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.

Information, photos, and other silliness can be found here.

That is all.

The Ann Arbor party seemed to go great- lots of people packed Leopold Bros place, doing battle with barflies and football fans. It was somewhat bizarre watching obvious normal bar people try to figure out what this large crowd of 'different' people were all about. We handed out a ton of t-shirts, drank much alcohol, ate nachos etc. Our party had a great number of Slashdot and SourceForge staffers... all folks who have been with Slashdot for so many years it's hard to remember Slashdot without them. I'm not exactly sure how many people eventually showed up... a lot of our RSVPs didn't show, and a lot more didn't bother sign up at all, so I think the two balanced out.

For me personally these sorts of things are always difficult. I'm not very good at crowds. I can smile for a picture, but I'm perpetually nervous when surrounded by strangers who have certain expectations of me. There's a reason I live life behind a keyboard!

Further compounding matters lately is baby induced chronic sleep deprivation. Me want REM cycles. It's always nice to get out and have a beer. Kathleen & I get only so many hours "out" together now, gotta make each one count. The party attendees were all cool... and understanding that I was pretty tired.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who showed up... I've still got the california party later this week. Hopefully my throat heals up by then. The only real problem with this location was the acoustics... I had to shout to be heard, and stick my ear in front of people to hear them (baby crying has done some amount of hopefully temporary ear damage). My throat is raaaaw from yelling. Sucking on cough drops helps.

As for other parties, boxes have been shipped. Hopefully they have arrived to most places on time, although I think they were shipped on a slowish shipping option so I'm not sure. I know some folks got shirts on friday, but I'm sure the others will arrive monday or so. Also, keep in mind that we only had 700 shirts and 2300 attendees from 136 parties with more than 5 attendees. So obviously not every party is getting a box... when we sent out the bulk mail, we had over 100 replies, and I'm sure there was nowhere near enough to fill even that.

But shirts or not, I hope your parties go well. Remember to submit videos or pictures or whatever to anniversary at slashdot dot org for your chance at the $1k ThinkGeek gift certificate grand prize.

This feels like a mega-spam entry, and I'm very self conscious about posting it, but I'm excited about this and I wanted to share . . .

I just published my third book, The Happiest Days of Our Lives. I mention it here because it's all about growing up in the 70s, and coming of age in the 80s as part of the D&D/BBS/video game/Star Wars figures generation, and I think a lot of Slashdot readers will relate to the stories in it.

I published a few of the stories on my blog, including Blue Light Special. It's about the greatest challenge a ten year-old could face in 1982: save his allowance, or buy Star Wars figures?

After our corduroy pants and collared shirts and Trapper Keepers and economy packs of pencils and wide-ruled paper were piled up in our cart, our mom took our three year-old sister with her to the make-up department to get shampoo and whatever moms buy in the make-up department, and my brother and I were allowed to go to the toy department.

"Can I spend my allowance?" I said.

"If that's what you want to do," my mom said, another entry in a long string of unsuccessful passive/aggressive attempts to encourage me to save my money for . . . things you save money for, I guess. It was a concept that was entirely alien to me at nine years old.

"Keep an eye on Jeremy," she said.

"Okay," I said. As long as Jeremy stood right at my side and didn't bother me while I shopped, and as long as he didn't want to look at anything of his own, it wouldn't be a problem.

I held my brother's hand as we tried to walk, but ended up running, across the store, past a flashing blue light special, to the toy department. Once there, we wove our way past the bicycles and board games until we got to the best aisle in the world: the one with the Star Wars figures.

I'm really proud of this book, and the initial feedback on it has been overwhelmingly positive. I've been reluctant to mention it here, because of the spam issue, but I honestly do think my stories will appeal to Slashdotters.

After the disaster with O'Reilly on Just A Geek, I've decided to try this one entirely on my own, so I'm responsible for the publicity, the marketing, the shipping, and . . . well, everything. If this one fails, it will be because of me, not because a marketing department insisted on marketing it as something it's not.

Of course, I hope I can claim the same responsibility if (when?) it finds its audience . . . which would be awesome.

So if you only count anniversary parties with 5 or more attendees, we have 128 venues with a grand total of 2366 attendees. The largest parties include Pudge's in seattle with 129, mine in Ann Arbor with 194 and Hemos's in CA with 197.

I'm sure that there will be many RSVPs that no show, but still, that's still an awful lot of interest. We'll be shipping shirts to a good number of those parties, but we have triple the attendees to shirts available, so we'll see just how far we're able to spread the love. Emails will be going out to party planners in the next couple days to get postal addresses.

As we're nearing 100 signed up people for the A2 Slashdot anniversary party, we've changed the venue to Leopold Bros... it's just a block south from the other place and they can handle us. I've also got word that we'll be printing a few hundred extra shirts since there was already like 50 parties with 5+ people in attendance. We certainly won't have enough for everyone, but we'll make a good dent in it.

I will of course put this information into a story next reasonable chance I get for a story, but I figured at least I could get the word out there. The anniversary party entry on the official page has been updated with the new location & address.

The A2 party already has like 70 signed up. We're going to have to rethink venue or time I think if we really have that many people. Wait a few more days and see what we can work out. Keep reading in the party forum for info. We have 500 shirts to print and hand out... it'll be fun to see where they go.

more info as I get it. There will be notes on future stories as days get closer.

