Trouble Upgrading Fox Go Server Under Parallels Desktop

I am publishing this blog post specifically to ask for help. I have provided a link to this on the Go Facebook Group.

I installed Parallels Desktop so I could use the Fox Go Server on my MacBook Pro. I have been playing on the Fox Go Server for a couple of months now with mixed results.

The first problem I experienced was the inability to download my games. At first I was able to download games. Then, even if I could get my games list to open, I was unable to get a game to load so I could download it. I had to resort to asking friends to download my sgf files for me. This was a major annoyance because it meant that I was unable to review my losses in a timely fashion. I also felt as if I was inconveniencing my friends.

The next problem is that when it became necessary to upgrade the Fox server program I discovered that under Parallels the outdated Fox program could not download the updated version of the program.

There was a solution to this. I found that it was necessary to drag the old program to the trash and download the updated program from the internet and install it fresh. I was able to do this at least five times without a problem.

A friend pinned a link to the Fox Server download on a Discord server that we both use. So I was always able to find the download link when I needed it. That was really helpful.

Just recently, however, I ran into a new problem with updating.

I downloaded the new exe file and installed it. 

I chose "yes".

After downloading an updated Fox server exe file, and installing it, the program wanted to update. 

This made no sense because previously the new installed Fox Server programs did not need to update because they were recognized as the latest files. The fact that it was attempting to download was a big problem.

Clicking on "yes" starts an unending attempt at downloading.

I tried dragging the program to the trash and downloading multiple times, but each time I ended up in an endless download attempt after installing the new exe file.

I am hoping that the file on the web is still outdated, and that the new file will be uploaded there soon. That would explain the problem. However, if every new exe insists on downloading after installation I will never be able to play on Fox again under Parallels.

Does anyone know what is going on?

I am thinking I might need to buy a Windows machine exclusively to run Fox and Katrain.

Parallels is worthless to me if I can't run Fox under it.

My Weekly Go Activities

 

I spent nearly 40 hours on Go Activities this week. I only played seven games this week, but I spent nearly six hours playing them. That is nearly an hour per game. All but two of them were unrated league games played on either KGS or OGS. The only two rated games I played were on Fox. 

Based on my recent performance on Fox I knew that I was likely to rank down. I only needed two more losses to accomplish that. So relatively late in the night on Wednesday I bit the bullet and played those game. 

I now have a fresh start on Fox as a 6 kyu. 

I have continued my concentration on Go Problems this week. I met my goal of over one thousand problems on the 101 Weiqi web site.

I believe that working on go problems helped me win my most recent Canadian League Game. There was a life and death problem in the upper right of the board. I took the time to read it. I trusted my reading. After my opponent gave up and played elsewhere I continued to trust my reading, and I did tenuki as well. I was proud of myself. I got a good lead in that game which my opponent whittled away at in the end game. I managed to win it by 9.5.

Here is the life and death situation. 

AI would have preferred that I play at m19 rather than p19. A friend of mine, Drewch, who clicked through the game later, suggested m19 as well. 

During the game I considered m19, but was not sure of the continuation. It gave me comfort to make two rooms with the p19 move. 

I did manage to read that playing p19 allowed me to answer m19 with n19. That is one eye. I read that I could answer q18 with r19. That was easy. There was a more challenging move for black.  I read if black played s19 I could not r19 which made me a little crazy. But then I miraculously read that I could q18 because black could not r19. That would leave a three stones capture. That would give me an eye because a throw in would not spoil the eye of a three stone capture as it would with a two stone capture.

I was proud of my reading.

To be clear I had at least twenty minutes on my clock when I ran into the life and death situation. I have little doubt that if I was in overtime that I would have had trouble with it. I am just now beginning to actually read in my games. It is kind of a miracle that I have gotten as far as I have on instinct and principles. Be that as it may, it is now time to learn how to read.

Most of my life and death skills to this point have been based on the Life and Death Principles of Yilun Yang. You can read about his method of approaching Life and Death on Sensei's Library.

My goal for next week is to review more of my losses on a real board, and to play more rated games on Fox. I also need to learn how to avoid making stupid mistakes late in the game. I need to learn how to bring a won game home. I lost two games this week that clearly should have been won. One of them I lost because I trusted my reading, but I was wrong. I don't feel too bad about that. I just need to get better at reading.

