Discussion2 rolls on... the most recent addition to the system is in-place comment posting. Essentially, little dynamic ajaxy slideout boxes to post directly within the thread, without going to a stand-alone page. This is great because you don't have to lose your place within the thread to post.

this functionality is currently only available to paid subscribers, and several hundred of them have tested it out already. We still need to make it look pretty and add a few minor things (like the CAPTCHA for anonymous posting) but it's almost done.

Also worth noting is that logged in users can click on the 'Score' field of comments to view the moderation information on the comment. This information was previously not visible within D2, unless you navigated outside the d2 system (opening a comment in a new window did it). I doubt most people really care about this info, but it's available.

We also have one (perhaps minor) thing to get in... right now if you visit a comment directly via a CID link you can navigate within that thread, but navigating 'up' the comment hierarchy results in a new page, and a new discussion... this makes context a pain to maintain. So pudge is going to change that page to display the parent posts in an abbreviated format. This will mean that you can climb back up the thread easily, even if you entered the forum via a link deep into a thread.

A few minor items left on the todo list (keybindings for threshold changes... maybe press 'r' to open the reply slideout from the current comment, and a bunch of small design issues to make the threads a little more visually clear and easily navigatable) and we're ready to call D2 finished.

We have no plans to remove D1, so those of you who hate D2 are welcome to stay on the old system, but obviously new moderation tools and whatever else we think of will be attached to D2, not D1, so you've been warned ;)

A group of researchers from UCLA Department of Materials Science and Engineering developed an artificial muscle made of carbon nanotubes, capable of healing itself. From the article: "The researchers used flexible, ever-more ubiquitous carbon nanotubes as electrodes instead of other films, often metal-based, that fail after repeated use. If an area of the carbon nanotube fails, the region around it seals itself by becoming non-conductive and prevents the fault from spreading to other areas." I don't know about you, but whenever I hear stories like these, my first concern is always whether I can use this technology to charge my iPod. Turns out, I can, as evidenced by Discovery Channel news report Artificial Muscle Heals Itself, Charges IPod.

MIT Technology Review describes a new Wi-Fi router from Intel capable of sending Wi-Fi signal at tens of miles away with somewhat decent 6 Mbps performance, which makes it perfect for rural Internet-less areas, and a number of countries interested in developing their Internet infrastructure, but no means to lay expensive cable or fiberoptics. The cost is roughly $500, and you need two such routers to create a point-to-point connection, Intel says: "Intel's RCP platform rewrites the communication rules of Wi-Fi radios. Galinvosky explains that the software creates specific time slots in which each of the two radios listens and talks, so there's no extra data being sent confirming transmissions. "We're not taking up all the bandwidth waiting for acknowledgments," he says. Since there is an inherent trade-off between the amount of available bandwidth and the distance that a signal can travel, the more bandwidth is available, the farther a signal can travel."

Acer is considering introducing an open, or standards-based gaming console into the market, company's sernior vice-president told BetaNews: "Wong said that, beyond "openness," all of the Acer-branded systems being eyed right now, including the game machine, are envisioned as offering new and innovative form factors and applications." Currently global gaming market is dominated by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, with $480 million worth of gaming hardware sold in the United States in a single month, with projected 2008 spending of $6.4 billion just in the US.

ExtremeTech is running a review of 9 terabyte-sized hard drives. They take a look at Seagate 7200.11, Seagate Barraduda ES.2, Western Digital WD10EACS, Western
Digital WD1000FYPS, Hitachi 7K1000, Hitachi A7K1000, and Samsung HD103UJ. The verdict? "HDTach measures raw performance, such as transfer rates, access times, and CPU utilization. It's a very low level test that works best on unformatted drives. As we can see from both the read and write tests, Samsung's higher platter density gives it a substantial edge in raw data transfers. The Seagate drives come in second, while the Western Digital drives, with their slower rotational speeds, take up the rear."

