In my last entry I talked about finding a good, free, online chess site and also my inability to locate a (for me) decent chess program.

Since then, I’ve discovered an even better chess site, Red Hot Pawn, and, via that site, a chess program, Rival Chess, that suits all of my needs.

There are a couple of things are better about RHP. One, Michelle is always notified via email every time it’s her turn to move. For some reason, which I never could figure out, she only got intermittent email notification from It’s Your Turn – although I was always notified. With RHP, she gets email all the time.

Also, I like the way that the screen refresh on RHP is much more responsive. Granted, it does use JavaScript so, unlike IYM, it’s not compatible with every browser set up (those that have JavaScript turned off for security reasons), but for most people it responds a lot better.

I did have one minor problem – Mozilla, for some reason, was unable to make any moves. I even went so far as to file a Mozilla bug about it. I found out shortly after, however, that it was actually my fault for having set a JavaScript security option that was preventing RHP from being able to do something it needed to do in order to allow chess piece movement. Now that that’s been cleaned up, I haven’t experienced any further problems.