Aart's Blog

Version 4.0 of Chess for Android, available at either Google Play or as direct download , focuses on localization and internationalization. All user facing text (except the chess notation and engine messages) has been translated into the following languages. English (the default) Dutch (translated myself) German (many thanks to Philip Stutz) Hebrew (many thanks to Haran Talmon) Polish (many thanks to Michal Kaczmarek) Spanish (many thanks to Krizia Lopez) Swedish (many thanks to Anton Hansson) If you spot any mistakes, if you would like to see support for other languages or, even better, if you would like to help with further localization, please drop me a private note.

I had been working on some general utilities for the micro-KIM , and used some spare time during the long weekend to finish a scrolling putchar utility that can output letters and digits to the 7-segment display in a scrolling fashion (some letters needed more improvisation than others, but my daughter Karina helped me designing all the letters and converting them to hex). Here is a demo.

Folkert van Heusen is developing a chess engine, called DeepBrutePos , and he also wrote a version for Android. The engine is written in Java, and he used the Android SDK to develop a version that acts as a chess server, so that it can be imported as network socket in Chess for Android (a rather unusual, but nifty use of that feature). I conducted a quick test with one of the first versions. Below the results of a one-second-per move tournament from both sides of all Nunn opening lines on a Nexus One. I was hoping for better results for Folkert, but hopefully he will release a strong version soon. Good luck!                        1        2          3         4         5        6                    1 BikJump v2.1P        *     17.5- 2.5 20.0- 0.0 20.0- 0.0 20.0-0.0 20.0-0.0 97.5/100 2 fairymax48q       2.5-17.5     *     10.0-10.0 12.5-7.5  18.5-1.5 20.0-0.0 63.5/100 3 umax48w           0.0-20.0 10.0-10.0     *     12.0- 8.0 20.0-0.0 20.0-0.0 62.0/100 4 Chess for Android 0.0-

I just released version 3.3 of Chess for Android, available at Google Play or as direct download . The new features include: Ability to modify filenames of regular and tournament games. Information on network status during socket setup. In the older versions, regular games and tournament games were alway appended to, respectively, the files games.pgn and tour.pgn on SD card. The new feature allows users to change these defaults through a "Change pathnames" menu. The pathnames can even include subdirectories, provides these directories exist.   The second feature displays information on the network status during socket setup (mobile connection, Wifi, etc.). In the version without network permissions (the default on Google Play), a proper warning message is shown instead.  

Below a more detailed view of all monitoring stations in the Bay Area that are part of the radiation network , where my station shows in slightly darker yellow. The station near LLNL usually shows a similar CPM rating, while the one in the South Bay usually shows a bit higher CPM. As long as my station is up, you can also view this real-time map .