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            <p>The other day, an idiot from SLT, tried to convince me that their 512kb/s ADSL line is as fast as a 2048kb/s WiMax link. You can expect people at SLT to make statements like that. Many of them probably hadn't seen a computer till they joined the company. There is a huge shortage of geeks at Telecom companies in Sri Lanka.</p>
            <p>In actual fact, a 512kbps SLT ADSL line only gives about 430kb/s</p>
            <p><img alt="SLT speed" src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/598385338.png"></p>
            <p>Notice that this test is being carried out against, SLT's own speedtest server in Colombo. It's only about 10 Kilometers away but it still takes 32 milliseconds for a ping. Remember Electronic signals travel at 300,000km/s so this indicates slow routers.</p>
            <p>How does SLT perform when you test against a distance server? Much worse.</p>
            <p><img alt="SLT speed" src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/598384647.png"></p>
            <p>Right, now let's see how Lanka Bell WiMax Performs:</p>
            <p><img alt="SLT speed" src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/598380855.png"></p>
            <p><img alt="SLT speed" src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/598382364.png"></p>
            <p>Lankabell's ping isn't so good either but the upload and download speeds are right up there. You get more than 90% of the advertised speed. SLT's subsidiary Mobitel has a mobile broadband service. Here is the speed test:</p>
            <p><img alt="SLT speed" src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/601408823.png"><br></p>
            <p><img alt="SLT speed" src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/601409842.png"></p>
            <p>I even stepped outdoors to see if that would improve the speed (since 3.5g signals don't travel well through masonry).</p>
            <p>So in short, if you want an ADSL line that can be compared to a 2mbps WiMax link, you will have to get a 4mbps line.</p>
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Broadband speedtest

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            <p>Comparing the offering of different cloud computing service providers is pretty much like comparing Apples and Oranges. However on the websites of many cloud hosting providers you do find a feature comparison table (usually against amazon EC2). Not surprisingly EC2 always comes off second best. In spite of that EC2 is still in business which means there is something worth investigating. But first a full disclosure: <a href="http://www.radinks.com/">our company</a> is already using Amazon EC2 and we are happy with it. Our DeadlineDue.com site is hosted on an EC2 instance and also relies on the Amazon Associates API to fetch book information. Other than that there is no other factor influencing the contents of this post.</p>
            <p>Comparison between different service providers has been made difficult by the fact that some of them charge you for RAM while other don't. Similarly you may or may not be charged for a virtual hard drive. To make matters worse different providers provide different virtual CPUs sometimes the CPU is described rather vaguely:</p>
            <p>"We believe that customers will typically get results similar to a 2ghz processor, but it can vary depending on the applications requirements."</p>
            <p>(<a href="http://www.flexiscale.com/faqs.php">Flexiscale</a>)</p>
            <p>What's that a P4? a Xeon? or perhaps it's a Celeron. It's actually none of those. All the virtual servers have virtual CPUs but it would be nice if the service provider can say something like "EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) – One EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor." (&lt; a href="http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#instance"&gt;Amazon) so you know what you are getting into.</p>
            <p>The first step in comparing these services would be to normalize them so that we are comparing various citrus fruits rather than apples against oranges. But normalizing the CPU isn't so easy. Most people would tell you that a 2.0GHz Xeon is better than a 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo but by how much? You will not easily find a definitive answer. One reason is that different processors are better for different things. Your Core 2 Duo might even perform better on your desktop when used for gaming.</p>
            <p>Because of the lack of scientific data, we are forced to split our applications into two different types - CPU intensive apps and non CPU intensive apps. A Spam filter will likely fall into the former category and a web server delivering mostly static content into the latter. For Non CPU intensive apps we will lump all the Xeons and non Xeons together. For CPU intensive apps we will multiply the processor speed by a factor. In the same manner, we will lump together all the RAM regardless of their nominal speeds. Hard drive speeds will also be different but they will suffer the same fate as the RAM and the CPU</p>
            <p>to be continued...</p>
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Cloud Hosting or an Apples and Oranges Comparision

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            <p>If you believe everything that cloud hosting companies tell you, thanks to them, small businesses, startups or someone trying out an online venture no longer needs to invest a fortune on servers. In actual fact, the credit for that should go to the thousands of small web hosting companies that made it possible for you to rent (rent not buy) servers right in your own town.</p>
            <p>Cloud hosting companies should however be credited for further reducing the barrier to entry. (If the server is not in your basement it doesn't matter whether it's on the other side of town or the other side of the world).&nbsp; Cloud hosting makes it possible to start with the lowest price option and automatically scale upwards should your service or website become successful or has a sudden spike in traffic.</p>
            <p>Cloud hosting isn't as abundant as virtual or dedicated hosting right now. <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/">Amazon EC2</a>, <a href="http://www.opsourcecloud.net/">Opsource</a>, <a href="https://rackspacecloud.com/">Rackcloud</a> and <a href="http://www.gogrid.com/">GoGrid</a> are some of the names that come to (my) mind.&nbsp; Because each company has different price models, offers different virtual CPUs , virtual storage options and non virtual SLAs it's very hard to do a comparison between them to find out which option is the best for you.</p>
            <p>There are some cases where virtual hosting or even dedicated hosting might be more cost effective than cloud hosting. Additionally there are situations where combining virtual hosting with cloud storage (eg amazon s3) might be the best option.</p>
            <p>Over the next few days, I plan to dig deep into the services provided by these companies and try to figure out which option is most cost effective 'bit for bit'</p>
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Cloud hosting

