So if you're in the Bay Area tonight, you definitely need to show up tonight at the Park Side Hall (across the street from the conference hall) at 7:30 (until 10) for the Slashdot/Freshmeat/Andover shindig. Free beer, and loud music (from San "Single White Female" Mehat), good times shall be had or your money back! You're all invited. It ought to be a rip roarin' good time. At least, after Guinness #3 ;)

Mr Poet would like to start a discussion on the following: "I am an AVID user of Postgresql, over the past 6 months I have seen more and more about MySQL. I have done a little research and outside of MySQL being extremely fast I have not seen any reason why people are so excited about it. This is not a slam on MySQL. I just don't understand the reasons. Could we have a technical discussion as to why?" That's a good question. What are the strengths and weaknesses of both programs. Are there areas of deployment where one is more appropriate than the other, or are these programs fairly interchangeable?

Andover.Net is springing for a party for Slashdot readers at LinuxWorld next week Tuesday. The shindig will be held at the Park Side Hall accross the street from the conference center immediately following Linus' keynote. Tunes will be provided by VAs San "NeTTwerk" Mehat, and the Beer will be provided by Andover. (Let me just say that it is super wierd throwing your own bash at a conference instead of just leaching off everyone else's, but hey, free beer, right?).

Ah yes the fun of debugging.. you might have noticed strange behavior today, but hopefully its all fixed now. Most of the changes were fixes of longstanding bugs, but I added one new feature that might matter to some of you: "Max Comment Size" is a limit for (surprise!) the size of comments. If a comment exceeds that size, it is truncated and you can click a link to read the rest. Sidesteps several of the more childish system abuses quite nicely. SQL optimizations and a new version of mysql will hopefully speed stuff up. I've also been slowly but surely fixing the bug where you get logged out when you visit 'Ask Slashdot' or the Book Reviews pages. Lots of other backend changes that won't matter much to anyone. Oh, and the Geeks in Space section demonstrates some of the new custom section code. I can redefine colors on a section-by-section basis. No big deal right now, but as we bring new sections online, it'll add some variety. CowboyNeal also reports that we now have Slashboxes for PDA Buzz, and Jack Stowage's Useful Links. Now methinks its time to microwave a pizza and have a nice glass of whiskey.

Alan J. Wylie sent us Andrew Leonard's article running on Linux.com on "The Three Stages of Free Software Cluefulness". The most clueless part of conferences is (as always) the PR firms. Mine has apparently made up some story about me herding media tycoons about LinuxWorld (I'm not sure if they mean physically or through Slashdot). Anyway, for me personally its a case study in why PR firms don't work in the era of the Internet.I mean, PR companies always screw up (you should see the comically erred press releases I get every day). The difference is that the Internet already has people (relatively) in touch with each other without the help of a PR firm. Their primary function is obsolete. As always, my email address is malda@slashdot.org, and while I don't reply to everything, I do read it. What a sucky way to start of the day.

Well, the fine folks over at The Sync have informed me that episode two of Geeks in Space is ready for listening-with Nate, Rob and I's commentary, and featuring a live report from CowboyNeal from Martha's Vineyard, concering JFK Jr. Honest! *grin*

MrP- writes "Please visit Hashsnot. Hashsnot is a simple one page parody of Slashdot, I'm almost sure you will find this amusing!

We've been working on this for awhile and we're excited to announce that the premiere broadcast of Slashdot Radio: Geeks in Space is officially online. We plan to do this weekly at first and pick up steam depending on demand. Essentially, hemos, nate & I sit in a bedroom at the Geek Compound and babble about whatever we think is interesting on Slashdot. Its available in Real Audio or as an MP3. Thanks to The Sync for setting us up with this. The link below has a few comments about what we're planning on doing.

First off, congratulations to Tom Lam and Jim Sproull who are the winners of the Slashdot T-Shirt Design contest. They each get a $100 credit at CopyLeft. The designs will be available in a few weeks (don't worry, we'll announce them), and Tom, please email me an updated URL or your image since your server seems to be down right now and your email is bouncing. Second, I added some new code in the User Preferences: Short Comment Penalty and Long Comment Bonus. It allows you to +1 and -1 comments based on their lengths- nice for filtering out "Me Too" kinda comments. Finally, CowboyNeal, Slashbox poo-bah has notified me that we now have Slashboxes for I, Cringely, LilithFair.org, Myther.com, PBS Online, Dr. Dobb's TechNetCast, and Riva Extreme. So login and play with them if you are interested in these things.

