As I said in the original story, I woul be posting and commenting on some of the designs as they came in, and posting them into my journal. I have a few of these right now, and I'm posting them so I can give some guidance to everyone on what is good and bad.

I've had probably 15 or so "Real" designs submitted. Half were (ahem) bad or just not at all what I'm looking for. What follows is a couple of them They aren't necessarily the best, but each has a few things about it that I like that i thought was worth sharing to help give everyone guidance.

first I have a design from Sujay Thomas. I like that this design is CSS. I think the handling of the topic icons in the corner is a bit clumsy. I think the margins are a bit excessive. I think the bars on the left and right need a bit of work. But I think the center column is clean, simple and very readable. I don't think that this design will win without some work: i think it might be to minimal for what I'm looking for. It's also a bit high contrast for my tastes.

Next up I have Hallvar Helleseth's design. Now he is missing a lot of navigational elements, and I'm not sure what the 0-1-2 thing is behind the topic icons, but the design itself is a dramatic departure from Slashdot today, and I respect that. He tries something unique with the topic icons. I'm not sure that the earthtone color scheme is quite what I'm looking for, but I give him huge props for going somewhere unique. The 'More Slashdot' button atop the page shows you some ideas for where he is going with navigational elements. I think the left and right sides of the pages need a bit more differentiation, and there are a few missing elements that aren't properly classed, but this is another solid starting point. I like the reflection on the logo.

Dan Theman's Entry is just plain funny.

The final entry I will comment on today is a design from Philip Dhingra. First off, it is worth noting that his entry is a jpg- far from the CSS that I hope to ultimately see winning. His article space is clean and legible. Good choice on the data formatting. Moving the department line is interesting. His handling of the topic icons is unique, and a nice way to get around the limitations the icons present. He loses a few bits of information (story section for example) and explicitly labels the icons- I'd prefer not to label the icons. I want them to visually stand by themselves. I'm not sure about his left hand menu. But hsi choice to put the user information in the upper right hand corner is solid. It makes excellent use of the space. Likewise, his clean handling on the right of the slashboxes is really cool. Of the designs presented today, this is the most developed in terms of "Design" but the least developed in terms of "CSS". But I can't wait to see where this one goes.

a few random notes

so far nobody has tried a CSS expanding/contracting menu for the left hand side. Given the huge amount of space the menu takes up, I'm kind of surprised.

WRT the topic icons at the TOP of the page- I think that those are expendable.

WRT topic icons, tons of people suggested automated ways of converting them to pngs and such. Others suggested contsts seperate from this one to convert them. I'm open to anything, but as I stated originally, I think working with the icons we have is the most sane plan. But all my rules are flexibile here.

Most of the designs so far have really shrunk down the logo in the top left. I think thats fair: it's pretty huge right now and probably could use a trimming. Get the readers to the articles faster.

I have a lot more designs in my inbox that I plan to post here and comment on during the upcoming days.

April Fools is probably my favorite day to post on Slashdot every year. So many entertaining stories to choose from, and a steady flow of humorless angry users irate that their precious Slashdot is not taking the world seriously enough.

The pretty pink april fools day theme was my idea, but implemented by kathleen. The ponies thing was all her. As was some of the wordings, as well as the link to cute overload- a site that got pretty well slashdotted. Sorry about that.

the most interesting part of the day was the things that occured in the tagging system. We'll get some really good data out of the whole thing. Most of the tagging was done in good humor (although some users were understandably offended). But the system can only get better with the data we collect here.

I leave for LinuxWorld in like 6 hours. If you're going to be in Boston for the show, much of Slashteam will be in some sort of lounge area on the show floor tuesday. I think we're also there a fair bit on thursday. Wednesday is mostly sourceforge folks.

I always have mixed feelings on LWCE. I'm not a huge fan of travel in the first place. This year OSTG has a booth for the company which I'm expected to sit in for much of the show. It's been several years since I did this. It's not that it's hard- we just sit and work in a public place instead of a private one. Sometimes users pester us, but most folks are really cool.

