Fat Tuesday

Today is the Swedish celebration of fettisdag which is directly translated to "fat Tuesday" and is the Swedish Mardi Gras.

The only way the regular Swede is celebrating this is to eat a Semla. Of course I went to buy me one as I love sweet pastries.

The normal Semla is a sweet bun that is spiced with caardamom. The top is cut off and a small hole is pinched out. Then you mix some almond paste with powdered sugar that you put in the hole, add some whipped cream, put the lid on top and sprinkle some powdered sugar on top.

One crazy way of eating it is in a bowl and pouring hot milk over it and eat with a spoon. I am not that kind so I keep my milk in a glass and eat it directly. But first I eat the lid with some of the cream and then big bites of the rest until my plate is empty and I dream of another one.

Chinese New Year

Happy New Chinese Year! Now it is the year of the tiger. This is something that is celebrated by all Chinese people. Much like we westerners are celebrating our new year at the 31st of December.

This year, like last year, we celebrated it together with the employees of Huawei. This year Girlwing was the hostess together with a college.

We started with eating a lot of tasty Chinese food and drinking Swedish beer. A couple of the Chinese employees had some fine BaiJiu with them from China and I was treated with some. Quite tasty but also strong with 43% alcohol.

When everybody were done eating it was time for some performances and snacks. This is to my understanding very common on occasions like this. Many of the employees were involved in some way with singing, dancing and fun games. Many of the employees children made performances as well. One thing that struck me is that this would never work in a Swedish company's party. We are too shy and would need a lot of beer and wine to have fun together, not to mention spontaneous singing in front of a crowd . Not a single person at this party got drunk. Another difference is that in a Swedish party there would possibly be some social dancing and that is probably very rare in any Chinese party and there were of course no social dancing at this party.

Most of the celebration was made in Chinese and much of Girlwings role as a hostess was to translate what was said to Swedish. As to be expected most of the Swedish guests left quite early after the food. Probably because they didn't feel like a part of the group when they couldn't understand everything. That is a bit sad but it can be understandable.

The whole celebration is anyway for the Chinese people, who are kind of stranded here in Sweden, so far away from their families at home. It is for them like it would be for us to be all alone over Christmas in China, but a hundred times worse. Family and friends are very important for them, so it is very valuable to be able to do this together with the colleagues and friends they have here so far away from home.

How to become a go pro

If you are living in in another country than China, Japan or Korea, how do you become a professional weiqi player? One way is to move to one of those countries and join their insei schools. There are a couple of western players who have done this. This is really hard work with a lot of competition against the other students and you have to be one of the best to make it to become a pro.

But now you have an easier way if you are foreigner of Japan. You can apply for a special foreigners test at the Kensai Ki-in. I believe this new test has been passed already. It is a quite simple procedure... You will play two games against two 1 dan pro players as black without komi.

• If you manage to win both games, then you become a pro. 
• If you lose both games then you will of course not become a pro, but you can try again next year.
• If you win one of the games and lose the other, then you will get another chance by playing a third game against a 9 dan pro. If you win that game then you will become a pro.

You might have a good chance of playing against non active professionals, because the active ones are usually quite busy with their career with studies, travel and tournaments. This way makes it possible for even strong 6 dan players to pass the exam.

I think this is good news for all the strong western players. Also, with more strong players with pro status it will encourage regular players to study more when they have western pros to look up to. These western pros will be more like celebrities than the 6 dan and 7 dan we have now. So I encourage all 6 and 7 dan players that feel that they might have a chance to pass the test to go to Japan and try.

Now go and become a pro, every country needs one!

Future go program

Sometimes when you surf around on Sensei's Library you will find some interesting, odd or fun stuff. It is easy to spend a couple of hours reading about this and that.

I am interested in programming and am still searching for the perfect go software. So when I stumbled over this page I felt that it is something worth spreading. The name of the page is "Go Software For The Future" and there anyone can post their suggestions and requests for the perfect future go program for programmers to consider.

So please do! :)

Blog Statistics

I read somewhere that IE8 now is the most common web browser on the Internet. I got surprised by that news so I decided to check the statistics for my blog.

I could not find any support at all for the claim from IE8 to be the most common browser. Rather the opposite.

Ok, my small blog is no good benchmark for this but I got around 200 visitors each month so that gives something to go on.

About the visitors to my blog we can see that Firefox is the most popular browser. Good second place is IExploder. How common is version 8 among those? About 6% of all IExploders are of version 8. 52% is version 7 and 43% is still version 6.

