Almost Famous

The idea-thieving scum at Microsoft managed to get some major press coverage on my work:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/04/silicon_chess/

*Silicon beats carbon in chess battle*

By Lucy Sherriff
Published Monday 4th July 2005 14:16 GMT

.."Computers have yet to master the game of Go, a much trickier proposition with its branching factor of 250. Brute force is no good here, because the number of moves gets really big, really fast. Researchers at Microsoft's labs in Cambridge have made some improvements to computer Go, using Bayesian ranking to calculate probable good moves. But the researchers concede that even the best programs are pretty easily dispatched by good human players."..

Unconventional Silence

As you can see, after I bought that super-monster PC, there was no money left for paint. :)

I didn't manage to make it silent, it seems the case fans produce a lot of noise as well. So I made a "cable snake", and put the PC next to the door, in the corridor of my microscopic 1-room apartment. This works (especially with the door closed), but the mouse- and keyboard cables didn't work. They simply are too long. Weird. So I bought a wireless keyboard/mouse combo and now I can work in relative quietness!

Longhauling

Interesting. I had a big spike in sales for a week, and now I have no sales whatsoever for almost a week. I am pretty sure why: Every new customer found one bug and two new features they would like to see implemented, and kindly informed me so on the forum.

New customers of course look at the forum to see how existing customers like Moyo Go, and see a lot of: "BUG found!" and "We really desperately need feature XYZ". So they think: "Why not wait a little until the bugs are ironed out and feature XYZ is implemented".

Hm, in case of Moyo Go, this is a bad idea. Because customers get lifetime free updates, which means you're loosing nothing when you buy now. But as soon as I have straightened out major bugs and implemented major features, I'll raise the price. Master Go, for example, can't do what Moyo Go does, but it costs 100 USD. This means that Moyo Go will most likely be doubled in price, over the coming years.

So it's expensive to wait.

Of course it's not that bad with bugs and lacking features, it's just the fact that because I offer free updates and I quickly fix bugs and implement new features, that people "avalanche" me with them :) Blake Haber asked for a much more powerful SQL database search and he got it 24 hours later. Of course this encourages to request more :) It doesn't mean that Moyo Go is a stinking pile of crap, on the contrary.

I do not care that I am not selling anything, for the moment. Because things go in waves. All the stuff people talked about will be fixed/implemented, they will rave about it, there will be a sales wave again, they'll find bugs in the new functionality and sales will slump again, etc. etc. until Moyo Go Studio has achieved Full World Domination. While all the time being under-priced, when you look at MoyoGo's commercial counterparts.

Bug movie

Some of my customers are geniusses. Adrian Petrescu is one.

Today I received a movie of a bug in Moyo Go, made with the trial version of Camtasia.

"It's easier to show you the bug this way", he said. Awesome idea. Of course there is nothing better than a bug report where you see the stuff go wrong, and hear the customer exclaim: "See? It's a bug!.."

(Well, I just have to guess for the moment because the movie was in Flash format, and I make a point of uninstalling Flash as soon as Windoze is installed. You wouldn't believe the tranquility of the browsing experience w/o Flash and with pictures set to "do not animate" (Mozilla has that option). Whenever I look at other's browsers I have to suppress an epileptic seizure.

Update: I can watch the movie now because Adrian made an AVI version and I am starting to think that I should give priority to bug reports that come on video :) A picture is worth a thousand words but a video outperforms that by yet again a few orders of magnitude :)

Fake Virus

As soon as I designed the blazingly fast index system for MoyoGo's instantaneous pattern search, I thought it would only be a matter of time before faux virus-alerts would be generated. It has remained silent surprisingly long, but my fear has become reality:

A dodgy virus checker ("F-Secure") thinks that one file might have a virus, namely:

moyo go studio\databases\nngs\3053.dat
Infection: Possibly a destructive program [F-PROT]

..this is nonsense, and I will take it up with F-Secure. I wrote "dodgy", because I was amazed that this company does not have an email address. Instead, they require me to fill out a dozen fields, and I'll end up having no copy of the correspondence, because a bug in Mozilla causes such fields to be empty, when the page is printed. Their support number in Norway is dead, on Sundays. I guess people don't use their computer on weekends. The bigger the company, the worse the service. My phone number is +47-98680219 and any customer can call me, any day of the week.

It is possible that even less-dodgy virus checkers will find "virusses" in other files. The reason is simple: Moyo Go installs twenty thousand files with semi-random (encoded and compressed) data. Virus checkers work with "signatures", which are byte sequences. You can imagine that 1.5 GB of semi-random byte sequences has quite a chance of having, just by coincidence, one of those "signatures" somewhere.

Anti-virus software makers could avoid this problem, but this would penalize their scanning speed and the ease of adding virus definitions.

Automatic Updates Now With Safety Belt

In a post of a few days ago I mentioned the potential risk of automatic updates: You might distribute something that doesn't work any more, irritating customers, which is A Very Bad Thing™.

Now, before an auto-update is installed, everything it modifies is backed up, allowing the user to revert to the previous version with a click of the mouse. This should not just make the customer relaxed about installing updates, it gives me peace of mind as well.

Why Moyo Go can't be Translated Right Now

I get offers to translate Moyo Go Studio into Spanish, Portugese, Chinese, German, Dutch, French and so on.

And I would like to take people up on those offers, of course.
But not now.

The thing is: I am still adding so much new stuff to Moyo Go, that I would need a few new translation strings all the time. The delay to release an update could run into weeks. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link - if the person who translates into Xhosa happens to be on a hunting expedition, releasing an update would have to be delayed until he came back (if not eaten by a lion).