I believe there will be wireless net access, so you're welcome to show up and just hang for a bit. We'll be the ones who's skin is pealing off from the flourescent lighting.

I have decided to move my blog to Blogsome. Please update your bookmarks. No, this is not an April Fools joke. Slashdot screwed up by not testing its pink theme on the journal section and so I am leaving. Read all about it at my blogsome blog.

Some stupid editor over at C|Net put the Nokia 770 in the same bag as some bad hardware products currently selling out there. He wrote:

"This thing, it surfs Internet. You want to make phone call? You can't make phone call. You like Ethernet? No Ethernet. You get Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi is nice. No wires! You like slow load times? Yes? It is good for that."

Hmm, this guy obviously has no idea about the PDA/gadget market. Why would anyone expect this (mobility-aware) tablet to do ethernet? And why would you expect it to do phone calls? Just because it comes from Nokia? So, if another department of Nokia started making dildos that guy would expect to also make phone calls with them too? The point of this product is to complement Nokia's phones (by surfing via Bluetooth+GPRS), not to compete with them.

"You like battery that lasts more than three hours? It does not have one. Nice screen, though."

The Nokia 770 has low standby times (because it doesn't support real standby), but when used continously, it can deliver over 3 hours of WiFi-activated usage and over 5 hours when WiFi is off. It still ain't as good as some high-end PDAs, but it ain't as bad as some other PDAs either (e.g. the Lifedrive which delivers less than 2 hours of Wifi usage).

So I work in a little armpit town called Dexter. It's outside of Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan. A great college town, with good food, concerts etc. Fantastic place to live. Dexter is a bit different. Like most of America, A2 is expanding and gobbling up the towns around it. Dexter, just a few decades ago was a little farm town. Now it is this wierd hybrid of people who bought 1 acre lot McMansions to escape the "City", and locals who have lived here for decades.

Today I finally found the perfect way to represent my town. This Trailer Hitch perfectly sums up Dexter. It was photographed just outside our office door. It raises many questions- not the least of which is How do you Get Away With That? With all the PC crap, is not a nutsack trailer hitch beyond the bounds of good taste? Now mind you the owner of this truck is my new hero. Personally, I think children ought to see things like this whenever possible. It builds character. It will make them strong.

The truck pulled away moments later. Gone forever. But I like to believe that he's just down the road, at the local elementary school picking up his own child amidst the throngs of screaming young'uns.

It is not a state secret as to how doomed the PDA market is. The market has moved to another level and business people who needed PDAs now buy phone-PDAs (aka smartphones). Here's the problem though: for companies that they don't do cellphones or their main market is PDAs this is a big problem because they see their market vanishing quickly. This is why a [true] rumor says that DELL is currently building a PocketPC phone too. HP, DELL's biggest PDA competition, has moved to PPC phones too.

But the big question is: where does this situation leaves Palm?

Palm already has 2 active smartphone models out there selling right now, but their main bulk of sales are STILL their PDAs. The PDAs that their sales decline overtime.

On two seperate recent occasions where Palm execs were interviewed, they made mention of a mysterious "new category of product" that they will add between their existing PDA/Lifedrive and smartphone product lines.

I am pretty sure that this new category is nothing but PDAs (of the Tungsten TX caliber) that have VoIP functions. I mean, think about it. VoIP is taking off, plain PDAs are dying, and Palm simply needs a shot of adrenaline to keep their product line still relevant to today's business needs. Sure, it's still the same wolf in a new dress but the relevance of VoIP today can help that product line to at least not become obscure.

Such a VoIP PDA is _very easy_ to implement by someone like Palm. All they need to add to a PDA like the Tungsten TX is two more buttons left and right for "receive" and "hang up" a phonecall, a microphone and a SIP application that can be written by their software staff (I hope not ;) or get bought/ported from a third party company. With a retail price at around $300 VoIP makes such a product both an excellent PDA and a business IP phone. The future of Palm, Inc. is phones and so it makes sense to grandually move their entire line to this market, being IP or Cell phones.

