Jumbled Thoughts
Kannan's personal space (a.k.a. Views of a Patzer!)
What are chess tournament categories?
Mar 29th
If you are a chess fan, you probably already know what the tournament categories mean. MTel masters, which is going to start this month, for example, is a category 20 tournament (based on January rating list). The tournament categories are determined by the average tournament rating. Lets say, the average ELO rating of a tournament (sum of all ELO ratings / number of players :-p ) comes to 2253, it fits the definition of a FIDE category-1 tournament.
Each category corresponds to a 25-ELO range. The ranges that are normally used by FIDE are:
| Category | ELO Range |
| Category 20 | 2726 – 2750 |
| Category 19 | 2701 – 2725 |
| Category 18 | 2676 – 2700 |
| Category 17 | 2651 – 2675 |
| Category 16 | 2626 – 2650 |
| Category 15 | 2601 – 2625 |
| Category 14 | 2576 – 2600 |
| Category 13 | 2551 – 2575 |
| Cat 12 | 2526 – 2550 |
| Cat 11 | 2501 – 2525 |
| Cat 10 | 2476 – 2500 |
| Cat 9 | 2451 – 2475 |
| Cat 8 | 2426 – 2450 |
| Cat 7 | 2401 – 2425 |
| Cat 6 | 2376 – 2400 |
| Cat 5 | 2351 – 2375 |
| Cat 4 | 2326 – 2350 |
| Cat 3 | 2301 – 2325 |
| Cat 2 | 2276 – 2300 |
| Cat 1 | 2251 – 2275 |
The table can be further extended to Category 21, 22 et al. The tournament categories were once used for GM and IM norms, but are no longer used (Check this page for the current FIDE title norms). As far as I know, the highest category FIDE tournament so far has been Category 21. If you know of anything more, do let me know.
The USCF (US Chess Federation) and ACF (Australian Chess Federation) maintain a separate scale for national titles and rating classification. You can find more info on these here
Wilbur Smith – Monsoon and other great books
Mar 28th
I just finished reading Wilbur Smith’s Monsoon, for the third time. Everytime I read one of his books, I literally experience a time warp, either watching one of the Courtneys shouting down “Belay the end, lad!” at his deck or looking up at Taita, the greatest of the Warlords, with awe! Having just finished the book, the images of Dorian Courtney dropping his Scimitar against Tom’s majestic Blue sword or Aboli watching Zama/Tulu are still dancing before my eyes. What can I say? Wilbur Smith’s characters always leave such a lasting impression! Unlike any of the lifeless characters you might have come across, Wilbur Smith has a way of making his characters extremely colorful and likeable. I agree he always depicts his heroes as macho men – battling with slavers and pirates & capturing the enormous treasure from them, killing mammoth elephants for the ivory, fighting successfully the perils of sea, adept at sword fighting and languages, seducing damsels…but I like them this way 
“Monsoon” picks up from where “Birds of prey” left (you don’t have to read them in order for the story to make sense). It tells the story of Courtney brothers Tom/Dorian/Guy and their adventures, especially Tom & Dorian. Hal Courtney, son of Sir Francis Courtney and father of the Courtney brothers I mentioned, is assigned the task of capturing, either alive or dead, Jahangir a.k.a Al-auf, the bad one, who is terrorizing the East India company’s trading ships. Hal sets sail with Tom,Guy and Dorian along with his faithful mates, Aboli/Ned Tyler and Big Daniel. They find al-auf, but during the fight, Dorian gets taken by Arabs. In an effort to save him, Hal Courtney loses his legs. Tom gets Hal back to England, where he succumbs to his injuries. Tom has a fight with William (his step-brother) and kills him accidentaly. If you are still with me, you should go and buy the book. I am not going to let this post being a big spoiler. Mind you, this book is a big one, may take couple of days to finish, but I assure you, it will make a great read. Personally I felt, near the end, the book is kinda rushed – probably Wilbur Smith had to cut down some chapters because of publishing constraints, but an entertaining book throughout.
My favorites in Wilbur Smith’s books are his Egyptian novels – River God, Seventh Scroll & Warlock. The ways of ancient Egypt, their customs & beliefs, the way their lives are entangled with the Great Nile, the treasures they accumulate for the tomb, the wars they wage – Simply amazing! Makes you wish you were born at that time. Who knows? may be, I was Taita in my previous Janma 
WS has released a new book – The Quest. This got released just 2 weeks back (Mar 14th/2007), in South Africa. I am not sure when it is going to hit the stands here in India, but one thing I know is I am going to pre-order it today in Amazon 
Funny commercials & some interesting moments
Mar 21st
This is an interesting video of Steve Jobs introducing the first Macintosh in their shareholder meeting! I can imagine how impressive that text-to-speech demo would have been, back in 1980s! Man, I still use this demo (in Windows, though) to impress my relatives
The latest PC vs Mac commercials are funny. I don’t think these are shown in India (correct me, If I am wrong). For those of you who missed these check this out.
