Jamie has been pushing hard on this point, and I'm leaning towards agreeing with him now. Essentially, what he wants to do is make it possible for a moderator to leave a note with their moderation, explaining *why* the comment was moderated. This note is made available only to meta moderators, to help aid them in deciding if the moderation was fair or not. Essentially I'd be looking for very short explanations like 'calling someone a nazi is not nice' to justify a flamebait mod or something.

The down side is that this slightly increases the potential burden on moderators... but our moderators are only modding a few points every few days or weeks, so we're talking about a burden on the order of typing a couple dozen words once a week. I do more than that just telling people to 'read the FAQ' in my inbox with my morning cup of coffee.

The chance for abuse is relatively light. We desire the system to remain anonymous, and a moderator could conceivably leave a note saying "I'm user ID XXX, so moderate me fair" however if meta moderators are warned that anonymity is part of the system, that might work against them (assuming meta moderators read directions).

Another related issue that I'd love to address someday is 'Funny' meta moderation. Nobody has the balls to call something 'NOT FUNNY' and that frusterates me. I think we should be VERY hard on usage of 'Funny' in moderation. An ATTEMPT at funny that is NOT funny should NOT be given a score bonus. And a moderator who says something that is moderately amusing when it is not should probably be given fewer moderator points. The problem is that meta moderators don't like saying funny is unfair. They think "Yeah, this is ok. It's kinda funny. Or they tried. So I'll mark it as fair". I think this is a great example of where some slight changes could help the system out. Stand up! Be proud! If something is NOT funny, call the moderation unfair!

This is something that Jamie & I have discussed extensively for the mod rewrite. By splitting the scoring system up into multiple modes, we have a lot of new options. One cool idea is to split funny up into several sub groups: "Hilarious" "Amusing" and "Not Funny". We could play a lot with those in meta moderation... like if something is 'Hilarious' then it should alsu be amusing, and definitely not NOT funny. So we could do some fancy schmancy number crunching to get better results out of this.

But mostly, I just would like to encourage meta moderators to be more liberal with the funny unfair tag. Countless recurring memes in the forums draw occasional, random 'Funny' mods. This wastes mod points, meta moderator time, and only serves to dilute the discussions. So many jokes that get a funny point here or there simply AREN'T funny. Meta moderators, have the balls to call something UNfunny!

Only once in a great while does a game come along that really tickles me the way that Katamari Damacy does. Now I must admit that I was skeptical, but when Kathleen asked for it for christmas, I was happy to oblige... I've long felt that video games make great xmas presents, because I can also play them. Of course, I think I've done a disservice to her because I've spent as much time playing this thing as she has.

The game is loaded with ludicrous engrish translations... sorta like Parappa. The music is cute and fun. The game play is unbelievably addictive. You roll your "Katamari" around and stuff sticks to it. Your "Score" is essentially the diameter of your katamari. When you start out you'll be rolling up thumb tacks and crayons and eventually pop cans, plants, and eventually cats, dogs, people, cows, cars, houses, and eventually (I assume) battleships.

The game play is so easy, and so simple. But what makes it fun is the constantly shifting perspective. The game doesn't change, you just get bigger... so the box that was a wall 5 minutes ago is now food for your katamari. And you come back later and grab the entire table that the box was sitting on. Later you can return and take the whole house!

It's a PS2 game, and you owe it to yourself to take a look. It's just "One of those games" that has the right mix of cute, fun and colorful, combined with a unique concept that just makes it absolutely shine. It made me pause Knights of the Old Republic 2, and that's saying something.

Slashdot's traffic continues to grow. Recently we set a new single day traffic record of just shy of 4.3 million pages. Even our average days are now around 3.5M. We were around 3 million pages last summer. We're not really sure where the traffic came from. Referrals from Yahoo's RSS definitely is a factor, and our referrals from google also seemed to have grown, but those numbers don't account for the 10-15% growth we're talking about. Strange things.