Now, if they could also replace their ugly font with a nicer, smaller, anti-aliased font, slightly color the application buttons' interior with a soft gray color and add A2DP/AVRCP/printing support to their Bluetooth stack, PalmOS 5.5 would rock and look more friendly to the eyes. ;)

I had a very weird off-topic dream this morning, but out of the blue, I dreamt of the Apple iPhone. And it was not at all as I imagined it in my "concious" self. My unconcious self saw it as a white iPod-sized laptop form-factor gadget. When the lid is closed, you are exposed to the iPod look, exactly as the iPod Video looks like today. When opened, you are presented with a larger widescreen on one side and a full qwerty keyboard on the other. So it's a bit like Danger's Sidekick phone, but better.

I guess, in a few months we will know if I am a psychic or not. :)

The 6280 is an amazing phone. The Nokia Series 40 environment has come a long way from the days that it was unusable. This phone makes it difficult to distinguish between smartphones and non-smartphones today. Only things missing from this phone is A2DP/AVRCP support, a standard audio jack and maybe a conversion application. Other than that, it's got the full monty.

"Senior Muslim clerics are demanding that an Afghan man on trial for converting from Islam to Christianity be executed, warning that if the government caves in to Western pressure and frees him, they will incite people to "pull him into pieces."

Religious fanatics get on my nerves.

The Science Channel showed today a nice documentary on the building of the Via Egnatia road that it's currently under construction in northern Greece. The documentary was spot on and the guy who put it together was very clueful (they even showed the road shrines that are put when someone dies in that spot). Towards the end it showed real footage of very dangerous driving in the Greek roads, and correctly noted that Greeks are the worst drivers in the european union.

The documentary correctly identified the overtaking, speed and lane-disrespect as the most important reasons for all the 22,000+ accidents that happen each year in Greece. And it did remind me how my brother wouldn't stay on his lane when we visited Athens last Summer. The reason for that is because all roads in our home in northern Greece are single-laned (one lane going towards one side, and one lane for the other side). Even if my brother is a very young person, he doesn't know how to behave on a multi-laned road. He doesn't know that he must stay on his lane instead of switching from one to another all the time for no good reason and without using the flash. Athenians are not much better either. So while we can say that Greeks are bad drivers, the conditions of the current roads have an effect in their performance too.

It was also nice to see my place in the US TV. They showed Ioannina and Metsovo, which are pretty close from where I am coming from and have visited a number of times.

If you go to our new bookmark page you can see our new taggable bookmark thingee. The tagging faq has a few entries specifically about it, including HTML for javascript bookmarking from your toolbar.

the most important part of this to US is that after a URL has been bookmarked, you have the option to write a journal about it, or submit it directly to the Slashdot authors for consideration as an article.

Also you can write a journal entry about it. Journal users will note a new function as well, a Submit to Slashdot function is now included in the Journal form. ticking that box will submit your story to the editors for consideration as a story.

The concept is roughly that you can now use the post-to-slashdot javascript to bookmark a URL. Then, once bookmarked you can write a journal entry about it. And when you check the appropriate box, that story is submitted to the editors. It's all quite simple, and it allows you to blog/submit/bookmark in one place.

Also bookmarks are taggable, so please try to tag them as best you can. We have a lot of stuff coming to this, but for now it's all in testing so please give feedback.

As I predicted a few months ago, Apple is working on a phone. A BenQ exec pseudo-confirmed it today when he revealed that this is common knowledge among Taiwanese hardware part companies who have been contracted by Apple to deliver the goods. Additionally, rumors say that the new iPod will have stereo Bluetooth support.

Update: Just for kicks, here's my iPhone mockup.

"A 27-year-old mentally disturbed man was beaten to death by enraged onlookers at a world-famous shrine in downtown Bangkok after he destroyed a popular statue of a Hindu deity with a hammer, police said."

