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            <p>Internet Scrabble Club is the cool place to play scrabble online. Some of the world's top players hang around at the ISC. Play online doesn't mean you can play with the browser, rather you need to download and install one of their clients. Fortunately they have clients available for Linux, Mac and Windows. The only trouble is that the linux client freezes at the slightest excuse. You can never seem to play more than one more before it either disconnects or stops responding at all. The obvious solution then is to try running it under wine.</p>

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            <p style="text-align:center"><img alt="ISC on Linux WINE" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.raditha.com/blog/images/2014/isc.png"></p>

            <p>&nbsp;</p>

            <p>The windows exe running under wine doesn't even get as far as that. It fails at the login screen. The dialog box to enter the username and password is permanently damaged and wants repainting but it never seems to happen. So it was time to look back at the java version of wordbuff and it wasn't long before I figured out that the problem was because Open JDK and wordbuff doesnt' see eye to eye. It runs easily with the Oracle JVM.</p>

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            <p><code>export JAVA_HOME=/usr/local/java/jdk1.7.0_65/<br>
                    /usr/local/java/jdk1.7.0_65/bin/java -jar wordbiz.jar </code></p>

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            <p>Ok a few footnotes:</p>

            <p>The client software is named wordbuff. Does that have anything to do with Derek McKenzie who runs the popular <a href="http://word-buff.com">word-buff.com</a> website?</p>

            <p>Wordbuff seems to save the username and password in a clear text file named Config</p>

            <p><a href="http://isc.ro">ISC</a> seems to save the password in clear text on their server (if you try the password reset, they send you your old password back in a plain text email)</p>

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Monthly Archives for 2014 07

ISC on Linux