Wal-Mart will discontinue stocking $199 Linux PCs made by Taiwanese company Everex, due to the lack of interest from Wal-Mart shoppers, company said. Company will sell gPCs through its online store at Walmart.com: "Walmart.com now carries an updated version, the gPC2, also for $199, without a monitor. The site also sells a tiny Linux-driven laptop, the Everex CloudBook, for $399."

Gary Gygax, July 27, 1938 - March 4, 2008

This is an odd one for me -- depending on how you look at it, I was in the RPG world for many years, but not of it, or of it, but not in it. Most of my friends are gamers, some of them quite hardcore for years. When I was a teenager, I wrote a paper RPG. (In retrospect, it seems as though what I was reaching for -- completely independently of anything, since I didn't know the people involved and they didn't know me, and there was a lapse of several years involved -- was what someone else eventually wrote as Vampire: The Masquerade, although what I came up with was closer to GURPS and, admittedly, ultimately unplayable. At least I got class credit for it.) I had a front-page entry in the Daily Illuminator (under the name of the person whose e-mail I was borrowing at the time, since I didn't have one of my own -- scroll down to October 2). I even owned a set of dice. (I've since given them away.)

However... Aside from a few abortive attempts at LARPing in the mid-90s, I've never actually played a pen-and-paper RPG.

However again, if it hadn't been for the RPG culture, in which I was at least an interested bystander if not an out-and-out participant, I never would have become the (geeky-but-at-home-with-it) person I am today.

So I owe one to Gary Gygax. Thanks, man. I've never even played your game, but you still changed my life.

IDG News reports on new projects developed at Microsoft Research, and presented at company's annual TechFest. Among them - Lucid Touch, a handheld device that responds to the touch on the back of the device, not front, and Blews, a blog tracker discovering hotly debated news items.

This comes from Shadow Wrought, and others...

Post a comment to this thread, and I will:

1. Tell you why I befriended you.
2. Associate you with something - fandom, a song, a color, a photo, etc..
3. Tell you something I like about you.
4. Tell you a memory I have of you.
5. Ask something I've always wanted to know about you.
7. In return, you must post this in your Journal/Blag/whatever.

In the last few weeks, we've switched most users over to the new 'D2' discussion system- a fully ajaxified discussion system. There are a number of minor bugs, but I figured I'd toss up a few quick notes to address the biggest user complaints.

1. you can turn it off if you log in. Some people get stuck in there ways, and no matter what we build it will never make you happy. So you can have the old lame system and we'll all enjoy the new cool system without you.
2. you can get 'nested' mode back by dragging the 2 thresholds together in the floating slider. they connect and become a single thing. it's quite nifty, and if you are logged in the setting is remembered so you don't have to click to navigate deep threads.
3. you can get more comments at once from the 'prefs' link. the default is currently 50, but choosing 'many' changes that (currently) to 250, which means you will get roughly the average number of comments in a typical slashdot story. Yes you will need to click 'more' on a huge discussion, but at that point we're talking about very large pages and slower computers like to choke on huge pages anyway so we have to balance size and performance.

there are 2 huge wins here for everyone... the first is retention of context. You can wade into a thread, retrieve more comments, change your threshold, all without losing your place like you did in the old system. And using the WASD keys to navigate makes it very easy to peruse discussions in a number of interesting ways. mouseover the help text in the floater for more information about how they work. We're open to suggestions on how this should work- i'm not totally happy with it yet... but it *is* possible to mash a single key and go from start to end of a discussion, which pleases me.

the second is that the default users see the highest score comments first. You can change this by logging in and toggling the retrievable order to oldest first, but for most people this means that the first comments they see will be the best. There are so many great comments on Slashdot, but most users don't see them because they are buried within the discussion. I think this goes a long ways towards helping.

A final word about the ads in there- unfortunately there are ads in the new system. Changing from a static page-page-page system to a dynamic ajax system with a single 'page load' causes us to serve hundreds of thousands of fewer ads. We worked out roughly how long people read discussions and are trying to strike a balance so that you see roughly the same number of ads under this system as you would have under the old one. We'll tweak it of course, but we gotta pay the bills here people!

