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Congratulations Fergus. Your technical mastery is unmatched and I hope to keep contributing, especially new games just starting up again as I used to decade ago with more Reference than games.
H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, Dec 3, 2015 06:37 AM EST:@Fergus: Interesting monolog about abiogenesis on your blog, by the way. Do you think it would be possible to substantiate these ideas by computer simulation on a model system, which randomly moves around particles that interact chemically and physically in a way somewhat similar to nucleotides? This is something that is still on my to-do list for interesting problems to work on. (Sorry for being so off-topic for a Chess forum...)
The general idea of self-replicators coming into existence has been illustrated with the cellular automata program Life. So what you want to do might be feasible, but I don't have the expertise in chemistry, physics, or nucleotides to weigh in any further than that. What I can say is that the evolution of life was a very long process that took much longer than a human lifetime and happened in an area much larger than a computer. So, to get results with a computer simulation, you would have to accelerate it or cut corners. But if it interests you, go ahead and do it. Maybe you'll get some interesting results.
chessvariants.com and play.chessvariants.com are now pointing to the ifastnet.com servers in England instead of the hostmonster servers the .org domains are still on. Continue using the .org domains while I fix up the site on the .com end.
I uploaded the latest version of this site to chessvariants.com, and it undid all the changes I previously made in fixing it up. So, I can't fix it up again and then update it with an even later version. The transfer of files has been made, and now it is time to fix it up to work right. After that, I may update the databases and copy over the most recent Game Courier files. But I will not be updating the whole site again. If you want to update particular files, it would be best to hold off on that until I complete the transfer of both domains to the new servers.
Right now, over at chessvariants.com, PHP files are giving 500 errors. This started happening after I uploaded the latest versions of the pages from this site. I don't recall if I had this problem earlier and what I did about it. Reuploading the files I previously modified, .htaccess and index.php, did't get rid of the 500 error. Since I have to go do some other things for a while, I'm mentioning this in case someone has some ideas.
In setting up chessvariants.com, I have run into some snags, for which I have submitted tickets with support. One is that some PHP pages are giving 500 errors while others aren't, and one is that #include virtual is failing to include the headers and footers on HTML pages in the play.chessvariants.com subdomain.
Ben Reiniger wrote on Tue, Dec 8, 2015 08:47 PM EST:Just modified the script to escape inside the subject name. I also did the escaping to fix a problem with member game submission scripts; do any itemid's have apostrophes? If not, I would prefer to disallow that rather than escape them.
I searched the Comment table for ItemIDs with an apostrophe, and I found some. I think these all predate my addition of the Subject field. When you enter a subject, it now uses a unique id for the ItemID. In the Item table, none of the ItemIDs have any apostrophes.
Also, nothing in the MemberSubmissions table has an apostrophe in the ItemID.
New ItemIDs should probably be restricted to low ASCII alphanumerics and safe punctuation, or else we might have to rewrite a lot of code. So it's best to not allow apostrophes or quotation marks in new ItemIDs.
Are we ready to point the chessvariants.org domain to the new host? Or do any editors need more time with it?
Ben Reiniger wrote on Wed, Dec 9, 2015 10:03 PM EST:I want to grab the last database entries from .org and put them in the .com database, but I am busy today.
Ben Reiniger wrote on Thu, Dec 10, 2015 04:07 PM EST:I've copied "2 Pronged Chess" and a couple of comments over to the new database. Other than a couple of comments concerning our move, I think this is all that was lost.
Most things seem to be working fine now. Some editor functions are down, so the review of submissions might take a little while. Let us know of any other bugs you encounter! (I still would like to address Muller's concerns over escaped characters like & and < and also linebreaks, but I need to find a way that won't break any old materials. After all that is settled, I hope to spend some of my winter break working on additional features including the nicer text entry systems discussed earlier.)
I have changed the servers for chessvariants.org to point to the new location. This will take a few days to fully take effect.
Ben Reiniger wrote on Tue, Dec 15, 2015 08:14 PM EST:<p>I think I now have all comments working as they should. Soon(ish) I will work on member submitted pages.</p>
<p><b> test&test </b></p>
<p><b> test </b></p>
<p>test ' test " test</p>
Speaking of member submitted pages, I added a few guidelines to membersubmission2.php today. So be sure to download the latest update before working on it.