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            Once upon a long ago, pre match preparation meant spending&nbsp; a great deal of time pouring over their ECO or a BCO or an MCO (perhaps even all three) and a bunch of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_Informant">Šahovski Informator</a> plus half a dozen monograms to end up being thoroughly confused. The next day, after the game is over, they inevitably need to take all those books out again to find out where they went wrong. Fortunately or unfortunately, during my playing days, the number of copies of opening encyclopedia available in Sri Lanka could be counted in your fingers. Now things have become a lot easier thanks to games databases. If your opponent is highly rated, you can analyze all his games and prepare and ambush.

            There are several commercial and free desktop games databases but there are quite a few online databases too. <a href="https://www.chess.com/explorer/">Chess.com Game Explorer</a> is one such database. During a game you can quickly hit the explore button and track the master games or your own games. It is even possible to browse your opponents or any other players completed games as well. The term 'master games' should be treated with a pinch of salt, there are about 2.5 million games in this database but not all of them have been played by FMs, IMs or GMs. According to the rules at chess.com, it's not illegal to resort to an electronic database during correspondence chess but you cannot use an engine. However you are not allowed to resort to a database for blitz or rapid chess (which they call live chess). It should also be added that only premium members can use the games explorer.

            Another online chess database is at <a href="http://www.chessgames.com/">chessgames.com</a> but only 530,000 games are available, however unlike at chess.com, master games really have been played by masters. The UI isn't all that great but it still beats going through books and having to setup the board over and over again. There are many other similar sites but the number of games are far too few.

            When it comes to desktop databases windows users sadly have more of a choice than those using linux. Every commercial chess engine seems to be a bundled with at least a small collection of games. For many years, linux users have been limited to Scid. Perhaps being limited to isn't the right choice of words because Scid is actually a very good program.

            I stopped taking part in competitive chess in 2000 and didn't play at all until 2008 when I started to play online. By that time <a href="http://scid.sourceforge.net/index.html">Scid</a> had almost become abandonware. I guess the authors thought it was feature complete and didn't bother to update it anymore. Instead a fork named <a href="http://chessdb.sourceforge.net/">chessDB</a> (which in turn had not been updated since 2006) had become available. It ships with a database of over 4 million games. So chessDB is what I used to keep track of openings and to manage the games I have played at chess.com for a while now. I knew that it was more than just a database - it's a xboard/UCI client as well. What's more several engines are bundled with it too. However I never managed to get it to analyze a game properly with any of those engines.
            <p style="text-align: center;"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/chess/chessdb-err.png" alt="chessdb error message when starting an engine"></p>

            For the life of me, I could never figure out why the xboard interface should complain about a difference of 32 and 64 bit systems. This is a client/server system after all it matters not whether one has a 64 bit OS while the other has a 32 bit OS. The other mystery is about why the error message mentions windows (isn't windows an 8 bit system?). So just out of curiosity, I decided to take a look at Scid. Lo and Behold, there has been an update just last month! This new version (4) has a new structure for the database but you can convert scid 3 databases to version 4. Scid 3 (.si3) is the format used by chessDB and those files including the 4million games database was easily imported.

            Scid 4 easily interacts with engines and what's more, it comes bundled with three of them (Toga II, Scidlet and Phalanx ). It takes a little while to figure out how game can be completely analyzed by the engine without having it produce a list of variations as long as your arm for even the most trivial alternatives. But it looks good. Real good.

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Chess Databases.