Cliff Lampe has written a paper which will soon be published where he did a bunch of research on Slashdot new users. The single point that this paper really drives home is the importance of feedback. Slashdot has 2 primary mechanisms of feedback for new users: Moderation, and Replies. Users who get positive are more likely to continue on to get good karma. Of course, this might be only an indicator of their natural ability to write good comments, but I think the idea is worth exploring. We've planned the future moderation system to handle this, but I don't really have any idea of what the results will be. Comparing the Data Cliff recorded and analyzed for this paper to any data from the new system will be very apples to oranges, so I'm wondering if it makes sense to try to kludge something into the system now.

So what i was thinking was something like this: We add a column to the comments table... comments.noob. I don't know how we define it, but my guess is a noob is someone who has posted less than 2 comments, has been moderated less than 2 times, and has a life time reply total of less than 2. I don't know what the real numbers are, but you get the idea.

Then we give certain users access to a new threshold... right now we have -1..5... we add 'Noob' if you are a moderator, or perhaps if you have excellent karma. This would then encourage moderators and experiences readers to be able to find them. We're talking about dozens of comments/day here, so the burden would be relatively trivial.

Patches?

LotR:RotK EE shipped today. It will be in my grubby little mits in the next day or two. I imagine the 10 hours of bonus crap will keep me well occupied for some time... and between that and Knights of the old Republic II, I think this will be a merry christmas indeed!

Dan Sandler has an article from a few days ago about RSS throttling, where he discusses the solution of having the server keep track of which clients have hit RSS feeds recently, so it knows when a client crosses the line and needs to be banned.

This is exactly what we do on Slashdot, of course. Every hit, whether to a dynamically-generated perl script page, or to a static .shtml or .rss page, triggers an Apache PerlCleanupHandler which inserts a row into our 'accesslog' table on our MySQL database.

(By putting it in the cleanup phase, we ensure it doesn't affect page delivery times at all; it just means a few more milliseconds that the httpd child is occupied instead of being available to deliver pages, but the only resource it's taking up is RAM.)

Dan writes:

I'm uncomfortable with this solution because it's hard to make it scale. First, you have to hit a database (of some kind) to cross-reference the client IP address with its last fetch time. Maybe that's not a big deal; after all, you're hitting the database to read your website data too. But then you have to write to the database in order to record the new fetch time (if the RSS feed has changed), and database writes are slow.

I'll grant that our accesslog traffic is pretty I/O intensive. But if you were only talking about logging RSS hits and nothing else, it'd be a piece of cake. The table just needs three columns (timestamp, IP address, numeric autoincrement primary key). You expire old entries by deleting off one end of the table while you insert into the other. That way inserts never block, even under MyISAM (though I'd recommend InnoDB).

You only need to keep about an hour of the table around anyway, so it's going to be really slow. How many RSS hits can you get in an hour? A hundred thousand? That's peanuts, especially since each row is fixed size. Crunch that IP address down to a 32-bit int before writing it and each row is 12 bytes, give or take. Throw in the indexes and the whole table is a few megabytes. Even a slow disk should be able to keep up -- but if you're concerned about performance, heck, throw it in RAM.

To catch bandwidth hogs, you create a secondary table that doesn't have so much churn. It has an extra column for the count of RSS hits, so if some miscreant nails your webserver 1,000 times in a minute, the secondary table only gets 1 row. You periodically (every minute or two) check the max id on that table, then

INSERT INTO secondary_table SELECT ip, MAX(ts), COUNT(*) FROM table WHERE id BETWEEN last_checked+1 AND current_max GROUP BY ip

By limiting the id to a range, again, there is no blocking issue with the ongoing inserts. After doing that, you trim off rows from secondary_table older than an exact time amount, and then you're ready to do the only query that even approaches being expensive:

SELECT ip, SUM(hitcount) AS s FROM secondary_table HAVING s > your_limit GROUP BY ip

and you have your list of IP addresses that have exceeded your limit.

What we do is use that data to update a table that keeps track of IP addresses that need to be banned from RSS, and have a PerlAccessHandler function that checks a (heavily cached) copy of that table to see whether the incoming IP gets to proceed to the response phase or not.

