Have a nice December 25th, everybody. Especially those of you who are stuck working today. :^)

Spent the last couple of years making my first feature. Shot/wrote/edited/etc it myself on a shoe-string budget. Sent it off to a few film festivals not expecting much. The response thus far has matched my expectations. Hard to compete with people who have a thousand dollars for every one of mine.

The old saw goes it takes ten years to get good at anything. Made my first short back in 1999, keep on feeling like I'm just a single step away from breaking through. But as of yet, nothing.

And so, slogging ever onward. Been debating whether it would be a good idea to self-distribute/release the project under a CC license the same as I have with my shorts. If I sold a few dvds they would pay for the shooting if nothing else.

All I really want any more is somebody out there to watch the damn thing. And this cockamamie scheme would seem as decent as any other. Or rather, something something about doing it for the cause. Thoughts, yay or nay?

In view of the fact that I hardly come here any more, plus the fact that TPTB here seem intent on fscking up the UI even further :| I've decided to call it a day here.

You can follow my antics over at deviantART or Multiply (sorry, Jorg), or add me on Facebook.

Alternatively, you music lovers can check me on Last.fm, whilst most of my linkage is over on StumbleUpon.

It was fun back in the day, when I had more time to spare, but now... *shrug*

Au revoir!

-MT.

Pudge made a cool change in discussions- if you link to a comment deep inside a thread and click 'More' the sytem is much more intelligent about crawling down and retrieving children, and then parents and grandparents and so forth up the ancestry. So odds are you'll get more related comments sooner.

We now abbreviate journals in the firehose... so they are more like slashdot stories with a Read More link to the full text.

The big user facing change this week was structural: historically we had 2 different "skeletons" on Slashdot, but with this refresh we unified to a single one. This change simplifies maintenance for us quite a bit (maintaining the idle section and the firehose views of the same data was a royal pain).

You also will see some changes to the firehose.pl layout. We're playing with the tab layout a bit, moving some menus around and better integrating the core functions into the site chrome. It's a bit buggy atm, so feel free to email me if you see something wonky. We're extinguishing a few minor brush fires but there's no forest fires that we're aware of.

It's bad enough when you're actually serving the data from your own site but it's in some form where you can't audit it. That's one of the many reasons I hate Flash.

But even Javascript sucks, when you <script src="someothersite">. The moment you do that, you know that all sorts of horrible things can go wrong. You just have to have faith. Faith is what it comes down to. And it can be justified, I guess, because you can get away with it for years.

Until this morning when our webpage was only showing for a second and then the whole thing would then redirect to someone else's site. Adios, visitors.

(What actually happened: the domain we were including from, apparently expired and now any http request goes to a Network Solutions page, instead of returning a DNS error like it should. Fuck you, Network Solutions, as if we didn't already know you're evil and dangerous. But the same risk remains even if someone's domain doesn't expire; they can always serve a different script today than they did yesterday, and that script can do anything with the DOM that it wants to. There's no way to sandbox it.)

It's "standard practices" to include external scripts. Everyone does it. The ad people aren't techies; if I were to tell them, "uh, we don't want to include any external scripts that might change from load-to-load, and we also don't want to include any Flash crap unless we've compiled it from readable, auditable source ourselves," they would think I'm crazy. You know, one of those open source fanatics. They would say, "Gee, that's a shame you don't want the money," and go on sending the same dangerous ads to our competitors while we collect nothing.

Is it really an unreasonable weirdo religious fanatic position, to just want to be able to make sure that stuff will work and not do anything crazy? I don't think so. The fucking "standard practices" need to change, but how can one person do that? *sigh* I feel so powerless.

Zach knows the wind now. I saw him look at the window and see the leaves rustle. He then started making blowing noises. We blow the mobile over his crib whenever we change his diaper, so he knows the blowing noises move objects. But he's translated that to leaves hundreds of feet away through a window. Now I'm not saying he's a genius, but he's pretty awesome.

Yeah, really.

Only took that organization like five years to see what the rest of the football world sees... 'bout time!

New job (back to consulting) and current client blocks 'social networks', so I may have to make my return here until the situation changes.

