Kramnik is the new world chess champion!

The match in Elista is over. Kramnik and Topalov were tied after 12 games and played a 4-game rapid tie break. Three of the four games were decisive, Kramnik winning the fourth.

I had said earlier that Topalov was a deserving champion. After the toiletgate shenanigans, I was rooting for Kramnik. He managed to overcome the one point penalty (from foreiting the fifth game) and prevailed. Mig has a good quote on his blog: "I don't know if the better player won today. But looking back over the past few weeks I'd have to say that the better man certainly did. Hail the new and improved world champion! Or, dare I type it, hail the new World Champion!"

The games themselves were very exciting, though the quality was often affected by nerves. They usually are exciting when Topalov plays! Reports and game scores can be found on the Chessbase site.

The next thing to look forward to is a resumption of a regular and fair system of determining future world champions. FIDE has for too long been a highly unprofessional and highly political organization. That needs to change.

Topalov-Kramnik match

A match to "unify" the world chess championship is under way in Elista, Kalmikia (FIDE president Kirsan Ilymzhinov's backyard). Kramnik followed up his fantastic Olympiad performance by going up 2-0 after the first two games. After a couple of draws, the psychological games began and resulted in the toiletgate scandal.

Instead of continuing the hugely interesting games, we had the edifying sight of Topalov complaining about the number of times Kramnik needed to visit the restroom and getting a pliant FIDE appeals committee to change playing conditions. The full details are too silly to elaborate. Kramnik forfeited game 5, refusing to agree to a change in conditions not approved by him. The match seemed to be over then, before Kramnik agreed to play game 6 under protest. Kramnik has clearly been wronged, and there is a huge outpouring of support for him.

Kramnik's conduct with the "classical championship" had been a bit dodgy, with him refusing to grant Kasparov a rematch and avoiding playing against any other worthy opponent. I thought Topalov had a better claim to being called world champion. But Kramnik has got off to a great start in this match and it looks as if the Topalov camp decided to use every means at their disposal to turn things round.

netgear MR814v2 and centrino 3945ABG do not talk

Tried configuring a Toshiba notebook with builtin Centrino 3945ABG to work with an old Netgear 802.11b router (MR814v2). It would not work with 128-bit WEP enabled. It would work if I disabled encryption. Did not find any information about this on Netgear or other support sites. I did upgrade firmware on the router as well as for the wireless device (v10.5.1.57 date July 2, 2006) without any success. A bunch of other cards including a a couple of Dell builtin wireless chipsets worked just fine with this router. I guess it is time to buy a new router, and take advantage of 802.1x security features while I am at it...

Microsoft and Ipods

A very funny video about what would happen if Microsoft designed the packaging for the Ipod.

tuning Windows for faster downloads

I see consistent download speeds of about 1 Mb/s from Comcast on my W2K system at home and 4+ Mb/s from another computer running Linux. I was bothered by this but not enough to do anyhing about it. When an XP laptop running on better hardware could do no more than the measly 1 Mb/s, I decided to do some digging into the performance setup.

How does one measure download speeds? There are a bunch of websites running applets that will run some diagnostics and give you details. I like this one available from the Argonne National Laboratory:
http://miranda.ctd.anl.gov:7123/
It gives you information about upload and download speeds, and underlying network characteristics.

It turns out that the default TCP settings on Windows are very conservative and limit download speeds on networks with larger round-trip times between the two end-points, ie. your average cable or DSL setup. It does not make a difference on faster LANs such as those at work. A few tweaks to the registry and the obligatory reboot later, the Windows boxes were doing much better.

You have to add three new entries:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters]
GlobalMaxTcpWindowSize REG_DWORD 131400 (decimal)
TcpWindowSize REG_DWORD 131400 (decimal)
Tcp1323Opts REG_DWORD 3

THESE CHANGES APPLY TO BOTH W2K AND XP. (I have done it on both.)

What does this do? This reserves more space for the TCP buffer where packets can accumulate, allowing the sender to send more unacknowledged data rather than having to send a small amount of data and wait for an acknowledgement before sending more. It allows more bytes to be "in transit", thus achieving faster downloads.

More details at:
http://rdweb.cns.vt.edu/public/notes/win2k-tcpip.htm

RFC 1323, referenced above in one of the registry keys, describes extensions to the TCP protocol for achieving better performance.

If you want to get really hard-core with tuning TCP/IP, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center has published a tutorial.

Glut of chocolate

Cadbury was left with a glut of chocolate products at the start of the year, after the installation of a new SAP-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system led to an excess of chocolate bars building up at the end of 2005.

Link to article on Zdnet. According to it, Cadbury began this ERP implementation in 2002.

2006 chess olympiad

The 2006 Chess Olympiad concluded recently. It was hosted by Torino, in Italy, also hosts of the winter olympics earlier this year. Armenia won the mens title for the first time, with China and USA taking silver and bronze. The womens title was won by Ukraine, with Russia and China taking 2nd and 3rd places.

Oklahoma city manager threatens Linux distro

Hilarious story about how the city manager of Tuttle, OK contacted a Linux distribution maker to complain about a 'hacked' website. His ISP had installed a new version of the OS and botched the website config so that it showed the default home page. Full transcript of email exchanges complete with strident threats to call in the FBI.

TaxCut and Epson Stylus printers

TaxCut 2005 does not play nice with Epson Stylus printers.

1. It defaults to printing on 8x10 paper without actually scaling the page. You have to explicitly tell it that the paper is 8.5x11.
2. Some pages simply do not print correctly. There actually was help related to this on the TaxCut website. You have to turn spooling off and set the print processor to print as "RAW".