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            It is widely believed that the <a href="https://www.gnu.org/software/chess/">gnuchess</a> and <a href="http://www.tim-mann.org/xboard.html">xboard</a> is all that you need to play a game of chess on a linux computer. While it's certainly enough to get you started, it's certainly not the last word. Besides, <a href="chess-engines-and-databases.html">playing against the computer is just a waste of time</a>, computers should be used only for post mortem analysis.&nbsp; The Xboard user interface is rather archaic and it wouldn't even start up on one of my linux boxes (xboard: no fonts match pattern -*-helvetica-bold-r-normal--*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*).
            <p style="text-align: center;"><a title="xboard screenshot" href="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/chess/xboard.png"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/chess/xboard-t.png" alt="xboard screenshot"></a></p>

            With most non-commercial chess engines you need a separate client software to provide a GUI for the engine (sometimes you do find them bundled together you can even find packages that include all three; opening database, client and engine). Such clients are often based on the Xboard protocol (sometimes called the winboard protocol). Xboard of course is the grand daddy of all xboard (and winboard) clients. There are many xboard implementations for windows but only a few for Linux and OS X. Fortunately many of the software written for windows can be installed under wine. But first lets look at the native apps. The next one I tried though wasn't really native, it was a Java app named <a href="https://code.google.com/p/decaf-chess-interface/">Decaf</a>. It turns out that Decaf is a front end for the &lt;a href="http://www.freechess.org/"&gt;free internet chess server&lt;/a&gt; and cannot be used with an engine.
            <p style="text-align: center;"><a title="eboard screenshot" href="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/chess/eboard.png"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/chess/eboard-t.png" alt="eboard screenshot"></a></p>

            The next one I looked at was Eboard. This again is better suited as a frontend for the FICS. According to the online documentation eboard can be used to analyze a game but the documentation doesn't tell you how exactly that can be done. As with xboard, the UI is a bit archaic so I decided to look beyond.&nbsp; I looked past <a href="http://knights.sourceforge.net/news_archive.php">Knights</a> , <a href="http://primates.ximian.com/~jpr/gnome-chess/">Gnome Chess</a> (not updated in ages) and <a href="http://www.jinchess.com/">Jin</a> (FICS client) before taking a closer look at <a href="http://slibo.sourceforge.net/">Slibo</a>. It hasn't been updated since 2003 either but the screenshots looked impressive. Unfortunately I never got to install it. There are no binaries available and the source wouldn't compiled (it's looking for Qt 3 headers/libraries - the current version is Qt is 4.5.2 ).
            <p style="text-align: center;"><a title="pychess screenshot" href="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/chess/pychess.png"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/chess/pychess-t.png" alt="pychess screenshot"></a></p>

            Next option was <a href="http://pychess.googlepages.com/screenshots">pychess</a> - it could be easily installed with yum and it's user interface looks decent.&nbsp; That seems to pretty much exhaust the list of chess clients available for linux. I guess it's time to look at windows apps that can be installed under wine or to look for a combined engine/client.

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Chess On Linux

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            <p>Only an utter moron would choose to play chess against the computer. It's dead boring and if you had not already acquired a taste for it through over the board play, you might even erroneously conclude that it is the game that is boring. There is second reason too; it's well nigh impossible to beat a modern computer at chess. A super GM might be able to beat another one in OTB play but that same player would struggle to beat a chess engine that plays at 2500 strength. That's because half the game is across outside the board. It's gamesmanship and psychological tactics. You can stifle a yawn or snigger at the computer to make it feel that it made a blunder.</p>
            <p>Chess software has it's uses to too. Gone are the days when players swore by print copies of the ECO or the BCO (here in Sri Lanka, we never had them anyway). They have been replaced by openings databases. You no longer need to subscribe to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_Informant">Šahovski Informator</a> to keep your openings knowledge upto date. Nowadays you can download a pgn file from the <a href="http://www.chesscenter.com/twic/twic.html">The Week in Chess</a></p>
            <p>The other useful purpose served by chess software is in Post Mortem analysis. You no longer have to go begging to a strong player to have a complicated game analyzed. Even then the analysis may not be perfect (unless your friend is a GM). On the other hand, a chess engine given sufficient time to ponder rarely makes any mistakes. So a Chess Engine plus an Openings database (sometimes you need a client software too) are essential tools for anyone who takes chess seriously. Well, I take chess very seriously but I haven't had an engine installed on my computer for nine years! That's because I retired from the game in 2000 however I started playing online at yahoo chess the day <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Fischer">Bobby Fischer</a> died (what a sad day that was). Many players on yahoo chess are said to use chess engines for cheating. So I switched to <a href="https://www.chess.com/">chess.com</a> early this year and started playing seriously again about the middle of the year.</p>
            <p>I have slowly begun to find my touch and my ratings are going up slowly in fits and starts. I have been using chess.com 's post mortem analysis engine to analyze my games but i've become fed up with it of late because the analysis is woefully inaccurate. I suspect the reason for this is because it analyzes hundreds if not thousands of games each day and thus allocates limited CPU for each game. The analysis is so bad, I have even see it miss mates, not once but twice. So the time has come to finally install an engine. While there are hundreds of engines for Windows, there are precious few for linux. I am planning to go through them and find something suitable tomorrow. So tune in again</p>
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Monthly Archives for 2009 10

Broadband speedtest

Cloud Hosting or an Apples and Oranges Comparision

Cloud hosting

Chess Databases.

Chess On Linux

Chess Engines and Databases