Blunder

This is mostly for chess players on Linux, but others may find it useful as well.

The software this uses and needs is:
* LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)
* Crafty program for chess move evaluation and annotation (or equivalent)
* Xboard, or an equivalent (recommended, but optional)
* pgn2fen.exe program to convert PGN notation to FEN notation
* WINE Windows emulator to run pgn2fen.exe program

Download Blunder: Version 0.1 (84 K)

Blunder documentation
Live demonstration - Blunder installed on this website. Contains blunders I have made (and opportunities I have missed).

Most chess teachers say one of the methods to improve your game is to look over your games, especially your tournament games, and look for where you made mistakes. Part of this learning may be solely in the finding. However, not everyone has a grandmaster chess teacher looking over their games, who will point out blunders and missed opportunities that the student has missed.

Which is where my program comes in, which I call "Blunder". It is still in beta as everything has not been fully automated yet, but I have it working well enough for me. It definitely can be more automated, some of these steps are unnecessary. It is working though.

When I wrote this program suite, I assumed there must be a simple, public PHP program out there that would locally display chess board web pages when given a FEN input. I was surprised to find out there is not (or at least I couldn't find it). There were some contenders, but nothing simple and public that did what I needed, or even close to it. So I wrote displayfen.php, which is fed a FEN and pops out a chess board in nice 100x100 pixel square format that fits nicely on my browser. I also converted some GFDL Wikipedia Commons SVG chess pieces to PNG format and included them. If this is all you need, just grab the displayfen function from the displayfen.php file.

Also: Related to this, I began writing some programs to train me for openings. However, it is a little more difficult than the Blunder program for a number of reasons - there are 20 possible opening moves for white, and 20 possible counters by black, thus, in the first move we already have 400 possiblities. I have the beginnings of it if anyone is interested.

I'd post my e-mail straight up, but then the spam bots get it. I have an e-mail account at Yahoo - yahoo dot com. The part that goes before the at sign is my name - dennissheil .