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.

Jeff "Hemos" Bates, cofounder of Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters and of Everything2, Vice President of Editorial Operations at OSTG, and Executive Editor of Slashdot has joined the Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board. He joins luminaries nearly as important as him such as Frank Wilczek, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, and Sir Clive W.J. Granger, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Economics. The Lifeboat Foundation is a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization, dedicated to ensuring that humanity adopts the powerful technologies of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics safely as we move towards the Singularity. This humanitarian organization is pursuing all possible options, including relinquishment when feasible (they are against the U.S. government posting the recipe for the 1918 flu virus on the internet), and helping accelerate the development of defensive technologies including anti-biological virus technology, active nanotechnological shields, and self-sustaining space colonies in case the other defensive strategies fail.

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.

Our fax machine started making a strange noise a few weeks ago. A clicking/popping/mechanical sort of noise. The sort of noise that pretty clearly indicates that the unit is ready to be retired. So I unplugged it. The noises stopped. Peace and tranquility returned to my environment. All is well.

This morning jeff arrived and actually needed to send a fax. Since this happens approximately once a quarter, he was understandably upset that the fax machine wouldn't work. It wouldn't even turn on any more.

What happened next was a blur- sort of Orange County Chopper combined with Office Space. The evidence I present to you now:

We all feel much better.

Please read the alert here. The Broadcast Flag is back, this time as a WIPO treaty, and if you don't speak up, it'll be decided by bureaucrats without any democratic input at all.

The alert provides a web form to write to your congress person. Please do that. And please put the alert up elsewhere, so that other people can help too.

I'm in Washington DC working on this today, and your support will help.

Thanks

Bruce

Please see http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=175093&cid=14558550 I don't see a reason for the negative moderation. I'd appreciate if anyone with mod points would help fix this.

Bruce

Slashdot user rodgster sent me 1000 slashdot subscription pages because he likes my comments. Thanks, rodgster!

Today i let a couple of mistakes get through to the homepage. I got a ton of hate mail. I'm feeling really good about myself- especially because my email is lagged by about 45 minutes, so I'm getting the bug reports about 30 minutes after the story goes live. I'm usually quite prompt about correcting stuff that needs it... but SMTP latency is killing me today.

I make mistakes. I'm only human. But i really hate when the feedback mechanism breaks down. And it really is depressing getting 100 messages pop into your box telling you how much you suck for a mistake that was totally honest.

Usually i'm pretty good at letting the water roll off my back when people are mean in email. But the last few weeks has seen my inbox take a turn for the viscious. I'm used to hate mail. I'm used to name calling. But lately it just seems like it's getting worse. Or maybe I'm just getting more sensitive to it.

There are a handful of things that people just flat out don't understand about what we do... the main one is the difference between reading "The Bin" and "The Homepage". On a typical day I might read a few hundred story submissions. I might read another hundred pages that are potentially Slashdot material. And during a typical daddy pants shift, I might post a half a dozen.

This occurs day after day. I might delete a submission that 12 hours later is posted by another editor (maybe there is less to choose from at 11pm than there was at 11am... or maybe a better URL came along to a story that was rejected earlier).

So I kind of see the Slashdot Index differently than others. Some days, like when I'm wearing the pants I'm looking at every story very closely. I concern myself with timing, mix, spelling, quality. Other days the stories aren't mine. I see them differently: I see a story i left in the bin with a note saying "Maybe later?" or a story i rejected because it had a crappy URL. I see several stories I've never seen before. I enjoy those the most.

The problem is that over 8 years of submissions, my posts, and other people's posts start blurring together. I've posted over 10,000 stories. I've rejected hundreds of thousands of submissions. Sometimes I'm simply not going to remember a story from 3 days ago posted by someone else. It's not that I didn't read it- it's that I might have read it 30 times in different places.

There are technical solutions that go a long ways... we have a bunch of keyword searching things in the back end that alerts me if a story with similiar words came up in the last week. But that works spottily at best. The real fall back is the fact that most stories are posted 30 minutes early and screened before subscribers. And this works GREAT. Readers let me know about typos or URL problems in advance. Many articles get fixed, updated, and occasionally deleted during this window. Which unfortunately doesn't work if my SMTP server decides to make me wait 45 minutes for my mail. Stupid protocol. I posted a story for 15:14 GMT. At 15:36 I get a ping saying I have mail. I check the window and see dozens of emails telling me, in increasing hostility, about my error. Those emails were sent as early as 15:00. Bah.