Which is why I prefer (true) Christianity. Sure, there are a lot of crazy "Christians" out there that they would do the exact same thing to the poor guy if he was found to be destroying a deity of Christ or Virgin Mary. But true Christians would never kill or hurt, no matter what, because Christ preaches of love even to his worst enemy. Other religions --while well-respected and with longer history-- they don't go into such depth into love towards our fellow man. So even in the event that these Thai guys were not religious fanatics, they might had still choose to hurt someone just because their religion in its very center does not preach *love and forgiveness* as the most important things in someone's life. Christianity does so and that's the only reason why I am still a bit attached to it and haven't outskirted completely into becoming an atheist. Notice that I am not critisizing their religion, I just note this specific difference it has with Christianity and why I prefer Christianity (although I must say that Budhism is very tempting).

I read a very interesting editorial by an atheist a few weeks ago. He concluded that while he doesn't believe in God, he reads the Bible sometimes and he prompts others to do so, not because he believes in all the stories in the Bible, but because Christ's teachings ultimately make you a better person. And that's what matters. If Christ is truly who he said he was, then he would prefer people to live by his teaching and not recognize him as the Son of God, instead of recognize him as such but still sin. And so that atheist makes a better Christian than many others "Christians" out there.

Kelly of osViews has done it again. He once again accuses Thom that he is posting anonymously at his site, while Thom is really not. Kelly's half-knowledge of how IPs and ISPs work really show how this person who runs "OS"views.com has no clue about OSes whatsoever. Instead of the occasional XP usage and heavy OSX usage, the guy doesn't really run or endorses anything else. Anyways, Thom has made a good write up here.

I completely redesigned the Pocket MSN front page in i-Mode cHTML so it's looking better on non-IE PDAs or phones that Microsoft doesn't support. MSN's mobile page is querying the user agent and then sends either a WAP page or an IE HTML page. Thing is, none of their two versions look good, some of the code is heavy and unesessary (hey Microsoft, people are paying GPRS by the KB!!) and the web developer who wrote the HTML version for Pocket IE shows up his idiocy when he declares a gazillion of completely unessasery tables at 240 pixels width. While PocketPCs are 240 pixels width, the guy forgot to take into account the scrollbar! So, I redid the page and it now renders much better on devices that can do HTML. You are very welcome to use this cHTML (non-WAP) version of mobile MSN (don't worry, no info is being stored on my server, it's a plain HTML page). Just make sure you have already signed in on MS' MSN website (check the "save my email address and password" option while signing-in) and then, for any subsequent visit use my version.

To show you how much lighter and cheaper to use my version is, here is the rundown:
MSN Mobile's HTML-only page uses 8.07 KB and with all images it uses 14.7 KBs.
My version uses 4.50 KB for the HTML and 9.25 KBs overall (including images). And if I had taken the time to place all images on my server (resulting in smaller URL text) and properly optimize the gif icons, we would be seeing just 8 KBs of *overall* downloading (including images). And this means 7 cents of savings with Cingular's GPRS ratings ($10 per 1 MB). So if you are checking Hotmail or MSN sites once a day, that would save you half a dollar in a week's time. Might not be a big deal to wealthy people, but it's still a saving and if ALL supposedly-mobile pages out there were properly optimized, per-KB-GPRS-users would be saving many dollars per month over their cellphone bill.

Opera Mini is server-side and does a good job "cleaning up" unessasery code resulting in cheaper GPRS charges, but in the process makes most pages look like ass and as a web developer myself it's a tradeoff that I am not always willing to make.

UPDATE: Check one more comparison between the two sites on my QVGA Linux phone running Opera 7.50.

I managed two royal flushes this weekend in Reno, NV in Video Poker ("Jacks or Better" game). I made about $5 (I only play for pennies, just for fun, I never gamble). JBQ made over $300 clean profit I think. It seems that I would be making some hundrends too if I was playing $5 per hand, instead of the $0.05 that I actually played. But I am a chicken, I would never play for real money. I've seen many starving days in my life to starting now throwing money on bloody casinos.

Since the dependency of GTK+ to Cairo, the Gnome performance has taken a hit. It's not even something that's measured in some percentages, it's just visible when using the system. But Xara Ltd has some numbers to show how slow Cairo is compared to Windows' GDI. If they were using DirectDraw instead of GDI, it would have been many-many times faster than Cairo.