Slashdot's resource requirements are actually a lot higher than this, since we log every hit instead of just RSS, we log the query string, user-agent, and so on -- and also because we've voluntarily taken on the privacy burden of MD5'ing incoming IP addresses so we don't know where users are coming from. That makes our IP address field 28 bytes longer than it has to be. But even so, we don't have performance issues. Slashdot's secondary table processing takes about 10-15 seconds every 2 minutes.

As for Dan's concern about IP addresses hidden behind address translation -- yep, that's a concern. (We don't bother checking user-agent because idiots writing RSS-bombing scripts would just spam us with random agents.) The good news is that you can set your limits pretty high and still function, since a large chunk of your incoming bandwidth is that top fraction of a percent of hits that are poorly-written scripts. Even a large number of RSS feeds behind a proxy shouldn't be that magnitude of traffic. We do get reader complaints, though, and for a sample of them, anyone thinking about doing this might want to read this thread first.

So kathleen & I have been looking at moving to a much smaller place, which means we need to move some stuff... one of the single biggest things I have to move is ~500 anime DVDs. Tons of great stuff in there. The problem is that that many DVDs would take absolutely forever to list individually on eBay or Amazon or something. And shipping hundreds of DVDs individually would be ludicrously time consuming. I'm not looking to make a huge amount of cash, in fact, store credit somewhere that sells something I want would be fantastic. Does anyone have any ideas? There are local places in Ann Arbor that will exchange old games for store credit. And I'm keeping my mammoth CD collection- but I'm putting it into storage I think since they are all MP3s now anyway.

I also have a number of professionally framed and matted cels. A lot of those I'm going to keep, but I probably need to move half of them. Anyone know of a good way to do that? At that level, eBay might be cool since we'd only be talking about 10-15 pieces as opposed to the *hundreds* above.

It's been quite awhile since I put words into this TEXTAREA field. Since then I did an appearance on The Screen Savers (which has since all but been cancelled as G4 tries to figure out what to do with the TechTV assets). I have mixed feelings on that whole thing. I've met several of the people who worked on the show and they seem sincere, but at the end of the day, I don't find TSS particularly watchable. I think the real problem is quite simply that I am to far over the other side of the techie bell curve... their audience is the average computer user to the power user and I eat/breath/sleep technology. When I turn on my TV, I'd rather watch CSI or Mythbusters ;)

I spoke at Georgia Tech a few weeks ago too, which was the last of like 5 trips I had in a 4 week period. That went really surprisingly well- it's cool to have a talk when there are several people who really get what Slashdot is. Some people have really drank the kool aid with regards to Slashdot and are simply fans. Others can see beyond that hype and really see Slashdot and objectively see its strengths and weaknesses, and we had a few of those. Those are the talks I actually gain something from. Had a good time with Tammy & Mandrake who I only get to see a couple times a year now that we all don't go to every single Linux Conference that pops up.

My iPod (a 3G 40 gig one, acquired only weeks before the 60 gig iPod Photo was released. Damn you apple!) doesn't seem to work with a USB cable connected to my iMac following 10.3.6. This irritates me because I use it to shuttle large files back and forth between the office. It's not convenient to drag a cable with me.

In Slashdot news, our traffic has continued to rise, and just like every time, nobody is more surprised than me. Our unique IP counts now routinely exceed 500,000/day. We're serving 3.5M pages on most weekdays. Jamie & I have spent a fair bit of time designing the 'Big Picture' for the new moderation system... most of the concepts have already been outlined in previous journal entries, so read backwards if you're curious.

There will most likely be some very controversial changes... we've talked about eliminating the Score:-1 to 5 threshold system. Its confusing, limited, and extremely non scalable. We've also talked about removing the *dozens* of options that only 2% of our readers use and only 1% understand, and instead replacing them both with a few very simple choices... viewing modes or viewing styles or reading preferences or something. User option all really simplify down to options that make the page bigger or longer, and options that focus or unfocus the discussion. Instead of giving users 28 checkboxes and drop downs, we'll give them a handful of big picture options.