We've discussed using IM and such for disseminating time critical information, but the real issue is GETTING the information. By using email, we raise the bar high enough that people don't arbitrarily spam it. If we put a text field right next to the index, we get so much junk it becomes a meaningless stream of worthless data. To much to keep track of. (Yes, we tried). Email works well for this purpose most of the time since it requires at least a tiny bit more effort than filling in a text field and clicking a button. I think it's a psychological thing- a web form is disposable.. and e-mail is more tangible.

And then the conspiracy theories: Submittor X is paying me to post his stories. Submittor Y is being rejected because I hate him. Advertiser Z gets all their stuff submitted because they are paying us Google is paying me to post their stuff. Yesterday a guy yelled at me for rejecting all his Google stories angry that I'm not posting enough about it.

The truth is less interesting- some guys know how to write good submissions so they get picked a lot. Some advertisers create original content that we find appealing. Since we reject 98% or more of all submissions, so the odds that YOUR submission just got rejected are pretty good. And Google is currently a very hot topic. Just like SCO was a few years ago, and KDE/GNOME was a few years before that. And when each of those stories were at their respective zenithseseses, I got hatemail for posting to much and not enough of those too. It's lose lose sometimes.

So anyway, i'm not in the happiest mood lately. The other reason is that yesterday my iMac shit itself. This particular computer is a normally just a dumb terminal containing little more than mail, web browser, and games, so normally this would be no big deal. Unfortunately i've been working for several weeks now to digitize my families home movies from the 80s, and edit them down as a christmas present for my parents.

The actual digitizing and editing has gone relatively smoothly. But this work in the last few weeks has created 80+ gigs of data that I obviously haven't backed up yet.

Now fortunately the hard drive is OK and it appears that only the operating system blew up. OS X won't let me reinstall tho, so I'm going to have to reformat. So now this machine is mounted as a firewire drive and i'm trying to copy everything over. The problem now is that it takes iDVD like 12 hours of master a DVD... and Christmas is this weekend... so I need to get all 3 DVDs finished, mastered, and copies burnt for relatives. I had plenty of time until my video editing machine needed to barf!

Anyway... it's been a long couple of weeks for me. I'm looking forward to a bit of a holiday break. Maybe it will bring a little more civility to my inbox.

The CSS upgrade went pretty much as smoothly as could be expected. A number of minor glitches showed up and we immediately smashed, and a few other glitches remain, but no 'Show Stopper' type bugs. There are some complaints by some of the users of various modes that get very little play (Light Mode, Opera, and believe it or not, Mosaic) but all in all I'd call the whole thing a success.

We knew light mode would irritate people so let me discuss it a bit here: Light Mode serves two seperate purposes: to provide a low bandwidth Slashdot for people with slow network connections, and to provide people who want a simplified design with just that.

The plan is to seperate those two tasks. The latter is simply new CSS themes targetted to a handful of common design desires. Since the site degrades relatively well, simply using "No" stylesheet actually accomplishes much of what light mode did anyway.

The bandwidth issue is trickier since it requires some actual code logic. Simple things like stripping out a lot of the menus and slashboxes that people don't need is a huge start. It's relatively simple to do but time consuming to do it right.

All of this is actually relatively minor simply because the number of people who actually use light mode number in the hundreds, and its hard to justify spending several days of work writing code to please such a small group, especially because when you get down to that level, they actually want a dozen different things. Some want "Feature Complete" and others want "Stripped Down For Handheld XXX" and others want something in the middle. Facts are we can't appeal to EVERY desire, but we sure do try where it makes sense.

The good news is that the code is in CVS, and now that we have stylesheets, a lot of things that were "Impossible" under the old code are probably just a couple lines in a custom stylesheet.

A few people asked about a redesign of Slashdot which I made mention of in the announcement yesterday. If you want to get started, the gist of it is that Yes, we will have some sort of contest. What prizes? What Rules? When? I have no idea. But if those silly little limitations don't scare you, and you want to get cracking now, let me make a few suggestions:

• The new Slashdot design will have to have all the user interface components you see today. Just because you don't like the section index or the banner ads, a winning design will still need to have them. Now you can move stuff around, or even hide some of it in roll-over menus, but the new design must retain all the links you see today.
• Design elements that ought to persist: the slashdot signature shade of green, the curve in the upper left hand corner, the caliseo font. It would have to be one hell of a design to get me to sacrifice these things which I regard as essential to Slashdot's "Look". I want a new design, but whatever is new will need to pay lip service to the original design. Some sort of visual consistency.
• The topic icons will need to be placed on white unless you plan to rebuild all of them. We don't have source material for a lot of them, and rebuilding a hundred topic icons from scratch is not likely.
• We'll want mockups of the index, an article (with comments!) and probably the user preference page.
• If you can do it entirely within CSS, that would be fantastic. Some minor code changes would be done for a fantastic design, but mostly we want skins to work entirely within a standardized css framework.

