting. I happened to have a Linux server at home, and someone at work suggested that I could host my Twixt website on it if I used DynDNS, which was probably a good recommendation at the time. DuckDNS does no hosting. These DNS services just provide a workaround for the inconvenient fact that a home internet connection changes its IP address every so often.

My server is really small - about 4x4x1 inches. It's also really quiet, and consumes very little power. I named it Yippy. Here's Yippy:

Hm, too bad the img tag didn't work.

Yippy

Hello Yippy!
And thank you Yippy!

If it were not for Yippy I would probably never win another game.

Comze provides web hosting for free. But for free you never know when it is going away.

It would appear that Yippy is down as of 12:18 7 May 14 California time.
Therefore, I am unable to move since I have no real skill at anything at all.

go here http://twixt-commentator.duckdns.org/ mtbikesman and put your game # in.

Hey, it worked! Thank you Mr. Q

The problem is that Richard has not been responding to my messages. Is he on vacation or something? 17 days advance notice, but the links on Little Golem still point to the old address. I have no control over that.

Just want to thank you again Alan for doing this. I am lost without it (well, more lost).

Yes Alan, and there are also many games for which z developped some analyzer but no link on LG ... :-(

Like Breakthrough.

I am looking at my new best friend YIPPY. I was wondering what is inside it? Obviously no room for a hard disk. Is the storage just on a flash PROM or something like that? Does it have enough memory to run any operating system?

It has an 80GB 2.5-inch hard drive, running Ubuntu 10 Linux. For more details, google "fit pc slim".

you can also click on the OLD LINK to analyze a specific game; it will take you to a dead dyndns page; then go to your address bar and change the dyn to duck; hit ENTER and
(meow)

Thanks Alan for the good work making the analyzer work.

At present though "twixt-commentator.duckdns.org" doesn't work.

regards Flemming

Seems to be back.

For the past 3 or 4 days, Time Warner has been extraordinarily flaky. It's annoying. I hope it gets better soon. Maybe they sense my unwillingness to bribe them.

Hello

If you add this to your "hosts" file it seems like the "dyndns" LINK on LG works:

24.40.140.120 twixt-commentator.dyndns.org

Flemming

PS: c\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Alan, rather than the commentator on Yippy, have you considered putting it on one of the free hosting sites like comze?

Flemming, keep in mind that Time Warner can reassign Alan's IP address on the fly, which is why he uses the dynamic DNS services. So watch out for your hosts entry breaking when that happens.

Yippy must not be feeling well at 15:03 California time.  He is not talking to me.  Now I can't play for I have no skill set at all without Yippy.

Mtbikesman: do you know about Jtwixt?  It's google-able.

Please don't blame Yippy. Yippy is just a poor, cheap, shitty little machine with 100% uptime, while Time Warner Cable is a rich, expensive, big monopoly that manages to be much less reliable than Yippy. The past couple of weeks have been particularly bad. Time Warner is having real technical problems in my area. Even when it is up, every time I measure the bandwidth on speedtest.net, it has been between 1/300th and 1/3rd of what I am paying for. At the moment, just under 1/5th. Ugh, it just died. Now it's back. Ok, slightly better now; just over 1/4th.

Alright... Complaints about technological infrastructure aside... maybe a change of Twixt habits is in order. You should not be so dependent on Commentator.

Take out your smartphone. Open up a timer. Set it for 2 minutes. Go to one of your Twixt games in progress, and start the timer. Find the best Twixt move that you can, using nothing but your mind. No Commentator, no Jtwixt, no physical board, no pencil or pen.  Just your mind. Sit on your hands if you have to. When the 2-minute timer goes off, write down the best move you thought of. Don't actually play it yet. Do the same for all your games. Take a break -- 30 minutes, minimum. Now come back and use Commentator on your games, just like you would have normally. See how many of your 2-minute choices are changed by your Commentator analysis. Measure your change percentage. Your goal is to get your change percentage to go down over time (secondary goal, that is -- winning Twixt games always trumps it, of course). Go.

If you can make smarter 1-move choices, your entire lines in Commentator will get smarter. There is no way that clicking around more in Commentator will compensate for the combinatorial explosion that you face in a game where you typically have more than 500 legal moves on every turn.

Sounds like a harbinger of something ominous...

I tried Alan's suggestion and my change percentage was almost 100%

Sorry Alan, but like a dealer in heroin you have now addicted me to Twixt Commentator and I cannot do a damn thing without it.

I blame Yippy completely .   I absolve myself of all blame.  Gee, I sound like I am from liberal California!

p.s.  I have Verizon FIOS and I always have about 20 mbit/sec all the time.

But you may want to look at comze  for free web hosting

:)

Another way to change your Twixt habits is to use JTwixt

And this is from Alan Hensel:

Ruby script for downloading Little Golem TwixtPP games to JTwixt format Just include the Little Golem game numbers on the command line: ruby getgame.rb (You may also need to download Ruby and JTwixt.)

