Psychic Origami

It appears that I’m helping organise “$5 Apps - a new geek meet” with Ian. Should be interesting.

Planning on giving a talk about setting up chrss and Ian will be talking about ShowMeDo. With luck we’ll get a few other people along to talk about their “$5 apps” in the future.

Well I ended up not doing so well against Kennon in the end.

To be able to finish the game though I needed to add the ability to resign from a game. So now when you are logged in you will see a “resign” button (if it’s your turn to move). You’ll get a javascript confirmation dialog (to make sure you didn’t press it by accident) and then that’s it - your opponent wins.

Couple of other minor things added, so total new features/fixes as follows:

• can now resign from games
• stalemate now being checked for
• the final result of a game now appears in the rss feed

Just done:

• user account creation now does email validation (more useful for myself)
• ordering rss entries in date order (as some rss readers seem to display entries in the order the entries appear in the file), to ensure most recent moves appear first

TODO:

• move confirmation (probably just with javascript), to avoid accidental moves
• ability to resign/concede and draw games
• check for stalemate
• rss notification of user joining games (and other such events)

Overall development on chrss is still going well. I’d classify it as being in “alpha”, but that’s more to do with it missing a few features than it being riddled with bugs (well at least I hope so). Once the features listed above are finished I can probably consider it as being in “beta” and the I’ll move it over to an easier to remember domain (which I acquired yesterday).

Well game #2 is in the end game now. It’s been really good playing against Kennon. Must say that I’m not faring terribly well, but it’s not over yet…

Updates to chrss:

• now setting guid for moves in the rss feed (so the entries can be told apart, even though they point to the same url)
• when you sign up you should no longer get redirected back to the sign up page after you first log in
• if you create an account, when accepting an invite, you should get redirected back to the original join link when you log in (uses a cookie to record the “join url”)
• added info about whose move is next when browsing games

First few minor bug fixes for chrss. Fixes:

• Now using absolute URLs in the rss feed. The feed also now validates at http://validator.w3.org/feed/.
• Corrected redirection issues, due to not running chrss off the base of the site

Still to be fixed:

• After creating an account and logging in, you get redirected back to the signup page (which is confusing).
• When creating an account during accepting an invite you don’t get redirected back to the page to accept the invite.

Over Christmas and evenings in January I’ve been working on a side project: chrss.

It’s a correspondence chess web application. There are plenty of options for playing chess online (whether in realtime or via correspondence), but I felt the urge to “roll my own”. This was a large part due to me wanting a small project to use Turbogears with and this fitted the bill perfectly.

Development was also further spurred on by starting to play chess again with my friend Ian.

Currently it’s fairly minimal, but functionally complete. You can create user accounts (which was pretty easy to implement using identity management in Turbogears), create new games, invite other people to join a game and play games. To top it all off you can then subscribe to a game’s moves via rss, so you don’t have to constantly check the site to see if someone has moved.

Hopefully I’ll add new features as I go. There’s a few I’ve got in mind already, which should be quite nice. First though I need to make sure that everything so far is working properly (there are a few little niggles that occurred from running chrss from “chrss/” rather than “/” , which I didn’t notice when developing).

Made in little spikey land, John Montgomery was forged out of cats, tea and hay-fever medication. Believing that he may one day be able to fold space he has decided to start off small and learn to fold paper with his brain.

To this end psychic origami is part of his ongoing quest to further hone his mind. The side effects may yet prove interesting.