I had an old laptop that I decided would make a good toy for playing around with some lightweight server applications. It was a great candidate for several reasons. For one, I'm not using it for something else. Second, it was free. Third, it has a built in battery backup …

January 30th, 2004 marked the Guinness world record for the largest networked chess computer. Using the internet to connect with 2070 computers, this networked conglomerate challenged Grand Master Peter Heine Nielsen, and the game ended in a draw!

All that to say that sometimes, we all need a little help …

Recently, while working with some older equipment, I needed a lightweight java IDE to compile some java projects. I really wasn't looking for something quite as big as eclipse or netbeans, I just wanted a simple, one stop solution that would allow me to build java programs on an older …

Occasionally, I do a theme, or idea, on a given day for a period of time. Currently, I have been spending quite a bit of time working on chess engines and their play. So, I am going to create a "Fool's Mate Friday" post. That's right, every Friday, I'll be …

Typically, if we want to check the internet connection speed, we can just use a web browser with any of the usual internet speed test sites. However, the other day I actually needed to test the internet connection speed on a machine without using a browser.

In this case the …

For better or worse, I added the ability to castle to the Beginner Chess Engine.

In theory, that would always be better. However, adding this feature actually caused two problems:

Problem #1 - Even though the castle works great, as expected, and is successful, occasionally, on the NEXT move of the …

If you've been following along, you probably have seen that the king had a slight problem. It was failing to adequately check for pawns when considering it's own safety.

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Here you can see the commit where I fixed the code. Now it will accurately …

Well, if you were wondering what I was doing with my spare time, this is it!

I just added a TextView to display the move options that the computer had available. Not real fancy, but it allows me to "watch" what's going on without the debugger running. You can check …

As you can see, I added a reset button to the app for the Beginning Chess Engine.

Originally, I had intended to have the board simply reset back to the starting position. However, for some odd reason, when I would reset the board pieces, odd things would happen....

Like a …

The beginner chess engine has a brand new repository so I can more accurately track issues. Before, it was a small part of a larger repository holding different programs, but I have so many issues that I wasn't to track, that it became difficult to use in that manner.

So …