What really sucks is hurricane ike destroyed Cincinnati, and I've been without power at home since Sunday, so even if I wanted to blog on multiply, I can't...

Stay tuned, I suppose...

This won't significantly affect most of you, but we have been working on some meta mod changes. The most user visible change is that the UI we used to use was thrown out, and instead we are using one based on the firehose. Subscribers will see it when they go to the old metamod link although users can see it by going to this version of those hose

The first real change is that we've changed the meanings of the UI around. The old system is 'Fair' and 'Unfair' and the new system is '+' and '-'. The meanings are subtly different. You are no longer rating individual 'Insightful' or 'Troll' or whatever... you are now stating basically "Is this comment good or bad for you". Personally, since I find very few Score:5 funny comments to be actually really funny (and not just cliche memes) I '-' most of them. You are encouraged to be harsh if you don't actually think something is insightful or funny, call it such. The system encourages more of what you + and less of what you -.

You are also welcome now to do more than 10 m2 per day... however we internally have diminishing returns after 10, so you can do more, but they start to matter less and less.

There will undoubtedly be bugs so feel free to email me or vroom at slashdot if you find them. Probably next week or so we'll move this out to everyone, so your assistance is appreciated.

Out of the blue, I got an email from my mom. She's been corresponding with someone about some sensitive things, and asked how to encrypt her emails.

My writeup is 9 paragraphs long. *sigh* There's so way she's really going to be able to do all that without me eventually going over there.

This is on Mac OS X. Sheesh. A Unix that doesn't come with gpg out-of-the-box, and the preloaded mailer (mail.app) needs a hard-to-maintain 3rd-party hack just to get basic functionality: you call this "just works?"

I don't wanna turn this into a specifically-Apple flame (I know of another high-marketshare desktop OS maker that also makes some pretty shitty apps), so I'll just make this generic comment: mail encryption is a very fundamental thing and it's ridiculous for it to not be built into all desktops. That's like a web browser that can't talk https. The howto I sent to my mom should have been about key exchange issues, not installing plugins. It's a disgrace for any mailer to not have this. This kind of shit is half the reason crypto goes unused by so many people. It's a pain in the ass not just because of the complex concepts (e.g. learning how to exchange keys safely) but because the most highly-deployed apps don't even work as-is.

Well, for subscribers only this week at least. We have a half dozen minor bugs left in the TODO list, but if you are a paying subscriber you can test it out. It works best if you are using the keybindings to navigate. Pressing 'f' takes you to the next unread comment respecting thread order... so you can press that over and over again.

We also added a thing to 'collapse comments after reading' which I think I might turn of as a default setting soon. This is only usable for subscribers atm as well. But basically, as you navigate through a discussion, it collapses the comments you've read after you move on. This makes it really easy to navigate large discussions without having to scroll over 150 comments you've already read.

we're aware of a number of annoying bugs, but hopefully most of them will be squashed by Pudge for this weeks code refresh. If things are stable, we hope to roll this out for everyone rsn.

also my baby cut his first tooth yesterday. My furniture will never be ungnawed upon again.

..a character was a byte, and you always knew what that byte meant, and you didn't have to worry about what database library the script interpreter was compiled against, and in turn what character sets the database library was compiled with support for? Remember when what you saw on the screen was the same as the underlying data?

How I long for those days. *sigh*

My wife and I were excited to see that Disney was bringing back 'family movie night' on ABC this Summer. For both of us that brings back memories of youth watching a movie with (our respective) families after Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, or 60 Minutes had ended.

However, apparently families with young kids are not the target audience Disney Corp. has in mind. For Saturday June 7th, they will have Finding Nemo, which runs just 100 minutes if you watch it uninterrupted. But if you don't own the DVD and want to watch it on ABC instead, you'd better give the kids a can of cola with dinner, because the movie will start at 8 PM Eastern Time and run until 11 PM. I can only assume that the additional 80 minutes will include some cast commentaries, as well as a preview of WALL-E, but what is the point if the kids fall asleep while Marlin and Dory are still stuck in the belly of a whale? You're just going to have to try and rent it or add it to your NetFlix queue so the kids can see the rest of it.