And obviously all of this is a work in progress. Pudge is leading development work on this. The next project is to make it possible to post without losing your place in the discussion, and then to refine navigation keybindings and thread expansion/contraction controls to make the whole UI clean. We appreciate constructive criticisim. There are bugs (especially in IE, but almost no slashdot user runs IE) but we're mashing them out- thanks for your feedback on them. As we sand off the rough edges I think you'll all find the new system a vast improvement if you just play with it for a bit and give it a fair chance. Not all change is bad ;)

Well, like any young couple buying a(n old) house, at some point you reach the inevitable point where you need to get outside jobs done. In our case, we had a lot of repairs to do, but one of the more obvious ones was a leaking rain-pipe on the street-side.

Meanwhile, after consulting various people and opinions, architects, etc, and making sure that our roof was still in acceptable conditions, we had some people install 3 windows (Velux) in our roof, so that we could have sunlight in our rooftop story. At first, we were very happy while blinking our eyes from the contrast adjustment, until we discovered that the quality of the work had been seriously below par. Pans were sitting loose, rain would seep in on the sides, and the windows themselves had been damaged and placed quite arbitrarily.

It was in august, and it was, completely in check with any other Belgian summer, raining cattle and zoo. While all kinds of animals fell from the sky, we started looking for a second team that could repair our rain-pipe. It was broken just underneath the plumbing of the collector, at the end of our tilted roof. After 2 people not showing up and 2 others being either too expensive or not very trustworthy, we thought we had found our guy. At first he would only remove one chimney, do the repairs on the plumbing, and the re-placement of the Veluxes. We were happy to have found ANYONE working for a fair price and helping us out. We signed him up for the job. This was around the end of September. He would only be free starting from mid-October and estimated that the job would be finished beginning of November. This sounded good, knowing that wintertime was coming. I wanted things to be done by December.

It was already the end of October when he first showed up. He had an elevator lift with him, and the removal of the chimney went swiftly. We were pleased. After he showed us a finished house he did from top to bottom a few blocks away, we talked about having the room isolated and prepared, and he volunteered to do this as well. Then he discovered that some of the large wooden ledgers were rotting away where they jointed with the walls. The ledgers had indeed looked a bit doubtful, bending under the weight of the keepers quite significantly as well. The whole roof would have to go, but he assured us that building a new roof and removing the old one would "just take 1 or 1.5 weeks extra". We were skeptical, but we signed a new contract detailing the extra work and materials.

He then started to remove the pans from the roof. This dragged on for quite some time, took about a week. Our hopes were still somewhat high but then the weather turned nasty. So nasty in fact that he didn't show up for one week, two weeks.. in the meantime it started storming and raining.. and we had no pans on the roof! The old under roof, a sort of light wooden layer that was looking like carton boards, was our only protection, and was getting soaked fast. After installing rain pots to deal with the biggest leaks that started popping up, I called him to provide a solution. He came and told us he had draped large plastic covers over the roof. We were somewhat happy that it didn't rain in our house (or so we thought), but our patience was starting to run out fast. 2 houses down the street, other roof workers had removed and re-constructed a new roof in only 2 weeks, rain or no rain. The next day we were on the 1st floor and we noticed odd yellow lines on the white painted ceilings. Going to second floor, we saw a soaked visitors bed, soaked books, soaked (freshly scraped) wooden floor, soaked IKEA pets, and a ceiling that was displaying weird patterns and bulges. Running to the top floor, I saw that the floor was wet, but not *THAT* wet. Apparently the water had found it's way down quite rapidly. I was trying to keep my calm and made another phone call, while installing more buckets. Our worker team came to take a look and agreed to repair it, at their expenses. Meanwhile I had found the source of the leak, and after a little bit of parley, the guy told us that yes, the badge he had used to fight off the rain had been about 80 cm's too short. Well. I guess that was the end of me being nice to him.

