Moyo Go Free Forever

Frank de Groot, the developer of Moyo Go Studio, seem to have given up with the development of one of the most powerful go programs on the market. He is no longer selling the product but are instead giving it away for free.

He claim to have a lot of enemies in the go community and it seem to be caused by aggressive competition among the commercial go program developers on one side and on the other side the fact that he say that he is not sure that people ever was gassed or incinerated by the Nazis.

He seem to be a smart but odd person. Too bad the software and its customers have to suffer. When he have such controversial ideas of what happened during the second world war, he should keep it to himself. Especially if he have a commercial interest in selling his software. Also it might not have been smart to proclaim a war against those who opposed him, no matter who started the conflict.

If he intend to never develop or sell the product again, I hope that he will let it be open source so other developers can continue the work and maybe even port it to Linux. I have been very interested in the program since I first read about it on the Internet, but I was never able to try it out because I use Linux and it is a Windows only program.

Slackware 13.0

It has been out since the end of August but I just noticed it last week. I was used to be freshly updated about this distribution for many years. Every now and then I went in to the Slackware change log to see how far they progressed on the next release. I have been using Slackware since my first experience with Linux in 1994 when I installed it on my i486 PC. 15 years is a long time...

But now I have been using Ubuntu for half a year since my old server melted and I had to buy new hardware. So I didn't find as much interest in following the Slackware distribution in detail. It is a bit sad and I feel like a traitor, but I was so impressed by Ubuntu that I just had to try it. Ubuntu has been a lot of joy and a lot of ripped hair from my soon bald head (because I am used to the Slackware way), but that is another story.

Slackware write in the release anouncement "Probably the biggest change is the addition of an official 64-bit port." and that is so cool. Personally I think it is a little late considering that AMD came out with 64 bit processors ages ago. Other than that there is a load of new cool and improved stuff in the latest release and I am tempted to install it somewhere.

Why don't you download it and give it a try!

OneSwarm

I just read about a new file sharing tool named OneSwarm. It is based on BitTorrent but is more focused on sharing files between friends and their friends and their friends while you are only visible to your own friends.

This new tool might be the new way for file sharers after the regular BitTorrent trackers like The Pirate Bay gets pulled of the Internet.

There are clients to download for Mac, Win and Linux. There are even source code to download if you want to improve the product.

I haven't tried OneSwarm yet but some day I probably will. If I can find some friend that uses it. :)

New server on the way

My old Linux server died. First a fan stopped working so the computer froze now and then. After not so many days it refused to start at all again so something in the hardware is fried. I guess there is something on the motherboard that burned up. I really hope there is no real damage on the hard drive. That would be a small disaster because I have no fresh backup.... :P

So now I have ordered parts to build myself a new server. First time ever that I will get a new computer as server. Previous I have only taken some old computer that is ready to throw away and made it to my server. The one that just died was my fathers before I asked if I could take it when he bought a new one. He had even bought a new one after that switch. My dead server is probably over ten years old and deserves to rest in peace.

This is the specifications of my new server:

• Antec mATX Cube NSK1380 - (350w)
• Gigabyte Socket AM2+ mATX AMD 780G (GA-MA78GM-S2H)
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ 2.9GHz / 2x512kB Socket AM2 (65W)
• Corsair XMS2 Xtreme 2048MB DDR2 XMS2-6400 800MHz
• D-Link Nätverkskort DGE-530T 10/100/1000 (PCI)
• Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB (7200RPM / 32MB / SATA II / NCQ)
• Samsung SATA DVD±RW 22x - Svart (Dual Layer) (SH-S223F)

and a

• D-Link 5-Ports Switch DGS-1005D 10/100/1000

I didn't do so hard investigations about the hardware so I really hope I didn't make any bad/stupid choices. As long as it works well I don't care much about the performance. My previous server had 350Mhz CPU and 384Mb of memory and that worked very well except in the graphical X Window interface using KDE which was a bit flickery and slow but still usable. Maybe that pain was mostly because of the really bad graphics card.

I am not sure yet if I will use the hyped up Ubuntu or the old reliable Slackware that I have always used before. I have actually used Slackware since summer 1994 and am quite comfortable with that distribution. I have used Ubuntu on my dual boot workstation and think there are both good and bad things about it. Most things I feel that is bad is probably my lack of knowledge about Ubuntu so I should probably choose that one for my server so I learn everything I need to know. But it feels almost like betrayal to not use Slackware any more. Hmm.. so hard decisions... What should I do?

GNU Go 3.8

Finally after over three years of slow developments there has been a new release of GNU Go. As of this writing the homepage has not been updated with the new version but I sent them a reminder of it.

I found the information when I was reading the GNU Go mail archive where they have posted a "press release".

The new version is version 3.8 and as they write in their email the changes since last version is:

• many small improvements and tuning since 3.6
• experimental Monte Carlo mode (9x9 only)
• support for tiny boards
• GPL v3

Another thing what I understand is that they put some extra effort to make it easy to compile the source for windows. It used to be a bit tricky what I understand but now they should have all the needed files and a detailed description of how the process should be executed.

As usual it is very simple to compile the source under Linux.

So go ahead and download the new version to try it out!

God starts to blog

My god starts to blog. Who is my god you might ask? My god is Linus Torvalds, the creator and current coordinator of the Linux project. Gods are creators of worlds and universes. Linus Torvalds created the Linux universe.

Anyway... Linus just started to blog and he often have very strong opinions about subjects relating to Linux and operatingsystems and this blog will cover other topics that is not directly related to the Linux project. As I understand the blog was first meant to be a family-blog but already Linus start by writing about totally different topics. I will be a reader of the blog. Gods words are true visdom. :)