My Weekly Go Activities

 

I spent over 40 hours last week on Go Activities. A good chunk of my time was spent watching others play, specifically my good go buddy Drewch on the Fox go server.

I decided to try to rank up to 4k this week on Fox. I only needed two wins in order to do it. However, things did not go as planned. I had five losses in a row on Fox over the course of two days, and now I only need two more losses to rank down to 6k. This rank down now seems as inevitable as the rank up had seemed previously.

I am in a disturbing downward spiral.

I played ten games this week. Half of them were league games played on either OGS or KGS. The remainder were rated games on Fox.

I did manage to kick some Canadian butt last night. It is the last game for the week.

I have been asked to replay my losses on a real board. I'm not a fan of the process yet, but I did spend over an hour this morning replaying three of my losses from last week on a real board in preparation for my lesson this afternoon.

I was a bit of a slacker this week with my go problems. I only got in 520 problems from the 101 Weiqi web site. 

I did manage to do a timed test of the cutting problems. I came in at only 88% accuracy so I will need to be working on that set again soon to raise my accuracy to at least 90%.

My Weekly Go Activities

 

I put in over 35 hours on Go Activities this week. At the top of the list was Clossius Lesson (Others), which is watching the go lessons of my fellow Clossius students. I had a Clossius Lesson Festival, spending nearly seven hours watching go lessons.

I tried to get ten games played this week, but came in short at eight games with four wins and four losses for a 50% win rate.

Last night it came down to a choice between getting in those last two games or getting 700 go problems for the week from the 101 Weiqi site. I chose go problems over playing because I really need to improve my reading.

My last game of the week had a Trouble Master that I missed. If my reading had been up to snuff I surely would have seen it. Even without seeing it all the way through, I should have invested two stone that would cost me nothing because they needed to be answered. Once they had been answered I would have easily seen the continuation. 

This was actually a pretty good game even though I lost it by 3.5. A friend of mine who observed the game commented that I had played a lot of active moves and had attacked things. There was a life and death situation with the e2 group that I failed to see. I don't think it was obvious though. When I finally attacked it I chose the wrong point to go in.

The Game

My goal for next week is to try for ten games. 

I will continue to do 700 problems on 101 Weiqi. 

My Weekly Go Activities

 

It was a good week for Go Activity with over 36 hours. For the first time ever perhaps Live Play came in with the most amount of time spent. That was followed by time spent on the 101 Weiqi web site doing go problems.

I managed to hit my minimum target of ten games, seven of which were rated with a 6:4 win loss ratio.

All but one of my games fell into the "feel good" margin of loss. Games 4 and 8 were played way too fast. I have to be more mindful of my speed of play. They were both played with the same player. In conversation after the second game I came to find out that he is a Spectator Member of the European Yunguseng Dojang. We chatted, and I friended him. He did admit to playing fast so his opponents would play fast. Maybe he feels he can handle fast play better than others. The results suggest that he can. I obviously can't. I got sucked into his rate of play.

I did force myself to play this week with mixed results. I am trying to build the habit of playing in order to increase the number of games I play which is why I forced myself to play. If I get some bad results because I am not in the mood to play, I am just going to have to accept that.

My emphasis on Go Problems has continued. I completed over 1,000 problems on the 101 Weiqi site this week. I feel really good about that.

My Weekly Go Activities

 

This week was light on Go Activity. I had only a little more than 23 hours. I consider myself to have lost a week of go study by attending an online conference for five days, so I am going to add up games from last week and this week and consider them one week with one week lost.  

I have ten games to show since my last lesson.

Unfortunately it has been a really bad week, and I was unable to win a single game this week. However, every game played in the past two weeks fell within the "feel good" loss margin of 25 points, so they are all colored green on the game link column.

All but one of the games this week were played as black with the Points Lover Fuseki.  I am either doing poorly playing this opening or I am getting into trouble in the middle game, but I am losing. 

The game played on Fox is unavailable for review because I was unable to download it.

Intensive work on go problems has continued as shown below. 

Once the week is over I repurpose the spreadsheet above for the next week and move the total figures to a chart I am using to keep track of problems and games for the remainder of the year.

