Assorted odds and ends to babble about late on a friday night. Read if you feel like it. Ignore if you like. Updates on Slashdot's code etc.

Just figured I'd quick explain what that jobs link is over on the left hand side of the page. There are 3 or 4 extremely common feature requests for Slashdot, and a service to help find jobs is probably #3 (after AC filtering and a mailing list, which both are coming as well). So click that thing if you're interested in employment. I'm not in charge of it, it's run by Developers.Net, I'm merely throwing it up here because of the huge number of people who asked for something like this on Slashdot. So if you're an unemployed bum, and want to alter that have at it.

I've got several misc. comments to babble about related to Slash, Slashdot, and whatever else I think of before my ISP times me out (this will also answer the mystery of the (score:x) thing that several of you have emailed about), so click the link below to read it if you're interested.

Tarcus writes "The Guardian national newspaper in Britain mentioned Slashdot in the supplement "The Editor" on Saturday October 10th. There's a link on their "Sites we like" page The entry in the paper and on the page runs: If you are not technically inclined, look away now. Slashdot is the place where the IT industry's insiders, and would-be insiders, discuss the latest technical news. If your company's internet team read Slashdot, they're probably pretty good at their job. That said, they won't have much time to do any work because they probably spend their whole day reading and sending messages to Slashdot. "

Ever since Chips & Dips I've tried to reserve 5-15% of Slashdot stories for humor. So today I posted something pretty tasteless. Something that was obviously a hoax. Something that anyone who bothered to look at the link would know was a fake. It was funny, but I didn't flag it as humor because then nobody would have fallen for it. I won't do that any more. The flip side of that is that I can't post hoaxes any more without flagging them as humor. Takes a lot of the fun out of my day, but I guess I'll always have the huge number of hate mail from today's boner to keep me warm at night. It bums me out to know that I can't post something on my own web site, but I guess I'll get over it. It's probably for the best. In the future I guess I'll put that sort of stuff on Taco Hell.

Allright, we're back in business. Long series of calamities that I won't bother to explain here. It might be a hard drive problem, so I'll be making backups every 30 seconds from here on out. Hopefully we won't have any more of these little unscheduled interuptions for awhile.

The Slash source release is wrapping up. I've decided to get a version out the door before I go to work on moderation stuff. The Look & Feel stuff is pretty much functional now (within reason). Check out Taco Hell or Slash to see how different articles on the same server can look. There are glitches yet, but for the most part, things look pretty good. Hit the link to read some notes on the moderation debates, as well as a few notes about recent changes to Slash.

We've got a problem on Slashdot. Along with amazing growth we've experienced in the last 6 months, we've suffered some of the same problems as usenet. Namely the signal to noise ratio on the comments is getting out of control. There are real gems in the comments section, but wading through 'I got the first comment!' crap, or huge rampant offtopic debates is wasting bandwidth and time of the thousands of readers who just want the good stuff. Keep reading to read the deal. Updated read the end

Well folks its friday and I'm ready to relax, so I'm going to take a second and just unload the list of stuff that has changed here recently. Also, note that I've added a link on the left hand menu to 'Ask Slashdot'. We're going to start posting more of them, but only put the more relevant ones of the homepage itself. This will be handled by Cliff Wood who has done a great job filtering these things for us. Hit the link below to read to Slashdot notes.

Browsing the web (instead of coding -- CVS frustration) tonight, I came across Linux Preview, a site which appears to track slashdot articles and translate them into spanish. It's not only an attractive site, with additional touches like Classical Music MP3s, but is also a great idea: many spanish people can now enjoy our articles. It's just a shame that it neither credits slashdot, nor our contributors, but instead claims its own copyright.I hope Francisco Burzi gets my hint... Update: Hint taken. Thanks.

Numerous Slashdot tidbits to report today. For those of you who are interested, you can click the following. Hear about the new comments code, read the exciting bugs list, behold the wacky comments about SlashNET, admire my response to Segfault's recent article, and of course, behold the results of my adventures with my new breadmaker.

The new comments code is in. Hit the link below to read a relatively up-to-date list of the outstanding issues with it. I'm going to bed. Looking forward to reading a few hundred flames from people complaining about it tomorow *grin*. Note IE and Lynx are broken right now. I'll hopefully fix it tomorrow. It's a problem with my Set-Cookie:, so if you are familiar with that stuff, check it out and let me know what I'm doing wrong.

Ok I pulled a boner last night so comment posting broke. It's fixed now, and will be until I finish lunch. Then I'm going to work on the new user system. In the meantime, please test the users script and let me know if you encounter any exceptional wackiness. Hopefully I'll get this sorted out before the monday rush. I've been adding features to Slash all weekend, we'll need a new release pretty quick to get the developers caught up.

Its been awhile since I hopped up on the soapbox, but I guess nows the time. First, a status report: We got about a million hits last week. The new server and connection to UPN held up fine. We saturated the T1 a bit, but the T3 will be in soon. The DNS moved on monday and it seems to be cool. I also wanted to plug Linux-HW who sent us the new 9gig hard drive. Muchos thanks. I also added some links in the 'older stuff' box so you can link directly to previous days stories in the normal homepage format. Much more convenient. Click below to read about Slashdot user accounts and other nifty features that will be coming.

I've recieved quite a number of writeups from folks on the LSA, the LSB, and various other Linux standardization efforts. I've decided that tomorrow I'm going to post a few of the better ones. If you have an opinion (and judging by my swollen inbox, you all do) write an essay saying what you feel and why you feel it. Does Linux need to run free? Is this freedom the thing preventing us from truly being mainstream? We won't resolve it, but hopefully we can fairly present a few sides to the debate.

Welcome to SanFrancisco. We're hooked up on the new box out here in CA. We're now on a T1 that we can load up, and in a few weeks, we'll have a T3 to saturate. You can use 207.218.152.112 for now. temp.slashdot.org should also propogate around sooner or later. I'll get to InterNIC soon. In the meantime, hurry and post lots of comments to make up for the last 24 hours.

Allright this is the temp server. Comment posting has been disable until the box goes up at its new home (hopefully in the next 24hrs or so). I'll overpost things today so nobody gets to bored (This is my chance to post all the flamebait articles I've been saving!). Anyway, sorry about the hassle, but when we get to the new place, there is a whole T1 for Slashdot. And a few weeks later, a T3. Hopefully we won't worry about the Slashdot Effect killing ourselves any more.

Tomorrow we are shipping the server to UPN. We've been shooting around many ideas about how exactly we're going to handle it, and after weighing all possible alternatives, what will be happening is as follows: The server will go out as late in the day as possible that will guarantee next day shipping. We'll definately insure the box. If it blows up, I want to buy a corvette and a quad CPU alpha to replace it :). However, in the meantime, we've got a temp box. It's a slower box, so to make up for it, we're going to disable comment posting. It won't be long, so please don't make me feel guilty about it. This will at least allow us to post stories for the day. After the move, we'll sort out the DNS stuff, and then hopefully, I won't have to worry about bandwidth or CPU or memory or anything for a long time.

Allright we're back up. Few minor glitches popped up, but hopefully everything is functional again. Keep an eye out for strange behavior. Hopefully things will be less strange now that we have a nice clean box running the show.

Ben Burdick (weez) writes "SlashNET's second forum was a success. A log of the night conversing with the Stampede Linux developers can be found here "