With CSS wrapping up, Slashteam is ready to take on some new projects. Pudge has been working on a new form validation system that is more extensible. This will make new forms of validation easier to add, and better error messages. Also the search system is due for a rewrite. The API is designed and the front end is mostly complete. Now its just a matter of building new guts so that it actually finds the right stories. And don't get me started on the moderation system rewrite: after a number of biz related needs (subscriber stuff and daypass advertising stuff) we're finally ready to return to the beast that is Moderation.

If you visit Slashcode.com you will notice that it is now running a brand spanking new CSS template designed by OSTGs Wes Moran and implemented by Tim Vroom and the rest of Slashteam. As some of you are aware, Slashcode.com is a testbed for Slashdot's code development. It gets features a few days before Slashdot so we can test the code on a live site. Of course the site is virtually unused, but that's not really the point for us. It's more about making sure the stuff actually works.

Which is where you come in. If you know a thing or two about CSS and web design, I'd appreciate a look at the site. You can email me if you have specific feedback, comments, criticism. I'd especially like it if people logged in and played with that. You'll notice that a lot of form elements look different. Some intentionally. Some because we haven't actually got around to creating CSS stylesheet entries for the dozens of custom things out there. Also, the comment code itself is completely unchanged. The display of forums will remain pretty much icky old HTML until we either (A) Rewrite the engine (which is planned, but a big project or (B) Someone submits a patch that does it for us. So if you want your chance to get your name in lights on Slashdot, this is a project worth considering. There's a mailing list and a CVS server. What are you waiting for?

The Slashdot CSS theme itself is well underway- the core HTML you see on www.slashcode.com is almost exactly what will be on Slashdot itself, we just need to finish a few parts, fix a few bugs, and work finish the Slashdot Stylesheet. We're looking to have that done in the next few weeks, although actually deploying it on Slashdot itself is a pretty huge project. I want to do it in august since it's usually really quiet, and we have a lot of data that needs to be converted in addition to the actualy site templates.

Pudge has been working a lot on that problem. Specifically we've got scripts to fix HTML in all editor & user contributed content spaces. A lot of this is under way already. Old comments are being automatically fixed in the background. HTML in articles from 1998 is being corrected. Scripts are working very hard. And in some cases, tired editors have been re-reading stories from 1998 to correct HTML errors that boggle the mind. None of this is perfect, so don't be to surprised if you find something wonky. Feel free to mail me URLs if you see it. We've got almost 60,000 articles, 900,000 users, and like 13 million comments. There will be mistakes.

Lastly, once Slashdot has successfully been ported to CSS, we'll have a lot more design flexibility. I expect that soon after we'll actually be ready to give the tired old design a facelift. If anyone has ideas, you can start playing with designs today by simply modifying www.slashcode.com's CSS stylesheet. my guess is we'll have a contest similiar to the T-Shirt contest we ran awhile back- users can contribute designs and I'll select from the best a new look for Slashdot. I'm really looking forward to that. I'll miss having Slashdot be "My" design, but the site still looks like 1997 and it's time for new life to go with fancy new web technology.

Also, my rogue hit 60 in WoW a few days ago. I also made my Volcanic armor set and have a few nifty other items w/ high fire resist. Now to get attuned and visit that toasty place known as Molten Core! And somehow save another 400gp for my epic mount. There's just no end to this game.

One very common abuse of the posting system is for a user to post something logged in, and then reply to himself anonymously pretending to agree with his point. "Yes yes, I agree with what Joe is saying." Or in the case of trolls, they might go so far as to argue with themself. A single person can make it look as if they are a dozen with just a couple of accounts.

I've seen some pretty terrible abuses of this problem, but usually it's relatively minor. I've been toying with an idea to solve this problem to at least some extent- essentially, if the same IP replies to itself using a different nickname or anonymously, we auto-moderate the reply down. We can exclude proxy servers from this. We could expand this to only allow a single nickname to post within a single forum, but I don't know how many false hits that would catch in the net.

The idea of allowing anonymous posting is that sometimes you need to say something that for very real, very legitimate reasons, you don't want your name attached to it. The logic behind this is that if you're trying to alternate between signing your name and not, you're more likely to be abusing the system than to be using it legitimately.