Moderation itself will internally change quite a bit. Right now there's a tangled ball of spagetti code wound so tight that it could easily have its own gravity. We need to replace that with a few tables... a table of events (comment moderated 'Informative', meta moderation ruled unfair etc) a table of repurcussions (karma goes up, ac posting disabled etc) so that we can more easily maintain what is an incredibly convoluted set filters that control moderation and posting.

We'll also have the option to revisit our mod labels. The ones we have are problematic. Some are redundant. Others require more discussion context rendering M2 difficult. One cool thing we came up with is that we'll be able to have context sensitive mod labels. This means we could have specific moderation labels that maybe only apply in a Call for Interview Questions... "Good Question"... or even crazy ideas like "Conservative" & "Liberal" for the politics section. The possibility for these options is endless, exciting, and a helluva lot better than a poor moderator being frusterated trying to figure out if a comment is Informative, Insightful, or Interesting. What was I thinking?

The last part will be a rewrite of the threading system so that threads better retain context through moderation. So good replies slide up and hopefully readers still get contextual comments. There's several complicated HTML issues, some UI ones, and a host of technical problems that need solving. If anyone knows of any forums out there that do a really good job presenting the data, I'd love to see them. We're open to any reasonable web technology... I hope to build this all with CSS, which will anger some folks, but I think we're well past the line where CSS is the only fair choice.

As always, you can email me if you have comments.

The media is surprisingly quiet about the "oil shock" that we are going through. One might almost call it "suppressed panic": I'm seeing the story in financial sections but it hasn't hit the front page yet. The price of oil keeps hitting record highs, and with supply barely exceeding demand, the price may continue to rise in the months to come.

The question is how much. The consensus seems to be that if we hit the $60-70 level and stay there for a few months, we're definitely looking at another recession. But what damage could a $50-60 price do? Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley was concerned, saying in August that

With oil prices now in the high $40s (WTI basis), there is good reason to treat this development as yet another in a long string of energy shocks. The impact of such disruptions depends very much on context -- namely, the vulnerability, or lack thereof, in the underlying economy. When a weak economy is hit by any type of a shock, recession normally results. Conversely, a strong economy is better insulated to withstand such a blow. Most of the oil shocks of the past fall into the former category -- hitting economies when they are vulnerable. Unfortunately, the Oil Shock of 2004 fits that script to a tee. [...]

At the current level of around $47, oil prices are 62% above the $29 average that has prevailed since early 2000. That takes the "real" oil price (i.e., WTI quotes deflated by the headline CPI) back to levels last seen in the late 1980s; in fact, other than the brief spike in late 1990, the current increase represents the sharpest run-up in the real oil price since the late 1970s. I have maintained for some time that the "true" shock probably comes with $50 oil (see my May 10 dispatch, "Global Wildcards"). That would represent in excess of a 70% surge above the post-2000 average -- enough of a spike, in my view, to put it in the ballpark with full-blown oil shocks of the past.

and

"The economy is near its tipping point," Stephen S. Roach, chief economist for Morgan Stanley, said yesterday. He said the nation would likely fall back into recession if oil prices hover near $50 a barrel for three to six months.

"This is an oil shock, absolutely," Roach said, noting that yesterday's closing price was 68 percent higher than the roughly $29 per barrel average that had prevailed since early 2000. "The oil price is high enough to make a real difference to a vulnerable U.S and global economy."

I wonder if W's economic legacy will be a W-shaped recovery.

Update, Nov. 1, 2004: Oil Down $2, Speculators Bet on Kerry Win - LONDON (Reuters) - Oil prices fell heavily on Monday, taking U.S. crude below $50 on speculation that a U.S. election win for Senator John Kerry could ease the geopolitical friction that helped fuel this year's record-breaking rally.

