Engine Updates

Francesca M.A.D. 0.16 (WB)
Win32; hash fixed in size: 128MB(standard), or 1GB(lardy)
- more aggressive razoring, depths 1,2 and 3
- cured a nasty TT bug related to pondering
- lots of little tweaks to get rid of all compiler warnings
- some eval tweaks, too - king safety, pawns especially
- hopefully about a 30 ELO improvement
- ditched the "diet" (low RAM) version; now you get two versions, the standard one used about 150Mb of RAM, and the "lardy" version uses about 1Gb
http://www.silentshark.co.uk/

Redqueen 0.9.5 (UCI)
C++ source; Win32/64, Linux32/64; uses pthreads library
- bugfix release (no details)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/redqueenchess/

Chess News
Nothing new today

Down/Problem Chess Websites

Aldebaran homepage down for 63 days (no response in 60 seconds)
Arena homepage down today (no response in 60 seconds)
Bearded homepage down for 10 days
Brutus homepage down for 11 days
Fianchetto homepage down for 40 days (configuration error)
Frenzee homepage down for 185 days (webpage down until new engine release)
Genesis homepage down for 38 days
Smash homepage down for 2 days (no response in 60 seconds)
Sorgenkind homepage down for 51 days (no response in 60 seconds)
Usurper homepage down for 50 days

Wiki Changes
Nothing new today

Bonus Notifications (recent releases of free stuff)

Warnings:

- do not install unwanted toolbars, etc.
- alpha releases have new features; crashes and bugs are to be expected
- beta releases have new features; they may contain bugs or crash
- release candidate software may contain minor bugs; crashes are rare

Paint.NET 3.5.7
very nice free image and photo editing software (paint program); recommended
http://www.getpaint.net/

Puppy Linux 'Wary 5.1'
"Wary Puppy is intended to be our on-going commitment to older hardware."
Open source, boots from a CD (your Windows installation is unchanged) w/ simple instruction manual
old, slow computers run very well using Puppy's all-in-memory Linux kernel
There are many versions of Puppy available, each with a specific purpose
You will need to know how to burn a disk from an ISO image
Puppy is an easy-to-learn, easy-to-use Linux distribution for Windows users. Recommended.
You don't necessarily use the latest version, you use the version with the software you want
http://puppylinuxnews.org/ (news & download)
http://puppylinux.org/ (PuppyLinux homepage)

Python 3.2
popular open source scripting language
http://www.python.org/ (homepage)
http://www.python.org/download/releases/3.2/ (more info)

Task Coach 1.2.10
open source cross-platform todo manager with task or calendar viewing
http://www.taskcoach.org/

Meaning of Colors

Red = New or Warning
Green = Updated
Gray = Info Only

Engine List: http://computer-chess.org/doku.php?id=computer_chess:wiki:lists:chess_engine_list
Chess News: http://computer-chess.org/doku.php?id=computer_chess:wiki:lists:chess_news_list

NOTE: If you want me to track a website for you, please email me and I will add it.

Hi,

Arena is not down :)

Michael

It's acting weird, though.

http://www3.telus.net/tmokonen/ArenaPage.gif

Are you in the middle of doing some updates?

Hi,

I almost killed it :) Try now...

Michael

Everything looks good now Michael, thank you. :)

Hi,

Arena is not down :)

Michael

My automated probe could not reach the Arena site. My probe often gives false positives, so I tried reaching the Arena site repeatedly using the Firefox browser and this also failed. There was a half-hour gap between the probe and the browser attempts.

Don't get ruffled by a 'site is down today' claim. Sometimes it is caused by backups or syncs that use all available cpu/bandwidth with not enough left over for handling web visitors. Another possibility is that there could have been a gap in service caused by connectivity problems external to your box. I occasionally have this problem on my own site here. You need multiple boxes in different locations (different countries!) to escape this problem.

Ron