I wasn't blaming you, mtbikesman. There are some unknown (to me) managers at Time Warner that surely are to blame. Tonight, my bandwidth is still 1/3rd of what I'm paying for... right after a rate increase, too. That was a nice touch. Well, not really nice. Some other kind of touch. Um... anyway...

All I'm saying is, you'll enjoy both Twixt and Twixt Commentator better as you get better at Twixt. And while you might get a little bit better at Twixt just clicking around in Commentator, that only gets you so far. If the 2-minute drill isn't your thing, invent some other way to train yourself up.

JTwixt is a good alternative, but I found it a little too helpful for my tastes. Heck, I even found Commentator too helpful. Building up my ability to see pegs and links that aren't there yet is something I considered very important. I would try to do that even when staring at a board in Commentator. Only when my mental visualization failed me would I start clicking - or, rather, that's what I tried to do. Very often, the temptation to start clicking was too strong.

I looked up comze.com, and it redirects to hostinger.ru. Looks like it's a PHP hosting solution, and if that's all it supports, it would be a lot of work to translate Commentator.

FIOS was supposed to come to my area many years ago. Then they delayed. Then they cancelled their plans. The only game in town is Time Warner Cable.

Alan,

Sorry that comze did not work for you.   I used it for my school grades for some time and then went to webhostpad and got it for only $2.00/month.  And then after paying for four years in advance the school came up with a horrible website that we are all forced to use  so now my money is a total waste.

One more thing.  Why can't I cant out of the italics font?

Don't hold your breath on FIOS.  From the time they dug up the street to lay the fiber until I could really get it was about ten years.

Sob!  Yippy has been down all day.  I tried Alan's suggestion of thinking of my next move all by myself but all I could come up with on my own was W-23 which can't be all that good.

Once more, why can't I get out of italics?

@mtbikesman: Let metry

Yea, Yippy has come back to life.  Good for Yippy, and maybe Alan too.

There's a bug in the forum script, it seems. Seems to carry over the text formatting from the previous post and is difficult to close. Not sure exactly how I did it, but I think I've turned it off.  We'll see when this posts, eh?

I love the new gravitars.  I had no idea Alan was such a good looking stud and  was quite surprised just how young yibyab is (and bratty too)  He looks like Billy Mummy from the old Twilight Zone episode where he terrorizes the town.

And once more we are stuck with italics.

Yippy has become my most frustrating adversary (tongue-in-cheek comment) here at LG as "he" only lets you play when "he" wants to which isn't too much lately. On a more positive note, love the new layout here. Mt, I can't tell exactly because of the image size but do you bike in speedo's:)

I usually bike naked but on that photo I was in blue shorts.  But with my right knee on the upswing it makes them look shorter than they are.  Thus the penalty for having a photo the size of a dime.

I still like Jtwixt, if for no other reason than you can easily resize the board display. (Yes there is the Ctrl + combination for most browsers, but the resolution stays the same, so the pieces and holes are fuzzy.) With that concession, I will try it your way Alan, and not explore a single move of a single variation other than in my head. I'll see if I can climb out of my rating hole that way.

Wow!  Bush is better looking than Alan.  Who would have believed?

David J., What would make you an even better player would be to play blindfolded.  Try that on our game if you please.

Uh- yeah! Yeah that's me for sure. Just ask Alan.

Oh yes. I met David about 8 years ago. He looked just like that, but 8 years younger.

Zippy had been down a whole lot more than he has been up so I installed JTwixt.

Does anyone know how to paste a current game into JTwixt so I don't have to enter each move one at a time?

http://www.littlegolem.net/jsp/forum/topic2.jsp?forum=55&topic=34

The end of italics!

or maybe not

@mtbikesman:

(1) Jtwixt > Misc > Import game records...  (cmd-I)

(2) copy the text game record from the LG page (something like "1. f5 2. swap 3. e12 .....")

(3) paste the text into the Jtwixt import window (replacing the existing explanatory text)

(4) click the "* Import from window *" button.

(5) optionally flip the board and grid labels.

With practice, this takes about 5 seconds.

I forgot to mention: be sure you have the latest version of Jtwixt from here  http://canyon23.net/xyz/jgame_beta/

The only reason someone might not want to import the text as you describe, Ignatius, is because Jtwixt ignores the "swap" move. It is easy to flip the board and flip the grid labels, but there are still three minor potential irritants.

1. Whatever colors you use in Jtwixt to represent black versus white pieces in LG will be reversed.
   
2. The move count in swapped games will differ by one.
   
3. The Jtwixt move list coordinates in swapped games will not be the same as LG, although the coordinate labels on the board will agree with LG as long as you flipped them in addition to flipping the board.
   

Yippy provides a link with every game to download a Jtwixt file which takes care of the swap issue. For example, a game 1.e2 2.swap will be saved as 1.b5 2.b5. It would be nice, if LG itself would include the code for such a link with every game, in addition to the Yippy link. That way, we could use Jtwixt with the greatest of ease even when Yippy is down.