Play online bingo with friends in the UK at Jackpotjoy Bingo.
Sunday, February 25. 2007
A short overview of BrainKing history (part 12)
- June 2005 - it seemed that people really wanted to have BrainKing localized to their native languages because four more full translations appeared in June 2005 - Esperanto, Romanian, Swedish and French. Should I add something? Only that it was far beyond my former expectations.
- July 2005 - there were several scheduled downtimes, mostly due to application server conversions (which could mean almost anything and I guess that we were recalculating BKR histories again because it's nice to have accurate values if the previous attempts were no 100% positive successful ).
- August 2005 - Xiangqi and Shogi were implemented, initially with westernized pieces only, the native ones were added later.
After a week we increased the number of supported games by five - Legan Chess, Knight Relay Chess, PahTum, Hasami Shogi and Great Chess, the last one with a kind permission of Christian Freeling, the game inventor. It was a good feeling to deal with a nice guy who did not need to make problems with licenses, patents and other annoying things because we already had bad experiences with such gothic behavior in the past.
We removed the 2700 limit of BKR maximum because many players reached it and had no motivation to play on, and we also added a rule of removing inactive players (6 months for paying members and 1 month for the rest) from the BKR charts. It was necessary because we had to solve a problem when a user occupied the top positions and stopped playing, so nobody could replace him.
International wire transfer payment option was added. The total removal of Gothic Chess on 1st January 2006 was announced.
Saturday, February 17. 2007
A short overview of BrainKing history (part 11)
- March 2005 - this month started a heated discussion about nationalities, discrimination etc. Why? Because 13 people made an agreement to sponsor the Brain Maharajah tournament which would award a winner with this unique membership level. The only "problem" was that nobody but users from Czech Republic could sign up for this tournament, as the tournament's creator condition. Well, the affair was a little exaggerated. Everyone who wants to sponsor an event with a prize, has the right to define specific conditions, no matter how restrictive they can appear to be. And since the tournament is already over and the prize membership had expired as well, everything is all right.
- April 2005 - 6th April 2005 was marked as the Day of Internationalization because we released the first non-English and non-Czech localization of BrainKing. Thanks to the great work of the translators, BrainKing was fully translated to Portuguese which one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. It was the first step to make our site open and available to non-English speaking people. Yes, I had to rewrite many parts of the source code, in order to make it ready for more than 2 languages, but it was definitely worth this effort and I wish to have BrainKing translated to as many languages as possible.
- May 2005 - the number of discussion boards was reduced by combining the boards of game variants into one, in order to keep the board system better organized and prepared to the launch of new language localizations. Which turned out to be a good idea, because four BrainKing translations were released in this month - German, Slovak, Turkish and Dutch. Way to go!
Thursday, February 15. 2007
A short overview of BrainKing history (part 10)
- December 2004 - we have announced a Christmas Action of a 1 free month to every new subscription (or a renewal), just like in previous years. People like to get Christmas presents. I was also honored by a visit of David Soucek (son of a famous Czech writer), known as Bad Bishop on BrainKing, who came from Vienna (Austria) to meet the BrainKing creators personally.
(actually, he was visiting him mum who lived in Prague as well) And he had told me about an interesting multiplayer game he was used to play with friends on a chat site. After a consultation of the rules and some experiments, the game Run around the Pond was added to BrainKing, getting a good popularity almost instantly. - January 2005 - there was a funny "deja vu" effect caused by a misconfiguration of BrainKing's resource files, so it was using the backup database instead of the live one for several hours. Not a big deal but I learned to check all changes twice before uploading them. And it was another opportunity to improve the BrainKing system of new releases.
Pro Five in Line and Swap Five in Line were added. These two variants were requested by experienced Five in Line players who were bored by the classic version when the starting player can always win. We have also enabled the creation of own Ponds for members with Brain Rook or higher membership level. After two weeks from this announcement, another two new games were implemented - Hyper Backgammon and Fisher Random Chess.
As I can see, there were many news entries in January 2005. The last one was about adding an option to move banner ads to the bottom of pages (for paying members only) and the Server News system improvement, applied on Fellowship News as well. - February 2005 - Due to planned upgrade to a higher version of our database, we decided to improve the password encrypting algorithm (because the former one was no longer supported) and asked users to change their passwords, in order to make this change activated. As usual, many users ignored this appeal, so when their passwords stopped working, they flooded my mailbox with requests of password renewals. Not a big surprise. We are used to this.
Monday, February 12. 2007
A short overview of BrainKing history (part 9)
- September 2004 - since the summer holidays are only in summer, there were no important news in August 2004. But September was a month of real richness, regarding the number of games supported on BrainKing. Let me summarize it - Jarmo, Alquerque, Froglet, Espionage, Jungle, Cylinder Chess, Amazon Chess, Berolina Chess, Anti Froglet, Spider Linetris, Small Espionage and Fast Espionage - that makes 12 new games in one month. This record was not broken so far (although the January 2007 release was very close to it) and simply means that we are never fully satisfied and want to improve our game site continuously.
- October 2004 - we developed a new system of timeout calculation because the former one (a heritage of BrainKing 1.0) was slowing down the site too much. Since this new system required an automatic synchronization process (to show the time left values correctly), it made several users confused. Fortunately, not for a long time. The second improvement of that month was the release of BKR graphs for paying members, after generating the tables of historical values, based on all finished games since October 2002 when BrainKing had been launched.