I'll admit to being a down about my game results this week. However, I am just going to continue to use the Points Lover Fuseki, at least in the games I play on OGS. I've dropped to 7 kyu. I'm not going to let myself care if I drop to 8 kyu. I'm sticking with this for a while. My plan is to put together an sgf file with Points Lover opening games in it and learn from it.

My Week of Go Activities

 

I spent over 37 hours on Go Activities this week. It was a very light week for Live Play because I was participating in a five day online video conference. That conference will spill into the next week, so my Live Play will be less than I would like for that week as well. I'm just going to consider the total for the two weeks as one week and accept the fact that a week has been lost.

There was no go lesson last week.

The big theme for the week has been an emphasis on Go Problems I spent over five hours on Spaced Repetition Problems and more than six and a half hours on 101 Weichi.

As always, Watching Others Play came in as the top activity.

I created a spreadsheet to keep track of my go problems for the week. After the week is over I transfer the weekly totals to a tab on my games spreadsheet. Then I reuse the sheet below to keep track of the next week.

The formulas on the right of the sheet are for gathering data for timed trials of problem sets. I performed my first timed trial on row 9 "Double Atari" of the 101 Weichi Spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was provided to me by my teacher Shawn Ray.

I copied the 101 Weichi spreadsheet to a sheet one of my own, and added columns for my own use. Below is a small part of my adaptation of the spreadsheet showing the results of my timed trial in the two columns on the far right. Blue cells represent Safari tabs that I keep open on my computer. When I close a tab I eliminate the blue color in the cell.

Upon editing, I deleted the column with Chinese language url links. I added a column for Safari translations.

My goal for the upcoming week is to continue working hard on go problems and to try to get in enough games to bring my two week total to a minimum of ten. If I can do better than that I will be happier.

My Week of Go Activities

 

This was a particularly active week with over 43 hours of Go Activity. Watching Others Play dominated the week. I played only eight games this week which is two short of my minimum. However, I spent over six hours playing those games largely because some of them were serious games. Three of the games were league games, and I won two of them. The one league game I lost was by only 1.5 points. I am currently undefeated in the MGA League.

I got a review from Clossius for the league game that I lost. He made it clear that this game came down to cutting points. I am not seeing the weaknesses of my opponent. Interestingly enough my opponent was not seeing her weaknesses either. 

My goal for this week was to do more problems on the 101weichi web site. I completed an average of 100 problems a day for a total of 700 problems this week. Because I keep track of how much time I spend doing problems I was able to calculate that I spent 26 seconds on average per problem.

In addition to the problems on the 101 site I am also keeping up with my Spaced Repetion problems on the Guo Juan Internet Go School. I do at least 150 problems a day there, so I did about 1050 additional go problems this week. I'm not lumping the Spaced Repetition problems in with the 101 problems though because they are different.

My goal for next week is to increase the number of games played to at least ten if not more. I will continue with the work on 101 Weichi.

My Week of Go Activities

 

I spent over 36 hours on Go Activities this week. There is a really big chunk of Clossius Time composed of four different Clossius activities. That is the large swath of pink on the left of the pie chart. I spent a significant amount of time this week watching the lesson videos of other Clossius students. 

I was a bit light on the number of games I played. There were only seven of them. That is three short of my self imposed minimum of ten. Only two of the games were rated.

If you click on the link below you can view the entire spreadsheet.

My Spreadsheet

In spite of playing so few games,  Live Play came in at over five hours. This is because the majority of the games were serious league games.

I am really enjoying playing in the leagues because it means more serious games that will be reviewed.

All but one of my games for the week fell within the 25 point "feel good" loss margin set by Clossius. The one that fell outside the margin did so by only half a point. Notice all of the light green in the OGS Game Link column on my spreadsheet.

My league game for the MGA was a narrow 1.5 victory. I felt good about the game, but I also felt very lucky. I always feel lucky when there is such a narrow victory because those games could easily have gone the other way. I felt even luckier, however, when I looked up my opponent in the AGA database. I found that she is 5 kyu AGA. I am 9 kyu AGA, and we had played an even game. My opponent played very well, and the game got complicated. There was a trade in the middle game. I am not sure who benefited from that trade, but I will probably find out next Monday when the game gets reviewed during a Zoom meeting. 