The story dragged on all the way until the 20th of December. By then the roof had been taken down (finally) and a new wooden construction was put in place, and new water collectors had been constructed to get the rainwater to the pipes. But the collectors still had to be leaded and the pipe connection itself (the reason that we had ventured with him) was still broken! This had taken another week. We were planning on going to Zandvoort / The Netherlands for 3 days. We had phoned him every day multiple times to get him to work on our roof, and he promised us to work during the weekend so that it would be closed up. In Zandvoort we got a phone call that the roof was closed. We were cheering at least a little bit. At home, we found that the room was closed with some kind of plastic cover under-roof sections, but the pans were still nowhere to be seen. It took Christmass and New Year to come round before the last pan got on the roof, at the cost of one call per 10 pans or so.

So now it's almost the end of January, the front collector has been leaded and the joint with the rain pipe is fixed. About 60% of all the protective slabs of the roof have been placed, and there is still some woodwork missing at the underside of the rain collector. We haven't even started discussing how the inside would be done. The guy does not pick up the phone or return calls for about 7 days. We have sent him a paper that states all the problems caused by him by mail (for which he has to sign) so we are now officially following legal proceedings.

I hope your roof treats you more kindly!

Tick Tock Tick Tock
She's walking like a clock
Tracking the river's path
On the high heels of time

Hi there,

I am proud to announce that Binary Colonies Pacman has been released. Check it out!

Cheers,
a0a

Since this is not yet documented, I figured I would mention this here now... we are experimenting with some very rudimentary keystroke navigation in the discussion2 system. We support both FPS style WASD keybindings, as well as the standard vi layout of HJKL. Down/Up will cycle you through next/previous comment chronologically... left/right will cycle you through next/previous in thread order. Holding SHIFT down while you press the navigation key will collapse the previous comment. And when you get to the end, pressing down or right will attempt to retrieve more comments if you want them.

What this means is that you can now use D2 to simulate most of the most popular viewing modes of the original discussion system. By dragging both the abbreviate & display sliders right next to each other you effectively remove abbreviated comments which simulates nested mode. By toggling comment retrieval order to 'Oldest First' and using up down, you can effectivel read the discussion from oldest to newest. And of course the default settings gives you the best comments first, providing a nice default view of discussions for most anonymous users (who rarely participate and we want to really show only the best comments).

You can also disable D2 in the comment prefs (the word 'prefs' in the floating dialog box) if you are logged in. Right now we're testing D2 for a large percentage of anonymous readers. As soon as we finish IE7 support we'll roll out D2 for the rest of the ACs.

[Here's a 2nd try, as the first attempt evidently went to bit heaven.]

Saturnday night I went out with other Santa Cruz Astronomy Club members to the Bonny Doon airfield. I live about 15 miles from the site and was a bit put off when upon unpacking found the power cord had left its storage compartment on my portable power pack. I'd been there before, leaving it home, but this time it appears well and truly lost. (Sunday I picked up a new cord at Radio Shack and used a tie-strip to secure it to the eq. mount.)

So muscling the LXD-75 10 inch SNT around was the order of the night. Not terrible, but it meant no tracking, which is the feature I depend upon most. Around midnight Orion cleared the trees and I swung the tube over to examine the Orion Nebula (M42), in Orion's sword. It's one of my favourite sights and this evening would be one of the best for viewing.

Early on I could easily make out the four brightest stars in Trapesium and continued to check up as Orion progressed higher. About 1:00 AM I was easily able to make out five stars, by 1:30 AM I was able to clearly see six, which is the full known compliment of blue stars in that stellar nursery. Cue massive geek astronomical excitement!

After a bit I swung the scope over to Fornax and Eridanus to scan for galaxies, which were in abundance. About 2:00 AM I was still wide awake, thanks to my 1L Sigg full of green tea, but knew I'd need to head home eventually or be the worse for it while unpacking and transporting all this wonderful dead weight back into the house. After returning home I was still pretty awake and enthusiastic enough to plan my viewing for the next week while downing some soup.

Sunday proved to be a difficult adjustment, even with the extra hour to sleep in.