I had such great hopes for Disney when Steve Jobs became it's largest shareholder, I guess my trust was misplaced.

So, later this year I'm having a birthday due to a new age that ends in a zero. This seems to be a popular time for sorrow and wallowing, but I see it as a chance to have fun for a change. Having recently been through my own wedding and being a part-time wedding photographer, I'm tired of attending other people's parties.

So, this year I have asked for a Transformers party. Now, everyone to be invited will be of an adult age, but we're all still kids at heart.

The reason I am posting this is for quirky party suggestions.

Like, pin the $item on the $creature. Instead of pin the tail on the donkey, should we pin the AllSpark on the Optimus Prime? If were inviting less guys and more girls, it might be fun to play "put some clothes onto that girl from the movie" game. Pfft, like girls would willingly come to a Transformers party in the first place.

What about Transformers-themed adult beverages? Can you think of some good drinks (please include at least a basic outline of the ingredients) with a great Transformers name? Like, I'm thinking something with lemonade and calling it a Bumblebee. Should we mix the Everclear into something and make it a Megatron?

"ME GRIMLOCK, ME DRINK BEER."

I'm asking for all of the Transformers party things like plates and napkins and of course the cake, but can you think of any other items that will be needed to make the party a success?

I'm aware links such as these already:

http://transformers.awestores.com/ttc/transformers-party-supplies/cPath/10251.html

http://www.prettypartyplace.com/kid-birthday-party-supply-transformers.html

http://www.parties4kids.com/birthday_partysupplies_cat/transformers_mtv-Transformers.html

And this set available at target, seems like a perfect place for us to start from, but none of these really tell you how to have a party other than to just buy some stuff and let the party happen. Thus, I'm seeking out the nerdiest bunch I know: slashdot.

Suggestions don't have to be limited to the recent theatrical live-action Transformers, the first generation is great, too.

You've got the touch! Now, make the suggestions.

So as we've been migrating the system from the tired old D1 to the exciting and awesome new D2 a number of complaints have come up. I'm going to talk about a couple of them here because I'm really looking for feedback on THESE issues. Please only talk about these points or I will mod you offtopic or troll or something.

The issue is about the use of Flat/Threaded/Nested modes. D2 cleanly replaces both threaded and nested modes- you effectively get nested mode by bringing the 2 sliders together. And threaded mode is vastly more flexible because you can choose the level at which comments are abbreviated or displayed in full text. So users of those modes should be set (obviously there are other reasons not to use D2, I'm just talking about the layouts here tho)

What's left is flat mode, which has a number of sort options. Now flat mode is used by roughly 4% of our active population. When i think about flat mode, I think about 2 reasons you would have to use it:

1. I hate indenting and whitespace. I want a big vertical column now this isn't my bag, but I can understand it and even consider supporting it in D2. I think you sacrifice legibility, but this is a personal preference. It also would be easy to support in D2. Hell, you could probably do it in a greasemonkey script no problem.
2. It's easier to remember your place in flat mode This to me is the only reason to use flat mode- you can reload your page an hour later, find the last comment you read, and pick up where you left off.

Now I Would think that the only reason to use flat mode is #2... except that only a couple hundred Slashdot readers have the 'ignore threads' sort order enabled. So either they don't understand what they are doing, or #1 above is the real reason that they use flat mode.

So in a nutshell, the question I am asking in this journal is 'Why do you use flatmode?' Is it cosmetic? To more easily keep your place in a discussion? Something I'm just missing? We have plans to implement a read/unread state retention for discussions, so maybe would you migrate to a threaded view if that function exists? Or is it purely aesthetic... an irrational hatred of scrollbars and whitespace? :)

The reason this matters is that simply formatting the page flatly is easy. Probably a simple greasemonkey hack or maybe a few lines of CSS. But re-implementing the alternate sort is gonna take some work. And I'm ok with that... except that the logs say that nobody actually USES that sort... they ONLY are using flat mode for the cosmetic reasons.

Speak out! Stay on-topic or you WILL be moderated down.