Mike's Page

Last night was the Greenwood Chess Simul exhibition and my first time participating in one. The SC Chess Association had arranged for chess Grand Master Gregory Kaidanov to play exhibitions in four cities.

We didn't have a huge turnout in Greenwood, maybe 15 players and a small crowd of spectators. This allowed the GM to play quickly and it seemed like every time I looked up, he was coming around for another move. I think everyone would have played better with a little more time to think. I was amazed when two of the Greenwood club's strongest players were out quickly. I somehow managed to hang on for a few more minutes but was just as soundly defeated. A few more guys hung on for a little longer, but the simul was over quickly. Here is my game for your enjoyment.


In retrospect I wish I had moved 8...Bb7 instead, but I'm sure there are plenty of other mistakes in my moves.

As if the regular simul event wasn't fast enough, it was followed by a couple rounds of speed chess, 5 minutes per side, with the GM playing four simultaneously. I still had nearly 90 seconds on my clock when I was checkmated.

The coolest part of the exhibition was the "blindfold" game. The GM sat facing away from the board and each player called out moves. Despite drawing one of the better Greenwood players, the GM made quick work of him. It's amazing to be able to keep track of the entire game in your head.

I really enjoyed the event and want to thank Mr. Kaidanov for taking the time to come to Greenwood.

This one stumped me for a while today. I had an application to deploy which worked fine in development. Deploying to production led to this error:

/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.0.5/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:249:in `load_missing_constant': Expected /myapp/releases/20090617160914/app/models/widget.rb to define Widget (LoadError)

Googling that error turned up lots of pages for Rails 1.2.x and issues with underscores in names. None of it applied. Widget was definitely being defined in widget.rb. Following the stack trace it appeared that the error was thrown in the Ultrasphinx plugin. After trying a lot of other things, I decided to comment out the Ultrasphinx code in the model and retry. The error changed to this, which was helpful:

Errno::EACCES: Permission denied - /myapp/releases/20090617160914/public/widget/myfile

This model was also using the file_column plugin, and the underlying error was just a permissions problem in the file attachment target directory. I fixed the permissions and put the Ultrasphinx code back in the model, and all was happy. If only that permissions error had shown up first!