Update, April 8, 2005: "The economists have changed their minds," says the WSJ. The economists who were saying last August that $50-60 oil would cause a recession have bumped their estimate up to $80-90. It's quite possible they were too pessimistic last year (and that I was foolish to believe them). But this writer wonders if they shouldn't have stuck to their guns. Oil peaked recently in the high-$50s, but has declined all this week, to $53.

Our talk at google seemed to go pretty well. I was surprised at the number of people who showed up to hear what we had to say, especially considering what little we actually HAD to say. Seems like a pretty cool work environment. The free food everywhere would scare the crap out of me- it took me most of 2004 to lose 30 of the 40 lbs overweight that I am. But more power to them I guess. There's a cool energy in there. Very different from most offices that I've spent any real time in. But it was great to see some old friends (Hey Chris, San, Bones) and just hang out a little.

I saw Team America World Police last night at a sneak screening audience in Ypsi last night. It was a little strange for me since Paramount actually emailed me and asked if I would go as part of some marketing campaign for bloggers to see the movie. Now I've written dozens of movies reviews on Slashdot (and before that, Chips & Dips featured movie reviews has a huge portion of its content) but this is the first time a studio ever actually invited me to see a free movie. Now Slashdot has a half a million daily readers, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but hey, it's been 7 years. I'll have a complete review of the movie to post on Slashdot soon, but the short summary is that I laughed a lot. And Kathleen who went to the film almost against her will, ready to hate whatever she saw, totally sick of South Park, actually laughed harder than me. Scary. Full review tomorrow, I hope. Maybe Tuesday at the latest because...

Tomorrow I fly out at like 8am to LA to be on The Screen Savers. And pretty much as soon as that is done, I hop back on an airplane and fly straight back. The first time in years I've flown somewhere and back again in the same day. Not my favorite thing, thats for sure. On the other hand, the airplane time will let me write my movie review, and perhaps collect a few more Pokemon. As jeff likes to say, it's not a suggestion really, you GOT to catch them all. The marketing says so. I almost never turn on my game boy when I'm at home, but when I travel, it's like my little blue buddy, providing me with soothing beeps and colorful pictures... tranquilizing me and helping me contain my rage at being trapped inside the steel cylinder 30,000 feet straight up and a thousand miles from my wife, cats, computer, and tivo.

Kathleen & I returned yesterday from a week vacation in Hawaii. Had a really fantastic time. The hotel internet was down almost the entire week, which saved me from even TRYING to read my email for like 5 straight days. I got over the withdrawl and enjoyed the sun. I snorkeled. I snuba dived. I drove switchback filed roads in a full size sedan. I took a helecopter tour of the island. I endured jet lag, and some utterly fantastic meals. Fortunately the hotel had a gym, so I managed to only gain a tiny bit of weight. I'm pretty well caught up on my email... but the Tivo is another story. So much CSI to watch...

I'm going to be on The Screen Savers again on Oct 11, and they asked me to plug my appearance. I don't really feel comfortable doing that on the mainpage... so many websites spend so much space plugging their own mojo that it gets incredibly repetitive. It's a pet peeve of mine. So I'll note it here, if you're in Los Angelos Oct 11, email your name, phone number, email address and number of tickets you'll need to TSSTicketline@g4media.com and I guess they'll hook you up. Of course, only like 7 people actually READ my journal, so I guess tell your friends or something.

While on the subject, I'm speaking at Google on friday, and the Georgia Institute of Technology on Oct 26... I'm not really sure if either event is open to the public, but what I am certain of is that I will be spending WAY to much airplane time. On the upside, the new Pokemon games for the gameboy came out recently. I know, laugh if you want... but I've been playing Leaf Green. It's just a simple RPG. Easily pausible. Easily savable. Easy to kill a few minutes waiting in a line or whatever. So with my mp3 player full of episodes of This American Life and the opportunity to 'Catch them All' and become the greatest pokemon trainer of all time, I guess I'll make do with all the time in the steel tubes.

Tragically this means my Sims 2 game will go largely unattended in October. Man the volumes I could write about that game... hafta save that for another time.

