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 ;)

In Catholic Confession, you start out by saying how long it's been since your last confession -- fortunately, I gave up being a strict Catholic some time ago, so I don't have to say how long since my last journal entry.

I'm starting now at Visual Effects Supervisor for Fast and Furious 4, we're bringing back Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, and a bunch of the other characters from the first three movies for one more run around the track. I've been involved in the first three as a VFX supervisor for my own company, this time I'm involved from the production side, and it's a whole different deal. Very exciting, a lot more responsibility, a million more things to keep straight. Fortunately, I have a good producer, Lori Nelson, and the work is similar to what I've done in the previous three movies, so I've got a bit of a running start.

I'm finally going to go over to the white side (as opposed to the dark side) and am getting a Macbook Pro to help with this movie. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Linux zealot, but at some point you just want to share information and movies and databases with the world of Mac users...and it's difficult to do that legally under Linux. So, we'll see how it goes! OSX has become closer to Linux over the years, so it's not such a radical a leap as it was.

In other news, my daughter's off to college at Washington University in St Louis, and my boy is in fourth grade, still struggling with autism, but having a pretty good time while doing it. We're still persuing the ABA therapy paradigm, it really seems to be the best program out there. He's taking Lexapro as well, in a very small dose, and it just seems to make everything in his life 100% better, so if you're a parent of a kid with autism, you might try it out.

I promise to update this journal sooner next time. Really.

Thad

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.

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.

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!

I'm interested in using a gampad or joystick instead of a mouse, for my Kubuntu desktop pointer. Later on, I'm planning on reinstalling Gentoo on a seperate partition. At this point, I'm intending to go with js2mouse. What do you recommend? Should I use a different software package? Should I use js2mouse as a kernel module? Also, I'd like to recommend this idea to my brother for his Windows XP desktop. What software package do you recommend for that? The packages that I've seen look kind of like spyware.

Hi all.

The military is awesome. It's probably 1 of the best career decisions that I've made. Everybody seems real nice. There seems to be great camaraderie.

You can reply to me by posting here. In particular, I'm happy to comment on the accuracy of the things people say about crypto on Slashdot if my attention is drawn to them here. Thanks!

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.

I thought that I'd give you an update into my life, since I achieved a significant milestone, and since many of you invested much into my life.

***I Got Into The Military***
***General Events Up Till Now***
***Learning French***
***Girls [or lack thereof]!***
***Good Bye***

***I Got Into The Military***

I went into a job interview today with the Canadian Forces, on Dec. 13, Wednesday, in downtown Vancouver. It was an interesting interview, because they drastically shortened the interview process for reserve applicants. In fact, they skipped all the typical job interview questions, and just asked about 3 questions on a check list, about commitments. There were other forms to be filled in, and they needed to follow up on things, but that's it.

I'm proud to say that I'll get the job, as long as I can pass a security check. I'll be a supply technician for the BC Regiment. I'm really excited about this, because the people seem great, the work seems meaningful, I can still find regular work, and the location is next to a SkyTrain station.

On the way home, yesterday, I had a sense of pride and a feeling that everything was going to be alright. I'm not entirely sure that I've had that feeling before. I was smiling for quite a large amount of time, as well. The weather was clear, cool, and sunny: just the way that I like it.

If I ever get my head blown off doing some kind of car bomb inspection, then you can mumble under your breath, "Well, at least somebody is getting his come-upins.". ;^)

I intend to supplement this income with another job teaching ESL, running my own business, or doing some other kind of government work.

Speaking of ESL, I got my ESL teaching certification, so I intend to travel 1 day, and hope to do some Christian ministry as well.

***General Events Up Till Now***

Okay, let's see if I can give you an update starting around 2006.

In Jan. 2006, and maybe a bit of 2005, I started going out to downtown Vancouver to see if I would have been able to start up a local Texas Holdem poker tournament, since poker was getting pretty popular around here. The short story is that I stood on the sidewalk to gauge interest and to promote the idea. It seemed that there was a significant amount of interest, and I even went around to businesses, asking for sponsorship prizes. I even managed to get 1 or 2 prizes. I wanted to get the sponsorship so that there would be prizes, but no gambling. Unfortunately, it never worked out.

All throughout Jan. & Feb. my dad and brother were pestering me to get ESL certification and teach overseas, based on the idea that I taught ESL successfully as a volunteer. I finally gave in and went in in March. There were 5 days in class, and a specialization. The specialization is rated at about 60 hours of private work. I managed to get a second free specialization for doing volunteer work for them.