Performance appraisals – Should they be so complex?
Mar 21st
We went through the performance appraisal phase in my company last quarter. As we had come to expect, it was one of the stressful periods, so much that we literally threw a party when 360degree feedbacks were prepared and sent (ok, am just kidding. But, you get the point!). We call this process FOCAL; when I joined 3 years back, I asked one of the managers why the perfomance appraisal was called FOCAL. My luck, that manager was forced to quit in our last round of “leaning”/”increasing efficiency” process, before he got a chance to reply me
FOCAL is more of a ritual for us; focal FAQs and training mails get sent to everyone by November of every year. The newbies are forced to take an half-a-day instructor-led course. Then one fine day, we start getting lots of requests for feedbacks on our peers and stakeholders, we spend 60-70% on filling up all these. Except a few, I have seen most of my colleagues just copy/pasting the content from one feedback to another person’s feedback. Bad, I know, but if you look from their perspective, who would want to be original in their 24th feedback form? After this the managers come in to the focus, they need to collate all the feedbacks on a person, along with that person’s own (check this out for some good points on writing one’s own strenghts/weaknesses) in to one report.The “ritual book” states that the managers need to present this to other peers, convincing everyone that the person under scrutiny deserves something better or gets screwed. Fair enough, right? Wrong! As far as I’veseen, people tend to take shortcuts everywhere, and as Kelvin claimed “there is always thins thing called POLITICS“. The main problem, at least the employess are stating is that nothing is transparent! Most of the times they don’t understand why they got what they got.
The period after focal report delivery is again a “fun” filled phase. Disgruntled employees leave, promoted / well-compensated ones put in more time/effort, new people are brought in and the cycle starts afresh! Does this process need to be replaced? I don’t think so. Does this need to be made fool proof? Oh yeah! Should intel get away with this complex process for something simple, like Microsoft? May be a good idea!!
I know there are couple of other pages like this and this, but at least I don’t believe things are so bad in India.
Car emoticons – gift for geeks!
Mar 16th
If you are used to chatting in IM so much that you long for those lovely emoticons to express yourself even in the real world, dont worry, help is at hand! Driving LED emoticons probably is the best gift they you could get. I wonder what they will come up with next? Check out the ThinkGeek site for more geeky shopping needs.
We should really appreciate those thinking up all these (crazy?!) ideas and are able to sell that! Will I buy one? nope, I’ll skip this. But, I’d love to have one of these or this
Coolcode.cn (Wordpress plugin) site down!
Mar 16th
Today morning I was surprised to see a couple of mails complaining that the videos I posted earlier here and here are not working! I checked them last night (ok…at 1am..technically it is today morning!) and they were fine. I use the excellent coolplayer 9.3 plugin in my Wordpress blog. I logged in to my account and checked the coolplayer options. They looked fine, anyway I didn’t change any of these things and they were working fine yesterday. So, what’s wrong?
Then, I noticed that the RPC server ping was not working. As you can see from the picture (click to enlarge, the RED ones are the errors), the coolcode.cn is returning a 503. My page just gets blocked for 19-20seconds, trying to get the rpc.php in coolcode to work! The site is obviously down and has taken all my videos down with it, I wonder how many more sites are also affected by this!
Man, how I wish I had installed the RPC server in my machine 
I couldn’t find a mirror with that zip anywhere. Till I setup my own RPC server, please do bear with the slow loading speed. Thanks.
Update (Mar 16,07 02:07pm IST): Hooray….the site is up and I have downloaded the needed zips
Update (Mar 16,07 03:00pm IST): Ok, I have the RPC setup in my machine now. No more worries.
Why people hate PS3?
Mar 15th
I stumbled upon this funny video in Youtube, on where Sony went wrong with PS3. Listening to Phil Harrison had me in splits 
Want to be famous?
Mar 15th
Becoming famous online has become very easy, thanks to interesting sites like http://www.fakeyourspace.com or http://www.mydynamicspace.com. The former stands out, because of its ability to sell you *virtual* friends, for a small amount (0.99c/mo). Now, this is what I’d call as a great idea, a good money-making mechanism. It’s bang on target, feeding those socially deprived persons who crave for online stardom. No breaking-the-head over deriving a solution, no deadlines, a simple no-brainer idea, but still you make millions, if not billions. What else can you ask for?
Whenever you see such an obvious, simple idea like this, making millions, don’t you feel bad/low that it didn’t occur to you !? Of course, when you have a day job, sweating it out for some MNC, trying to just survive amidst the fierce competition to keep the bread/butter (or dal/roti) coming month after month, you won’t even have time to breath, forget thinking, but still……
BTW, fakeyourspace is down, the domain has been parked by Godaddy! I don’t know why the site is down, but am pretty sure the creator must be enjoying his/her ass off in a distant island!
More links
- Interesting articles on FakeYourSpace here and here
- Google Cached copy of Fakeyourspace