My foes list has a bunch of trolls on it. Some are new. If anyone has suggestions for names to add or names to take off, please post a comment here. Oh and please link to examples of why it should change. Thank you.

So I just want to complain a bit about a constant problem that we have on Slashdot. We get 500 story submissions on a busy day... and we post 15-20. This means that we're going to reject 96% of every story submitted. It means that on average, you would need to submit 25 stories to get just ONE accepted.

Users hate this, and it's understandable. A lot of users just half-ass a submission, a link and maybe a badly spelled rant about how evil some corporate monster is. But others really put in a lot of effort. They clearly spent 5-10 minutes crafting a solid submission, finding and linking related articles around the net, and linking previous stories on Slashdot. Very cool. So when their submission gets rejected, they take that as a slap.

It doesn't help that a story rejection on Slashdot essentially amounts to "Rejected". No explanation. No reason. No justification. Users invent all sorts of reasons, ranging from the likely (they didn't care much for the story) to the conspiratorial (I've submitted 5 stories and they've all been rejected, clearly you hate me and all that I stand for). This morning I found this priceless little gem (reprinted with permission, but name witheld to prevent ego stroking) which really typifies the response I get. I get 3-5 complaints a day, but this one was special.

Subj: Question: Who do you have to fuck to get posted in "Ask Slashdot"?

I'm 0 for 5 now and that's BULLSHIT!!! You bastards don't even have the courtesy to acknowledge the care and thought that goes into a submission? Shame!

For me the illusion is broken. "Community resource?" My Ass!

I will now break down what he said, what he means, and try to respond to it. I shall do so in asshole form becauase it's early and I haven't yet finished my first cup of coffee, and because I'm not clever enough to respond Strongbad style.

• I am angry enough to use impolite language with a total stranger. This is always an issue for me. I like to help readers. I like to answer questions. I'll even answer very controversial and difficult questions if I can. But to start off a message like this... this guy knows for a fact that no good will come of his message. Everything about it. This is purely flame. What does he really expect to come of this message? I actually laughed out loud when I read this one. It was early, and this message was SO stereotypical, it prompted me to share. Now don't get me wrong, I'm no prude. I'll cuss and swear (as anyone who knows me will attest to) but you don't cuss and swear when you are trying to promote change from a stranger. It's just bizarre.
• There is a mysterious "Secret" to getting a story selected. He implies that this is sexual. As if by boning me, he'll get a story posted, even tho I'm pretty sure that even my wife has never managed to get a story posted. Already, there is denial here... he believes that there is a secret to getting a story posted, and it won't matter what I tell him. The truth is less interesting...
• Since he has submitted 5 stories, he is entitled to get one posted This one actually used to bother me. As I mentioned above, we reject 25 submissions for every one we accept. So he is already off by a factor of 5. But it never ceases to amaze me that people think that volume of submissions is a factor in selection. What they don't understand is that we don't even look at the name of the submittor. I deleted hundreds of story submissions yesterday and probably didn't read a single byline. I double check them to make sure they are syntactically correct and not dirty words before I save a final story, but it doesn't even enter in to the story selection process. Each submission is a stand alone event...
• He is entitled to some level of praise and honor for writing a submission This is a fair request, and it has always been an issue on Slashdot that a submission that is not accepted is marked as 'Rejected' and returned to the submittor. Some users take this very personally. From the big picture perspective, we're providing no feedback, so there is no chance for the submittor to improve. From a practical perspective, its just not possible to give a reason... there's simple not enough time. Remember that we're talking about 500 rejections a day. Even if it takes just 10 seconds to decide upon a reason, and select it from a list, we just added 83 minutes to our work day, or 9.6 hours to our work week. We don't have 9.6 extra hours next week. Or the week after that. It's just not possible. The other fact is that the more feedback a user is given, the more dialog they want. We learned this with the moderation system and the user account system. Every piece of data we reveal creates a new discussion. New dialog. New questions. New answers. And more email. Right now 3-5 users email me a day to question a rejected submission. I reply with a form letter. If we provided a reason, I'd bet that number would increase 5 to 10 fold. I don't have time to write 50 more emails a day apologizing and explaining and justifying.
• I should be ashamed because I didn't give him praise As you probably noticed from this journal entry, I'm not really feeling shame.
• His view of Slashdot is diminished as, for him, it is not a community resource. This is the one that really gets me giggling, because he already has said he was submitting 'Ask Slashdot' stories. In other words, he is pissed that we won't answer his question. This isn't about serving the community. This is about serving him. And because Slashdot won't do that, we are failing them. Again, this is very typical of some submittors. The sense of entitlement is strange. The individual always likes to call out the needs of the 500,000 daily Slashdot readers when they don't get their way. Wheras I like to think that the reason that we have those 500,000 daily readers in the first place is that we're doing a pretty good job of selecting stories that do serve the community.
• My Ass! this one confuses me too, but i have a theory: he already demonstrated in his subject line that he considers sex a means to get what he wants. Perhaps this statement is an exclamatory related to that. It's unclear to me if he is offering something, or complaining about previous results. But again, it's a little to much to put into an email to a stranger