The bad news for this week is that I ranked down to 7 kyu on OGS. That is to be expected while I ride the line between ranks. I'll have to play a few more games on OGS this week to see if I can rank back up again and maintain the promotion.

There is other bad news. I've done fewer go problems on 101 Weichi lately than on the Internet Go School. I was particularly bad this week about that. I need to continue finishing my due problems on the Internet Go School, but I need to make more time for 101 Weichi too because that is how I can improve my reading skills.

My Week of Go Activities

 

This week I spent just shy of 30 hours on Go Activities. My life is feeling more balanced as a result.

I managed to play my minimum of 10 games this week. I did it by playing two games per day on five days, so I actually got two days off from playing. My games this week included an MGA League game and a Clossi League game, both of which I won.

It was hard getting in the last two games for the week, and I did force myself to play on a few days. It was quite late last night when I started to play my last game of the week, but I wanted to get it in. I was winning, but fatigue set in, and I missed an atari that forced me to resign. Aside from that it was a good game.

Look at all of that Clossius time clumped together in four categories on the left side of the chart! The narrow strip of Clossius time at the top of the chart is accounted for by the review of my Clossi League game this week.

As always my games spreadsheet is open to everyone to view. It includes links to my lesson videos with Clossius, links to all of my games, and AI-Sensei links to my losses.

My Week of Go Activities

 

My Weekly Go Activities blog post is coming much later in the week because I have rearranged my week to accommodate my new lesson day of Friday. I want to give Clossius a full week of the most recent games on my games spreadsheet.

I spent 36 hours on Go Activities this week and about half of that time was on Essential Go Activities in the form of Live Play, Go Problems, and Game Reviews. I have come to the conclusion that it is no longer worth the trouble of documenting the difference between Essential and Non Essential go activities. I don't think it is productive since I am pretty consistently logging between a third and a half of my time on Essential Activities. As a result, I am going to be dropping those statistics from my blog posts moving forward.

I am dropping a few things from my games spreadsheet as well.  I will no longer document the date that games are played. It is an extra step that does not give me any value in my spreadsheet, so I have eliminated the date column. 

I am keeping the Day of the Week column because I use it to plan my games through out the week, and I do see value in seeing if I am taking too many days off or if I am trying to get in too many games in one day.

Another column I am getting rid of is the Time of Day column that I had used to code the three hour periods in which I was beginning games. It served a purpose when I first stared using it to focus my attention on attempting to play earlier in the day. Unfortunately, the sad truth is that my domestic situation forces me to play in the evening against my better judgment. I don’t need to see the codes to remind me that I am playing too late in the day.

You can see the results of the above mentioned changes here:

Anyone who is interested in watching any of my previous lessons with Clossius can view them by hovering over the Lesson Number on my spreadsheet and clicking on the url for the YouTube upload of the lesson. You can also replay any of my games, and view AI-Sensei reviews for my losses.

My Games Spreadsheet

My Week of Go Activities

 

I spent a little over 35 hours on Go Activities this week. A good portion of that time was spent being social at the end of the e-Go Congress Zooming. Another large portion of time was spent Watching Others Play.

I took a four day vacation from Go following the end of the Congress which accounts for my light week of only six games. The reason for the vacation is that I am starting to be afraid to play again. I’m a little late with my post this week because my lesson day has been moved from Tuesday to Friday so there was no real need to post at the beginning of the week.

I’ve started the new week fairly strong with three games on Sunday and three on Monday. I’m hoping to hit 15 games this week which is a step in the right direction. I've had a problem with Fox not updating, so that is an issue to deal with. I took a day off on Tuesday and I have been playing fast and furious with my fearless account on KGS. I lost two games in a row with fearless, and ranked down two ranks going from 5k? to 7k today.

On the bright side I am close to ranking up to 6k on OGS, but that is only making me more afraid to play and steering me toward using an account on KGS that I don't give a crap about.

 

Now for the important stuff: 

My rated win loss ratio is 4:2    (66% Wins)

 9:18    Essential Go Activities  

 2:24        26%    Live Play 

 5:06        55%    Go Problems

 1:48        19%    Game Review