Another interesting thing we can read from the graph is that Google Chrome is slowly gaining interest. It will maybe pass IExploder within a year among my readers. No? You don't think so? Hmm... we'll see...

E-mail support with humor

I am maintaining a BMC AR-System environment with ITSM applications supporting ITIL applications including Incident, Problem and Change. This system is sending out a lot of e-mail notifications to all the users. Quite often the end user reporting an incident answers the receipt e-mail asking questions or sending additional feedback. Very often the system just receives autoreplies about the users being on vacation or on paternity leave.

The autoreplies we don't care about but the questions and feedback can be interesting to pay attention to. I want to build some workflow to filter out the interesting stuff and attach to the relevant ticket in the system or automatically deal with them in some other way in the cases where it is not possible to find the corresponding ticket. So far I didn't get the permission to do this development.

Instead I was asked to set up an autoreply in the exchange account for every incoming e-mail that comes from within the company. In this autoreply we are just going to inform the end user that they've sent an e-mail to a system and no person will read the e-mail and that they should send the e-mail to some support address.

So I did, but I was a little bit concerned that Exchange was not smart enough to deal with the auto-replies from end users on vacation. If our system sends an e-mail to a user on vacation and and the users e-mail account sends an auto-reply to our system that send an auto-reply back to the user that sends an auto-reply again and so on... You get the picture. It will become like a ping pong match.

I sent an e-mail to our e-mail support group asking about the risk of an ping pong match. I really liked their answer.

"Usually Exchange is smart enough to not start a ping pong match that it can not win. But occasionally it can happen that they get excited and someone smashes in a backhand volley."

OK it didn't wipe away all of my concerns, but still I really like to see some humor at work. :)

Europe got a new pro

Li Ting [6D] living in Austria just became pro through a test by the Kansai Ki-in at the age of 29. You can also read the new at the Austrian Go Association's homepage. Her pro status will be valid from 1st Mars 2010.

This is very good for European go! I hope she will play a lot of pro tournaments in Japan and become even stronger.

(Now I think we can make all European 7D to pros, found the European Go Pro Association and start our own pro circus in Europe)

Eidogo for Blogger HOWTO

I got the question from a fellow weiqi playing blogger of how to post a game of weiqi to a blogger blog post.

Well, I have done it. Now I will try to explain how you can do the same. I remember that I had some problems to implement it myself. Mostly because I was not sure how the whole process works. After some trial and error I figured it out.

I found my first clues on the Eidogo homepage. This information is probably enough if you have a single copy of the board on your personal homepage. This description is not really enough if you want several boards with different games on your blog. At least not to my experience.


So this is how I did...

First we want to add the eidogo javascript to the blog. The first you might thing of is to add it to the html part of your post. That doesn't work for more than one board and post. Instead you want to add it to the header so it is included only once for your whole blog. Then you will never have to do this part again.

So go to the Layout section of your blog and click on Edit HTML. Maybe you already have done some of your own cusomizations there. At least I've made a lot of them. Before you start you want to do a backup of your template if you by mistake break anything. Then you can do your changes.

Down there in the later parts of the code you will see a row saying:

</head>

Just above this line you add:

<script src='http://eidogo.com/player/js/all.compressed.js' type='text/javascript'/>

Then save the template.

The next step you need to do for every blog post you want to add a weiqi board to. So you start writing a new blog entry. Write any free text and when it is time for your Eidogo board you hit Edit HTML.

Where you want to have your board you enter the text:

<div class="eidogo-player-auto">

(;GM[1]FF[4]CA[UTF-8]AP[CGoban:3]ST[2]

RU[Chinese]SZ[19]KM[7.50]

PW[Boywing]PB[Juãn]WR[5k]BR[4k]RE[W+Resign]

;B[dp]

;W[qp]

;B[dd]

;W[pd]))

</div>

The red code in the middle between the div-lines is the content of an sgf-file. Mine here only have four moves. You can use a complete game of course.

Notice that it doesn't work to preview your post...

Now publish your post and you will see something like this!

(;GM[1]FF[4]CA[UTF-8]AP[CGoban:3]ST[2]
RU[Chinese]SZ[19]KM[7.50]
PW[Boywing]PB[Juãn]WR[5k]BR[4k]RE[W+Resign]
;B[dp]
;W[qp]
;B[dd]
;W[pd]))