So anyway, good morning! I have probably 200 more people to reject before I get to go home today, imagine what my inbox will look like by 5!

We get a lot of telemarketers and have done many things to confuse them over the years. Most inventive is Samzenpus who lives for the challenge presented by random phone calls. When they call and ask for the person in charge of phones, he simply explains that 'We Don't Have Phones'. We've been sharing office space for like 3-4 years now, and this never gets old.

For the last few months, the new game has been 'Hold'. You can usually tell within about 3 seconds if the call is legit or not. If they are obviouslly selling you credit cards or phone service, you politely ask them to be put on hold. Then you start the stopwatch. Most people last 20-30 seconds tops. Today we had someone break not only the never-before-breached 1 minute barrier, she made it TWO minutes. She lasted so long that the phone actually beeped to warn us that there was someone holding! Glorious!

The politics section went live today. I'm quite nervous about it, but it'll be interesting to see what happens with it. After 20 minutes of posting, most comments in the discussion are pretty irrelevant (blah blah color scheme, blah blah jump the shark, blah blah). But then again, people are always incredibly negative whenever Slashdot does ANYTHING new. We'll see what happens when we start posting some content.

Several users commented that they don't think that the Slashdot editors represent much political diversity. For cying out loud, Pudge is an elected official in the GOP! The verbal wars waged in our IRC channels would convince anyone.

I'm certain that we can be fair in our story selection. I'm less certain that our posters and moderators can do the same. Politics brings out the best and worst in people, and I suspect that it will do exactly the same for our moderation system. We'll see all its flaws and strengths.

I'm planning a vacation at the end of the month. Kathleen & I are aiming to go to hawaii for a week. I've never been there and I'm really looking forward to some down time. This summer has been surprisingly stressful for me, and I really need some time to unplug. Unlike our last vacation, I think we're going to plan this one very loose: just a week of nothing. Play it by ear. If something sounds fun, we'll go do it. I'm really looking forward to it. Not looking forward to my inbox after that tho.

After 2.5 years of living in Ann Arbor I finally went to a UofM sporting event. We went and saw them play football again Miami Ohio on saturday. The game was a bit of a blow out, but it was pretty amazing to sit in a crowd of 110,000 people. Took an hour to get through traffic to get home... the normal drive is about 12 minutes. Utterly insane. I need to take better advantage of living where I do... I went to see the Tigers lose a few weeks ago and had a great time. I'm not huge into sports... but there's something about going to the spectacle that is sports when it's on this giant of a scale. I need to see a Red Wings game, and a UofM Basketball game I think.

Next week is LinuxWorld. I'm only going to be there for 2 days, so I'm kinda looking forward to it... well, not the flight part, but seeing some folks. I haven't been to San Francisco in quite some time anyway. Strangely I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing there. I'm told I have to meet with people, but I haven't seen an itinerary or anything, so I guess I'll just wing it.

