Christian Laverton

The match between Mid-Norway (Trøndelag) and Mid-Sweden (Jämtland) has become a yearly tradition, and the 2008 edition was played this weekend. I participated for the first time for the Norwegian team, and was able to draw my game against a higher-rated opponent. But unfortunately the Swedish team beat us 13-7. This came as no surprise though, as the home team usually has an advantage. It is hard to convince the best players of the club to travel all the way to Østersund in Sweden to play a game of chess.

On sunday, a rapid chess tournament was played, with 15 minutes per player per game. With 32 players, there were quite a few strong players in the field, and I knew that getting a decent result would be a tough job. However, I got off to an amazing start, scoring 5 points on the 5 first rounds! This included wins against strong players such as Lennart Burman, Terje Lund and Ulf Persson. But my winning streak came to an abrupt halt when I faced Kjell Arne Lilleløkken. In the last round I got paired against Christer Mäki, the same player I met in the match the day before. Christer slowly outplayed me. Maybe I struggled to shake off the loss against Kjell? But when everything looked completely lost and resignable, my opponent made a terrible move, capturing his own pawn with my pawn! This is of course not a valid move, and because we were playing with blitz rules, it lost him the game. Christer was very disappointed, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how unfair the result was. However, this was quickly forgotten when I was handed the 1st prize trophy!

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Despite the warm weather, I decided to go to the cinema today with a friend. We saw Batman - The Dark Knight, and what a movie it was!

Earlier today I had noticed the incredible 9.4/10 score it has on imdb. I thought maybe this rating was a little biased, because most of the people who have rated it so far are probably Batman-fans. Thus, it might even out after a few weeks. But, the movie really lived up to the expectations. Especially Heath Ledger impressed me in the role of The Joker.

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What to do when you lose a game of chess? Well…

For more funny use of English, check engrish.com

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The tournament ended well for me, as I was able to snatch a full point on the final day. This put me on 50% with 4.5 of 9 points, and a nice 35th place. Doesn’t sound too impressive, but my performance was well above expected. The norwegian rating performance was 1881 (+172), and the international was 2021. I already have a provisional international rating of somewhere around 1800, so including this tournament I should get my first official international rating of somewhere around 1900 on the next FIDE list.

My friend and clubmate Anders Rundgren had a disappointing final day, but anyway ended up on a respectable 3 out of 9 points. His norwegian rating performance was 1573 (+143), so nothing to complain about!

Unfortunately I caught a heavy cold on wednesday, meaning that I’ve not been able to do anything useful the last few days. Hopefully I’ll be fit for fight again soon. Luckily I didn’t catch the cold during the tournament…

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I should probably have mentioned this before, but I’m actually playing in a tournament in Oslo now. Maybe I wanted to keep it a secret in case I played badly? Luckily I will never find out, since my performance has been above all expectations! My score is 3.5 out of 7, with 2 rounds to go, giving me an international rating performance of 2032 and a national rating performance of 1910.

I’m not sure what to say about the quality of my games. It seems that I often get very good positions out of the opening, but then struggle to make anything of the advantage in the middlegame. Actually in one of the games I lost and in two of my draws, I would say I had an almost winning advantage but failed to make any use of it. This indicates that opening play is one of my strengths, and that I should work harder on the middlegame phase and how to convert to an advantageous endgame.

The tournament is in memory of norwegian IM Svein Johannesen, who passed away earlier this year. The organizers have done a fantastic job so far, it has been a pleasure to participate!
I’ll try to write more about the tournament after today’s rounds. In the mean time, check the tournament blog.

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TSF arranged the rapid chess tournament Gamle Bybro 2008 yesterday, with 6 rounds of 30 minutes per player. My previous rapid tournament was a great success, where I won with 6 of 6 points. Because of this, I felt some pressure to perform well in yesterday’s tournament. But, the day before the tournament, Daniel Kovachev from OSS had signed up. He’s a 2250-player, especially strong in blitz and rapid chess. In addition, I went to a party saturday and drank quite a few beer.

Despite this, I played pretty decent chess and had 3.5 points after 4 rounds. In the fifth round I was paired against Kovachev with the white pieces. We played a classic Nimzo-Indian with 4. Qc2 0-0. As is usually the case for me in the Nimzo-Indian, I had no idea what I was doing. Still, I managed to survive all the way to an endgame where I should have held the draw. Unfortunately I’m far from a 2250-player in endgames, especially when low on time. 0-1 …

In the last round a relatively quick draw was agreed between me and Pål Andreas Hansen. I had the black pieces and was too tired to play for a win (although this could have given me the second place). So I ended up in third place, not a bad result at all!

My rating is now at 1709, which means it has increased 350 points in 1.5 year. Assuming my rating increase is linear, I should be 2000+ by the end of 2009

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My brother Edward and his girlfriend Trine are moving into my apartment. Today I helped Trine move her stuff, using a car from Rent-a-Wreck. The car turned out to be bigger than expected (a Mercedes diesel), so we managed to move everything in one go.

Although the car qualified to be called a wreck, it was fun driving. You get a “king of the road” feeling when driving such a big car.

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I have been working on a photo-application in J2ME. The main challenge turned out to be thumbnail generation. This isn’t really hard to do in the first place, the problem is the limited memory available. Trying to load photos captured with your mobile’s camera will most likely give you memory problems.

There is however one solution, which is to extract the thumbnail stored in the photo’s EXIF. Both Sony Ericsson and Nokia generate and put the thumbnail in the JPEG when you take a photo, but there is of course no guarantee that all photos have one.

The algorithm for extracting the thumbnail should be something like this: (where rByte is the byte you read)

1. Read through byte stream until you get rByte & 0xFF == 0xD8

2. Read thumbnail data until you find rByte & 0xFF == 0xD9

I found the necessary code as part of a slideshow tutorial (look for ImageFunctions.java in the downloadable source code)

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Today I tested Java Service Wrapper by Tanuki Software. Basically it’s software for running your Java application as a service or daemon, and really eases the task of starting, stopping, logging and monitoring your application.

It worked like a dream, and was fairly easy to set up!

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I’ve now started working at WapTheWeb’s office at Tiller, not too far from where I live. I’m doing some work for them, and they’ve been kind to lend me some space where I can do Microways work too.

The only downside is that the bus takes around 40 minutes, so getting a car might be a good idea…

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