- November 2004 - there was a major failure of the database server, so we had to move the database itself to the application server and temporarily run everything on only one machine. After a day, everything was back to normal. Although system failures are not too rare and usually not worth mentioning in the history, this one was significant because it was the only event (so far) which helped me to make Liquid write the news entry himself. And I guess that it will not happen again because he seems to prefer to work, instead of talking about the work.
Saturday, February 10. 2007
A short overview of BrainKing history (part 8)
- May 2004 - hey, what about February, March and April? Since the news archive shows no logs during this time range, it was probably fully spent by developing the announced BrainKing 2.0 application. Based on a brand new framework (created by me as well), it was promising many new functions, much better performance and scalability, and similar neat features. We had announced the Big Release for the beginning of June 2004 and performed final tests, with a help of some volunteer testers. By the way, I wanted to get a name for the framework but couldn't think of anything meaningful, so it was left nameless. The only possible advantage would be if someone wants to build his own site based on BrainKing engine but I don't expect it happen.
- June 2004 - right, we had released the BrainKing 2.0. After several minutes we had turned it off and started to investigate what is wrong. Simply said, it was consuming too many system resources because of some forgotten infinite loop or deadlock in the code. After detailed exploring I had pinpointed the problem source and decided to relaunch the former BrainKing 1.0 for one more week, just to have enough time to fix the bug once and forever.
After three weeks, the BrainKing 2.0 was launched again. That time it was a success and BrainKing 1.0 application could be thrown to a virtual trash bin. And, as a side effect, three new games had been released - Amazons, Battleboats Plus and Dark Battleboats. - July 2004 - since there were no more critical issues with the newly released BrainKing 2.0, we could focus on a development of new features. During July 2004 we had added BrainKing Store where people could purchase BrainKing t-shirts, the very first Team tournament (in backgammon), the first version of User Agreement (containing rules for all BrainKing users) and the Bug Tracker to allow users to report bugs and track their status.
Tuesday, February 6. 2007
A short overview of BrainKing history (part 7)
- November 2003 - of course, the reason of missing news for the previous two months is obvious - there was a big system crash which had destroyed all database records of more than a month history (or more than two months?). We, we were given a lesson that no security was high enough. A good consequence was that BrainKing's system of security and backup had been improved on several levels and simply makes a similar event impossible to happen again. We had also replaced some damaged parts of the database server and made the system much more stable (after a week of total downtime). Remember, it was still the first version of BrainKing which had turned out to be based on an ineffective code, as a result of lack of my former experiences.
- December 2003 - the site was recovered (as much as it could be) and the process of rewriting the source code (and preparing BrainKing v2.0) was started behind the scene. As far as I remember, no other important events had occured.
- January 2004 - the New Year had started with a timeout bug which had made my New Year celebration quite operative because I had had to restore several tens of wrongly timeouted games and disable the timeout checker for a while. Luckily, I was online when it happened. As, as many important issues, this one cannot happen again because the timeout system was fully rewritten as well.
Map of visitors
Quicksearch
Advertisement
To find the best online poker site, visit PokerSite.org which has reviews of poker rooms as well as poker strategy. Plus, don't forget about the best casino on the Internet, which offers casino reviews.
Comments
Mon, 18.04.2011 16:15
I understand the ins and outs of what you are trying to achi eve
Sun, 17.04.2011 19:38
True, true. I will add it to t he list. Thank you.Comments ()
Sun, 17.04.2011 18:45
Actually, for me, Move and Sta y Here, seems to take me to th e Next Game. Not the main page , as you say above. S [...]Comments ()
Wed, 25.08.2010 08:46
I didn't test RSS feeds yet, s o it's possible there is some glitch I am not aware of yet. By the way, 76 BrainKin [...]Comments ()
Tue, 24.08.2010 18:50
Great news, but just to note, the RSS feed for the game list currently does not work corre ctly when using the IPv6 [...]Comments ()
Sun, 21.03.2010 22:18
If your settings don't delete "form and search history", the n you can click in the name bo x when it is empty and i [...]Comments ()
Sat, 20.03.2010 13:04
ah, darn...the only thing i'd want to change my username to is one character longer than t he username field will a [...]Comments ()
Sat, 20.03.2010 13:02
sounds great to me...even thou gh i've never changed my usern ame in all the years i've been on brainking. maybe i w [...]Comments ()
Sat, 20.03.2010 12:01
even if do not change name eve ry 2 weeks you can forget your email... I do not like to muc h opponents name changin [...]Comments ()
Sat, 20.03.2010 02:31
will that stop the fellowships being deleted?Comments ()
Wed, 17.03.2010 17:08
Care to enter a bet as to how many submissions you'll get if you offer as a prize 6 months rook level?Comments ()
Mon, 15.03.2010 21:32
I was thinking of that and I e ven started a logo contest on Facebook (when our page was no t infected by spammers). [...]Comments ()
Mon, 15.03.2010 21:24
BrainKing logo: why not delega te this? Make it a competition . With all those members, payi ng or not, there's surel [...]Comments ()
Wed, 30.12.2009 00:59
hmm... seems like the simpler solution (no weekends at all) does not mean the simplest tra nsition between the two [...]Comments ()
Wed, 30.12.2009 00:56
The only point I see in using weekend days is when you play 1 or 2 day games but only get online 5 days a week (an [...]Comments ()