If any of you are using an iPhone and are willing to help test out some Slashdot handheld crap, shoot me off a note... my email is the same address as always, and if you can't guess it, you probably can't help anyway ;) I've built a stylesheet and Tim put together a few little options that we think will make a few bits of Slashdot look nice on an iPhone (or really most lower resolution displays) but unfortunately none of us actually HAVE one yet... so anyway, let us know. Or if you work at Apple, send us freebies dammit!

Simple tasks like switching between Firefox and Thunderbird are driving the load on my machine up over 4, and if I'm trying to run Amarok at the same time, it drives it up to 8. In fact, my machine frequently climbs up into the 7-9 range, bringing my apps to a crawl and frustrating the hell out of me.

So I've decided it's time to buy a new computer. I'm going to replace my aging Sony Vaio desktop machine (which runs Linux) with something newer that has more RAM, a faster processor, and a bigger hard drive.

The thing is, I'm not entirely sure where to start looking. A quick walk through Circuit City a month or so ago lead me to believe I can get a rather "big" computer for as low as five hundred bucks, which further leads me to believe that if I were to buy something online, I can get a huge pile of RAM, a fast processor, and a big honkin' hard drive for even less.

I run Kubuntu, and use KDE as my desktop (though I occasionally switch to Gnome when I get bored) and I mostly use Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, Amarok, and run PokerStars in wine. I'm looking for something that can do all of that without slowing my machine to a crawl.

Anyone have any suggestions on where to start looking?

Edit: I don't think I have the patience to build my own machine out of individual parts. I also don't have any real loyalty to any particular company or architecture. New Egg has lots of machines with AMD processors, and though I've always had Intel processors because more things seemed to run on x86, that's not as much of an issue as it once was, right?

The discussion2 system had 2 notable changes in this weeks code refresh that I'd love to hear feedback on (use email if you can't post here). The first is Scott's very excellent new draggable slider control. Everyone mostly figured out the slider tool before, but it was very unresponsive... but no longer! It has some layout niggles under some browsers, but it functions properly in most of them.

Equally exciting is new dynamic updating... the old code actually transferred the full discussion and displayed/hid content as requested by your settings. Thew new code properly requests comments as needed, and when needed. This cuts page sizes dramatically for people reading with filters turned up very high. It also puts us a few stone throws away from a 'refresh' button which can just add newly posted comments in place. There's some work to be done yet, but it's made a lot of progress. I hope you like it.

We've tested everything under most of our most common browsers... if you're curious they are very roughly FF2 38%, FF1.5 19%, IE7 8%, Safari 7%, Opera 3%. Missing from our compatibility list is IE6 with 13% of our traffic. Fixing IE6 is non-trivial and we'd certainly take patches... but since the IE6 population lost a point or two last month anyway, and fixing the code is pretty substantial, we'll probably be focusing our development time on the larger and growing platforms (FF2 and IE7 obviously being the most important).

Anyway, merry-whatever-you-believe to everyone out there. I'm spending my holidays the same as always- driving from family gathering to family gathering. Roads suck but the person I like being with most is in the car too, so it doesn't matter.

Here's a (no nudity, but not everyone is wearing a parka if you know what I mean) clip explaining how the two differ and how that may align with your interests.

Personally, I wish there was a video game console that could be summed up with this pic but what do I know.

(PS if anyone knows that model's name, and/or if she is for sure the model appearing in the Sigma SD14 DSLR print ads [the ones in the photo magazines] let me know).

If you have enabled the Discussion2 beta, you will notice a number of confusingly titled links appearing in comments. These control expansion/contraction of threads in several different ways. They are confusingly titled because we want you to try each of them and let us know which ones you like best without concerning yourself explicitly with how they work.

You can email your feedback to me (try d2 at cmdrtaco dot net) or some of you can actually post here.

I think next week will have a patch with a number of D2 changes (including some results from this experiment hopefully) so your help is really appreciated.

Link 1

Link 2

As web applications grow more and more featureful, I slowly find myself replacing desktop apps with web apps. This really makes a lot of navigation on the desktop a real pain in the ass. Example: Gmail. It's probably open in a tab right now. Not sure which one... occasionally we accidentallly close tabs. But if I use quicksilver to open 'gmail' it will open a NEW tab every time. Same if I use the gmail notifier.

Applications each open individually, and they know that they get focused when activated/launched whatever. But effectively firefox may (or may NOT!) actually encapsulate 2-3 different applications... spreadsheets, email, or say, the bookmarks that I use to maintain Slashdot's submissions bin.

I'm not exactly sure how to deal with this. I imagine this problem will only grow if good web applications continue to replace desktop applications.

First off, my cat thinks he is Einstein. Or maybe Willie Nelson, I'm not sure.

Now, to share some other photos. We were out today to pickup this big poster that I had custom framed and we spotted this bag of really odd gummy candies in the Halloween Candy section at the local Target.

You have to check them out, they are all gummy candies made up of multiple colored gummies in intricate shapes and nifty colors so that in combination they make fast food items.

It's sort of like that PlayDoh set or other "fool food" things I used to play with many years ago - only these really are edible... barely.