The Geek Complex is without power today following an electrical cable cut inadvertently made by the phone company following some work in the area. This means Rob and Jeff are unable to post stories, respond to e-mail, etc. It also explains my sudden usurping of power on the site. We're hoping that everything gets fixed soon.

I'm sure a lot of you knew it was coming. The steady stream of emails asking "When is Slashdot gonna IPO" and messages from VCs pretty well proves that you guys knew it as well as I did. Well the cost and overhead of running Slashdot independently finally began to overwhelm us. After much deliberation and careful analysis, we're excited to announce that we've been acquired by Andover.net. Read more to learn what this means.

Copyleft has redone all their pages, so it only makes sense that we get some new T-Shirts up there too. So we're going to try to do a contest for some new designs. I'm going to serve as Judge (and god am I ruthless judge) on this one, and the Winner (or Winners if there are several good entries) will get the fame and glory of having their names and designs displayed here... as well as a $100 credit at Copyleft. Hit the link below to read the specifications.

First and foremost, we've moved the images to a new box. As many of you noticed, it was running temporarily off a non-standard port on the ad server. This was causing havoc for those of you behind firewalls. The new VA box is in place (blatant plug). It's horribly over powered (Dual P2) for the task at hand so to make things interesting (and to get Jesse to stop whining) we're trying out FreeBSD on it. I've also added several minor features to the comments section, as well as fixed a few bugs. Click the link below to read about them.

Catatomic writes "The Village Voice has an interesting article about Katz "Voices From The Hellmouth" Check it out here. " Well, interesting is one way to put it; incendiary is another. Worth checking out though. Click below to get a response from Katz, who was interviewed for this article.

Normally I reserve stories about Slashdot to the quickies bin, but this article is getting submitted so many times that if I don't post it, I'll spend the rest of the day deleting it from the submissions box. Bill Longabaugh wrote in to send us a piece by Dan Gillmor over at the San Jose Mercury News about Slashdot. It's a nice little 'Slashdot as a weblog' piece apparently designed to stroke my ego. Update: 05/25 03:42 by CT : I've begun rewriting the Moderator Guidelines, so if you're interested, please check them out and submit comments (or diffs :)

Several notes attached below regarding the system in general, but also regarding minor changes to moderation. If you have ever had moderator access, or ever expect to get it, please read the link below to read a few comments on minor changes to the system, plus answers to faqs that keep flooding my inbox. Never fear, I'll be rewriting the moderator guidelines just as soon as I have a few hours of peace and quiet.

Madoc writes "Was just over at Seti@Home's site, and saw that they've introduced teams now! There are 2 Slashdot teams, we should probably standardize on one: Slashdot.org and Team Slashdot " I vote for Team Slashdot. Go seek out new intelligence if this rocks your boat better than cracking DES keys.

It's Official: Slashdot served up its One Hundred Millionth page at 6:57pm Eastern. (It was a Mac user from cs.purdue.edu loading the homepage if you're curious). Thanks to the authors, story submittors, comment posters, and especially to the thousands of you who just keep reloading day after day.

As you probably noticed, the Server really bogged down today. The reason is quite simple: Katz's story, with about 500 comments weighed in at about a meg. 70 httpd's trying to serve a one meg file (which takes 2-3 minutes for most of you to download) perhaps a dozen times a second. Do the math *grin*. So I have a server level setting that will enforce Comment Limits when we get bogged. This will annoy the heck out of some how you, but it vastly speeds up page loads. After that mess, I'm glad to have some good news: I brought the 2500 stories online that I yanked awhile back when we were getting overloaded (mostly stories from late 97 early 98) so you can search for them again. More random musings are attached below.

I added the Cheesy Portal Page. No you can't configure it- its just all the Slashboxes that you could possibly have on Slashdot in one gigantic page. Several folks asked for this, I could actually see it being kinda useful if you're on a fast connection and don't mind a huge homepage. Next, the Brain Power boys have their Neuro Network stuff live now. Its like $5 per resume and $10 per new affiliate. So if ya put 'sd' in the 'more info' blank, Slashdot gets to pay the bandwidth bill again this month. The search engine has been shaping up quite nicely too. Lastly, The moderator stuff is basically up to speed now. Several dozen jurors are getting randomly selected each day to moderate discussions. We'll see how it goes. Fingers crossed.