Ben Reiniger wrote on Wed, Dec 16, 2015 12:59 AM EST:I think editing user submissions should now work better w.r.t. escaped characters.
H. G. Muller wrote on Wed, Dec 16, 2015 03:48 AM EST:Indeed, I can confirm that it does.
I can now edit my Interactive-Diagrams submission without any ill effects.
You cannot imagine how much of a relief that is!
Thank you.
<p>
Now that you are working on the submission script,
could you also implement the [diagram] [/diagram] tags for including an interactive diagram in non-HTML member submissions?
I can then make an extra button in the design wizard next to the one that at the end says "Create HTML",
for creating the text that should go into non-HTML submissions.
The only difference would be that the leading three lines of the HTML code,
which are the link to the script and the div tags for containing the diagram and for having the text wrap around it, would be replaced by [diagram],
and the trailing line with the /div tags would be replaced by [/diagram].
<p>
So the submission script would have to make the reverse substitution.
(Although in non-HTML submissions it would probably be best to not have the text wrap around it, and leave out the corresponding div tag pair.)
So [diagram] ->
<br>
<pre>
<script type="text/javascript" src="../membergraphics/betza.gif"></script>
<div id="diagram">
</pre>
<br>
and [/diagram] ->
<br>
<pre>
</div>
</pre>
<p>
Also note that the diagram generator currently does use by default my own piece images that I uploaded with the submission, rather than alfaerie (as the description claims). This because there still is no way to get a listing of the content of the alfaerie (and other chessvariants.org graphics) directory, due to the index.html it contains.
For my own uploaded graphics (to member.graphics/MSinteractibedia) this problem does not exist,
so the wizard's 'Pick' button does work on that one.
<p>
To make the wizard fully functional for alphaerie and such,
it would be nice if you could supply a server-side script that would allow one to request the directory listing,
in a format similar to wat you would see if there is no index.html in the directory.
H. G. Muller wrote on Wed, Dec 16, 2015 04:00 AM EST:On a more general note, I noticed that one thing has changed in the submission process after the move:
<p>
After I hit the 'Preview' button, when I am not happy with the result,
and go back to the text-entry page,
I lose all text I had entered there.
<p>
This is extremely annoying for people who are used to the old system,
and rely on the text still to be there...
Ben Reiniger wrote on Wed, Dec 16, 2015 11:41 AM EST:The [diagram] scripts are probably easy to insert, but I am preparing for holiday travel, so I don't know when I'll get around to it. I also noticed the browser's back button losing text from comments. I don't know what mechanic ordinarily preserves the text entered, so I don't know how to accomplish it. (Again, when I have some more spare time I could look into it.) I could provide a back button in our script that would return you to the editing page and repopulate the textarea with the text in the php variable, but the browser's back button would be much nicer.
H. G. Muller wrote on Wed, Dec 16, 2015 12:12 PM EST:Why is it needed to refuse HTML tags in a non-HTML submission anyway? As far as I could see, the only difference between HTML and non-HTML submission is that in the latter case the submission script surrounds each section with <pre> tag pairs. I don't think that would not prevent the <div id="diagram"> to work.
<p>
It is just that the submission script would refuse the submission if it detects any tags in there, and the HTML checkbox is unticked. So to insert the diagram as HTML forces you to tick it. But then you lose all formatting (empty lines and line braks), and are forced to put <p> and <br> tags everywhere to get it back, which most people would not know how to do.
<p>
It would be much easier if you can use HTML tags always. A warning that the text contains HTML tags while the checkbox was unticked can still be given, but I see little harm in allowing people to force submission anyway.
Both domains are now pointing to this site, and you can no longer ftp to the old site. Each domain is handled as an add-on domain pointing to the same location, and either one works without redirecting to the other.
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David Howe has made me the new custodian of this website. One of the first things I will be doing as the new site owner is moving the website from hostmonster.com to ifastnet.com, where I've already paid for web hosting for my blog. I have already changed the servers for chessvariants.com. Initially, once the change has propagated through the internet, I expect that chessvariants.com will point to my blog, fortheloveofwisdom.net. Once I see that it does, I will go into my cpanel and direct the domain to the section where I have already uploaded a copy of this website. I will make sure it is working as the .com domain before I transfer over the .org domain, and when it is working, I'll fix up URLs on the .org end to go to .com so that I can minimize downtime or lost data due to the transfer.