A bunch of folks went camping up north for Scott's Bachelor party. This was the first time I've been really in "Nature" in years. Sleeping on the ground and stuff. It was actually surprisingly nice. It always surprises me when something that I didn't enjoy as a child turns around and seems a lot nicer as I get older. I think a lot of it was that "Camping" for me as a child was basically a parking lot with a designated square lot. You couldn't be loud because the people in the tent 15 feet on either side of you would hear. It's a lot different to actually have several acres of trees on all sides of you. Makes me want to try to find some land somewhere. I think I'd like to camp a bit, but finding a place that isn't a camping parking lot seems a bit difficult. A nice chunk of land would be swell to just sit on... maybe someday build a house there. Although I can't imagine a universe where I could get internet access in any place that secluded... and I'm not going back to satellite internet ;)

With the completion of the new Section/Topic code, we can finally create a few sections on Slashdot that we've been wanting to do for a long time. The first 2 are live already... the Linux.slashdot.org and IT.slashdot.org sections. Both are obviously subject areas that Slashdot covers extensively. The creation of the sections allows us to post additional content that might otherwise be rejected. I'm very picky about what gets posted to the mainpage because not every Slashdot reader is interested in the same level of detail about any given subject matter... but the sections give us the ability to post stuff in a place where we know it will be read only by the people who are interested in that extra content. We've got at least one more section coming up.. the 'Entertainment' section which will be for TV & Movies and such. We already post a lot of stories in those sections, so this will let us group them together.

The last section is still up for debate... We've long considered 'politics.slashdot.org' with all its pros and cons. I think we're going to do it. As the presidential election gets closer, we would have at least some coverage of major political events. These stories would rarely make it to the Slashdot main page, but we have a lot of people who want to see Slashdot discussion on the major political events. Right now, those discussions happen in related stories... a conservative/liberal debate in a YRO story is very common place. We think it would be fun to run the section for a few months leading up to the election just to see if it's the sort of thing people would like. If it's successful, we'll keep it around. If not, it still provides us with a sort of blueprint for creating sections in Slashdot for specific events that come and go over time...

The code refresh went as well as could be expected... which is to say that there was some twists, turns, and a whole lotta bad aftermath, but that's par for the course. Under the hood things are all working properly. We had a couple of quick bugs that are now fixed. A few more minor bugs are waiting to be swatted. We also temporarily disabled a couple of user functions... nobody noticed some of them, which means we can probably purge some stuff if it helps make the site faster. User customization is great fun, but anything an end user can customize means one less thing that we can effectively cache. The main problem now is performance. Index especially is substantially slower following the refresh. Of course, since 60% of our index page views are anonymous, static HTML, this is only affecting a third of our users, but the effects are noticable. Jamie has been performing herculean efforts of real time optimization to get the kinks worked out.

I, Robot suprised me. On the 'Will Smith Summer Blockbuster Meter' I went into I, Robot expecting something somewhere between Independance Day (Bad) and Wild Wild West (Rancid). Instead I got something more on par with Men In Black (Pretty Good). The special effects are really quite excellent. While the plot is a bit cheesy and some of the dialog is incredibly lame, I was never bored. I roled my eyes a few times, but I also laughed. The audience I saw it with even gasped a few times when some of the more clever things occured. Actual audience response like that is tremendously rare these days. I'm not sure if people are just getting more cynical or movies are getting worse. I won't get into the Book vs Movie thing 'cuz I've never read the Asimov stuff that the movie was 'Suggested By'.

Lastly, if you're in Dearborn, I'm gonna speak friday afternoon at ADHOC (formerly MacHack). I don't have any agenda, so it'd be swell if people showed up so I'd have something to talk about. I wonder about the show. It seems to be in a serious state of flux... I went to the last 2 MacHack's and was really impressed. This really is a small-scale show with a real heart. People doing their thing for the love of it. They legitimately care about the "Yutes", who are respected as little geeks in training. It was a surprisingly cool experience, especially to jaded 'ole me. Hopefully that same spirit is retained this year... of course I won't have time to see since my visit will be just a few hours long.