Thoughts? A few of you can post. Others can email.

I've chosen to return from my self-imposed Slashdot exile of... *checks date of last post*... two months, nineteen days.

I don't have high hopes for an improvement in editorial quality, but I'm willing to give this site another chance.

The next step, if things prove to have stagnated or degenerated even more, will be a pointed e-mail to Taco's bosses and a much longer period of non-visitation.

On May 18 I'm speaking in Tokyo at GLOCOM. Space is very limited, but if you'd like to go, contact Masayuki Hatta. We're apparently also going to have a party on May 19, but I'll yell when I know more.

My WoW Dwarven Paladin on Algazor hit level 26, and Drew/Thorzin from my guild took me on the whirlwind tour to get my mega hammer of bringin-the-hurt-in. I had the first 2 components, but the fourth component required us to haul ass into horde territory. The game continues to amaze me. After 2 weeks of fairly excessive gameplay, I still have only explored a half dozen maps- maybe 5-10% of the world? You seriously could play this game for MONTHS. Which I guess makes sense given the number of level 60 characters with 30-40 game *days* into their chars. Highly addictive. Kathleen's mage is a few levels behind me. Gnomes are adorable. I like to play with her just to here her cheer when we do something neat.

Slashdot's CSS port continues to move along. Tim has the basic stuff done for the generic slashcode theme. We're waiting for Wes to finish mocking up some of the lesser used pages (like journals and user preferences). After we roll those into the slashcode theme, the actual task of moving Slashdot to CSS will likely take only a few more days since it will just be mangling around the CSS files, and the actual slashcode themes will become relatively set in stone. Look and feel can be easily twiddled by editing the css templates, and slashcode itself won't need to be changed. Man HTML has come a long ways in the decade since I started.

And I'd just like to wish a happy birthday to my beautiful wife.

This weekend was Penguicon where I played WoW. Also, I played WoW. And I had a surprisingly interesting panel on the age of the open source hobbyist with Nat Torkington and ESR. There was some lively discussion. I was entertained participating. I hope others had fun too. Also, I played WoW.

With just one night home I packed up and went to Cleveland (which is nothing like Howard the Duck made it out to be) to speak at Case Western. The talk went really well. The audience seemed very responsive. Clearly a large contingent of hardcore Slashdot readers. They even hooked me up with fantastic prizes to give away. I tried to use my cellphone as a clicker for the presentation, which usually works, but the stars were apparently misaligned... oh, and I tend to pace when I talk... right out the range of bluetooth devices ;)

This afternoon I'm going to visit the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame which everyone tells me is a glorious waste of time... but they are doing a huge Tommy exhibit and my obsession with Pete Townshend knows no limits. So therefore it beckons to me like... well... WoW.

After the drive back to michigan I think I get to stay "Home" for several weeks. That will be great. Time to level and pet the kittens.

I've resisted the tempation for many months. I know my personality. I know that massives call out to me, begging me to suckle their time consuming bossom. So I never bought a copy of World of Warcraft. Now almost everyone I know has played WoW to some degree and the consensus is pretty much that it is the best massive ever. Anna & Patrick talk about it compulsively... and they finally managed to get the bug lodged into my wife's beautiful head. I bought Kathleen a copy while in California last week. She installed it. I watched her play for all of 60 seconds before I decided I had to play. The next day it was installed on my box and I was off and running.

I'm playing on Azgalor and actually got my real nickname so feel free to say hi or mail me cool toys. I'm running a level 11 dwarven paladin and having a quite enjoyable time of it now that I have a decent mace and can actually kick out enough damage to kill things. I've run most of the quests so far with Kathleen (who is running a gnomish sorc). The hype is right: WoW really took everything from its predecessors and just kinda said "Fuck it all, lets do it right." Unfortunately I also have real life to contend with... real responsibilities take away from getting a piece of miner gear or something so that I can get that sweet sweet XP. I need to sit down and decide upon a path for my char. What abilities and such I wish to focus on. And strategies for making my char more effective.

I have maxed out my vacation time, so I guess I could just take a week off and play... but that might be a little foolish. Maybe every OTHER day for a couple weeks!

Penguicon is this weekend. I've heard of a number of people that are going, but so far there's been no real demand to organize any sort of Slashdot extravaganza. I'll be speaking somewhere, and hopefully showing my fandubs in the anime room. Should be good times. Or I'll just sit in my hotel room and try to level.