So, while I was doing the specialization, I explored downtown Vancouver, 1 day. Too much time on my hands, eh? :^) I saw a banner advertising the hiring campaign for the Canadian military. On a gut instinct, I decided to check it out. I think that deep down inside, I've still been hurting for not making it into the navy. To be honest, I am quite jealous of those who did. It turns out that the way of doing things with the BC Regiment is more in keeping with my life than the navy. With the navy, you disappear for long amounts of time. With the BC Regiment, you are only working part time. So, I explained my situation to them, and why I never made it into the navy, but it didn't even phase them. They handed me a application form. Well, I read up whatever I could about these guys, and even attended 1 of their open house recruiting seminars. I was pretty impressed. It looked very exciting and down to earth. So, I bit the bullet and handed in the application.

Since I was going to have to wait for them to process the application, I decided to sign up for some temp work, doing manual labour on a construction site, doing warehousing, and whatever. Well, eventually I got stuck with MAKAM Construction. They asked me to work for them, and I told them that I was intending to join the military, and couldn't work for them. They eventually asked again, and I explained again, and they politely insisted, so I said, "As long as you don't mind me working for only 1 month, then okay.". Since the military was slow in getting back to me, and since I had to get forms filled in again, I ended up working for them for about 3 months on payroll, but over 4 months in total. During that time, I was supposed to finish my ESL certification correspondance work, but I was too tired. In fact, I stopped going to church as well, because I was so tired from the week and just fed up with liberal Crhistianity and lukewarm Christianity.

At around mid-August, they began swearing a lot at me, while micromanaging, which made it all the more painful. It was interesting because I was busy working 1 day, and then they found me, and accused me of slacking off when nobody was looking. It seems that they were looking for me, and I was walking a different route, and we passed each other. Somehow, the time passed really quickly, and it looked like I hardly did any work at all. So, I can understand their perspective. It just blew me away that they would shout at me for playing games, hiding, and not taking a lunch break. That was pretty much the last straw, so I told them that I wanted to quit a month later [2 weeks notice plus 2 weeks vacation].

Fortunately, I managed to stay around long enough for dental insurance, and now I can get that cavity taken cared of.

Another good reason to quit was because I was able to start attending to the homework.

I've started going back to church. This has been quite an experience. I have been going to a couple of Reformed churches. I'm surprised at how they don't decorate their churches for Christmas. That just changed my opinion on a lot things that pertain to influence. I came to the conclusion that sometimes people are just too paranoid, and they want the easy way out by banning things altogether, when God never meant it that way. He sure didn't have a problem with decorating the tabernacle in the Old Testament. So, instead of working with reality, we'd rather ban it all. Then there's the other extreme, where everything goes. It's like we refuse to think and come to a detailed set of rules that allow us to have the most for the least.

So, I finally got my certication at the end of Oct. 2006. Since that time, I've been shopping around for new stuff, and planning board gaming events. Have you read The Tipping Point? I've been trying to push board gaming over a tipping point, so that there would be a huge increase in popularity. I've been checking out various transit friendly venues, and just getting a feel for planning events.

***Learning French***

Also, I bought a French-only dictionary. I spent much time reading through the pronunciations, and examples of word usage. I also went out to the Wednesday night meetings at the Alliance Français, where people sit and chat for a while in French. I've also been reading the New Testament in French too. It's very interesting in that the French language reminds me of King James English.

I've met some nice girls there, but I haven't the foggiest idea on how to ask them out in French. I also can't carry a big conversation in French, so I don't know what possibilities exist there.

***Girls [or lack thereof]!***

Nothing happening here.

In the latter parts of 2005, I hung out with a woman my age, and we practised speaking French. Somehow, I think that we both got turned off each other around February, despite how we had almost everything in common. I guess that I don't like people like me. ;^P

Sometime around Christmas, I met this warm and friendly girl from my brother's church. She invited me out to her Christmas party. We also went to see "The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe". I can't remember what the movie what the movie was about, because I didn't get a chance to watch, due to "distractions", but we were at the movie. *nudge* *nudge* *wink* *wink* Eh, just kidding. I watched the movie. *sigh* ;^p Seriously, we did watch the movie. It was interesting. She seemed to enjoy chatting about it afterwards. Unfortunately, when I turned to see her facial expression during the movie, she seemed so bored.

On an unrelated note, I played Mr. Beaver in our high school play, in grade 11.

That's it! I have to start finding more places to find girls.

***Good Bye***

I wish you all the best in this merry Christmas season...except for you, you and you...and well, you. ;^p I harbour no ill feelings [*cough* visibly *cough*] against anybody [well, actually...]. ;^P Seriously, folks, take care, merry Christmas, happy holidays.

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.

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.