English Chess Forum

thanks to all for all there hard work as without you we would not of been able to view the games at all and also i like to thank the rest of the team for all there hard work during the British for all the pgn files as well.

Ian Lamb wrote:thanks to all for all there hard work as without you we would not of been able to view the games at all and also i like to thank the rest of the team for all there hard work during the British for all the pgn files as well.

Your thanks go to David Clayton, Stephen Connor and in some part Wilf Arnold - with yours truly playing a minor role

£5 less than something else I could mention

yes true carl

I would like to echo those sentiments. After a shaky first day or so, the coverage was excellent.

Me three. Thanks to all concerned.

Me four.

Carl Hibbard wrote:

Ian Lamb wrote:thanks to all for all there hard work as without you we would not of been able to view the games at all and also i like to thank the rest of the team for all there hard work during the British for all the pgn files as well.

Your thanks go to David Clayton, Stephen Connor and in some part Wilf Arnold - with yours truly playing a minor role

£5 less than something else I could mention

If by 'minor role' you mean whipping up a couple of extra servers in short order then I suppose it is an appropriate term.

We let Andy Howie out of the quarantine box for the last round - he missed the whole event thanks to swine flu. He installed a lot of the wiring so it seemed fitting that he be asked to take it up again.

It was a great experience to be in the Technical Room for a few days - I now have a fuller appreciation of the work needed to keep the live game feed going. Dave Clayton's analogy of 'plate spinning' is extremely accurate.

Wilf

Dave without doubt has the patience of a saint...

I wasn't totally happy with the live games if I am honest, clearly the virtual servers struggled with the load and some people did see errors

This is not acceptable, free should not mean crap - we need to do better next time

I am happy to open up free server hosting to anyone who wishes to show some live chess - if you show it free the hosting is yours

You would probably need the technical assistance of Saint Clayton on site of course and that is another issue

Carl Hibbard wrote:I am happy to open up free server hosting to anyone who wishes to show some live chess - if you show it free the hosting is yours

You would probably need the technical assistance of Saint Clayton on site of course and that is another issue

I was talking to Dave about this over the last 2 weeks. The number of people he reckons have done this to his knowledge is probably less than a dozen in the UK. The set up looks fairly simple on the face of it.

You have a number of boards that are linked together by a cat5 network, and connect to a pc via a serial or usb link (coming soon bluetooth). The software used to communicate with the boards is TOMA. TOMA saves the data in a set of files which can then be transmitted (via ftp) to a site such as Carl's. People can then use this feed as part of their website to display live games. I am assuming that we are not building in a time delay for data transmission. When all goes well then everything is as sweet as a nut.

However, things do go wrong. The players place a piece on a square in such a way that the board 'loses' it, during a timescramble the board is overwhelmed with rapid moves and pieces get 'lost' (so don't rely on them for proving time control has been reached), the TOMA software crashes losing games or sets of boards, the PC at the venue crashes, the internet at the venue is too slow. All this is before it gets to a server. Events this year meant that there was insufficient time to reliably broadcast games in the morning. The amount of time required to ensure a set of boards is ready to go is not trivial as sometimes the boards can miss pieces even in the start positions - if you go to one of these congresses with sensory boards look out for someone swapping pieces around just before the round starts!

I agree that free does not mean crap (and I'll take up your hosting offer as well). As well as the feed to the internet, we had to feed a projector in the main playing hall. There are a lot of people who want to watch the actual pieces and players and have the moved clarified on a display almost at the same time. This audience were largely players/families of players who actually paid to play and so deserve a decent service as well. It was no good to merely send in the internet feed as there was a 5 minute delay, so the original plan was to have a secret internet location on the web where we could then display the game 'live'. This put extra strain on the servers and so an alternative plan of using an internal network was adopted. This idea will be developed over the next few months.

Setting up is the easy/dirty part (Andy is good at it). The most experienced (and best) people are those who can recover lost games in the shortest time (Dave/Andy good - me novice). At the British we were co-located with the website and were aware when things went wrong - hence my post last Saturday - mind you it was quite easy to see the 'TOMA has encountered....' warning box on one of the PCs.

Wilf

Wilf Arnold wrote:we had to feed a projector in the main playing hall.

As someone who was there, that was an excellent idea and finally relegates those manual magnetic display boards to the commentary room. At the British, it was just the one screen with two boards side by side which was visible from some way off. Four boards on the screen might have seen too crowded and the bottom two would have been at the same level as the players, so difficult to see.

Wilf Arnold wrote:We let Andy Howie out of the quarantine box for the last round - he missed the whole event thanks to swine flu. He installed a lot of the wiring so it seemed fitting that he be asked to take it up again.

Aye I was gutted. Spent Sunday setting up with Dave, Monday nursing my wife and the rest of the tournament bar the last day down with swine flu

Was a good laugh though i wonder if Mark Hebdon realises he "lost" that game 3 times as well as drawing, before he finally won it.

Toma is wonderful....

Is that like Soma in brave New World?

Roger de Coverly wrote:

Wilf Arnold wrote:we had to feed a projector in the main playing hall.

As someone who was there, that was an excellent idea and finally relegates those manual magnetic display boards to the commentary room. At the British, it was just the one screen with two boards side by side which was visible from some way off. Four boards on the screen might have seen too crowded and the bottom two would have been at the same level as the players, so difficult to see.

I liked the magnetic boards to be honest, there is no reason not to use them really

I am not quite at the rebelling against technology age but sometimes the old methods are fine

Carl Hibbard wrote:

Roger de Coverly wrote:

Wilf Arnold wrote:we had to feed a projector in the main playing hall.

As someone who was there, that was an excellent idea and finally relegates those manual magnetic display boards to the commentary room. At the British, it was just the one screen with two boards side by side which was visible from some way off. Four boards on the screen might have seen too crowded and the bottom two would have been at the same level as the players, so difficult to see.

I liked the magnetic boards to be honest, there is no reason not to use them really

I am not quite at the rebelling against technology age but sometimes the old methods are fine

There is a need for the magnetic boards in the commentary room - Andrew Martin's presentations are so fluid that magnetic boards are still the best way of conveying the ideas he presents.

However, in the main hall we used to have people stood next to large demo boards who copied the moves down as they played and then slotted them into place - a very labour intensive and inefficient way of doing it. (Probably health and safety involved as steps were often needed).These moves were then relayed to the runners who passed them on to Andrew. This year we had the forum, in which 'we' set up a large projector. Although good the spectators preferred the atmosphere in the playing hall which is why the projector was then set up in there. Towards the end of the week there was a marked improvement in the atmosphere in the hall as the technology was improved and the display got better.