Well I guess this is todays changelog: First, my space heater is busted so I can't feal my fingers very well. Second, "Light" and "No Icon" options are in the user preferences. Combined with with "No Boxes" and setting your mode to NoComment, you should have a Slashdot that will work on extremely minimal browsers. Comments probably will still die in light mode (and still require a table) but I'll work that out later. Hit the link to read about changes to various Slashboxes.

The arrival of the new server last week brought spare clock cycles to burn. It was time to make Slashdot customizable. Last thursday I announced the ability to filter the story display, but now, we have full customization of the grey boxes on the right side of the homepage. Currently, things like The Poll and Freshmeat dominate, but now we have a couple dozen interesting boxes to choose from, ranging from the User Friendly to the JenniCam to various search forms and headlines to a few of our favorite sites. Or you can just turn them all off. If you are Logged In and you Edit your Preferences. I'm open to suggestions about new boxes, and in the future we'll be allowing users to make and share their own custom boxes. Course by then hopefully we'll have a few more servers to distribute the load over.

I've been a busy boy- but mostly today has been debugging and optimizing stuff. With the new filterable homepage, the server needs to do a lot more work (those dynamic pages don't just generate themselves people!) But I think I've sorted out the major bugs at this point. (note:mod_perl is so cool). http://slashdot.org/ should automatically route logged-in users to index.pl, but serve everyone else the static page. Hopefully this will help keep things quick. Plus I've done a lot to optimize out SQL where possible. Thanks to everyone who has been helping test this stuff out and sent suggestions- most of the suggestions are coded now. We should be ready for wide scale testing tomorrow. (Assuming no major bugs crop up yet tonight and cause me to miss the X-Files)

Logged in users will notice New Options on the Preferences Page. (non-logged in users should go to the Accounts Page and login). Last night I added the ability to filter Slashdot on Author, Section and Topic for all you Katz haters. Today I added an option to configure how much news you want on the homepage. Tonight I finish configuring of the grey boxes on the right hand side of the homepage. Its actually working nicely: I've got a picture of Dust Puppy, the JenniCam, and a couple forms for my favorite search engines. You can even have a custom block for your own bookmarks if you really care. If you have URLs to sites that have open back ends that we could import useful stuff from, let us know. We've already got our favorites in there, but we could do anything that makes sense so send in suggestions- preferably with parsable back end pages or perl scripts to make it easy. Having a fast server is cool. We can do much neater things. Update: 03/11 02:18 by CT : Did I mention you can now disable comments? *grin*

President John F. Kennedy wrote in to say that Propaganda 5 is out. Another outstanding series of background images. RPoet wrote in to say that The Gimp had a 1.1.3 developer release come out. Bill the Cat sent us another strange eBay Auction Item. Les VanBrunt sent me a picture from LWCE that should be destroyed. netweasel sent us a link to Jesus Action Figures! Collect All 12 Apostles! Jesus! With Super Healing Grip! I bet Boba Fett would win. Bowie J. Poag wrote in to say that CopyLeft now has Themes.org shirts for sale. unitron sent us a link to Phone Spell which converts ph#s to words. I found some cute ones for mine- wish my area code didn't have a 1 in it. Lastly, another reminder to go to the User Account page and edit your preferences. Slashdot article filtering should be working. More coming tomorrow, assuming this stuff works as advertised.

A truckload of you have emailed to curse me because you aren't getting emails from the system for lost passwords and new accounts. I'm getting emails from some of my accounts, but not from others, so hopefully I can get this working soon. Probably just switch to Net::SMTP. But wait, thats not all. Hit the link for a big batch of assorted updates pertaining to bug fixes, hardware updates, and new features coming up on Slashdot. Its fun for the whole family assuming your whole family is deranged. Update: 03/10 11:34 by CT : I think email is working again. Hopefully everyone can stop emailing me now *grin*. Update: 03/10 11:55 by CT : The Users Page has been updated- click 'Preferences' to get the first round of Slashdot customization. More hopefully in the next day or 2.

The new box is stabilizing at 206.170.14.76. Thanks to the several of you who've commented on various things. Yeah, its a bit slow- but thats actually because I think we were hitting our bandwidth cap. Anyway I've got a new kernel and I've shut off the useless services, and I think we're almost ready, but I need some of that Slashdot Effect for once to make sure we're gonna go uninterupted tomorrow. So go to 206.170.14.76 for a couple minutes and post some comments or something. Lets see how revved up this beast really is. (don't worry about 404s- I haven't moved the 200 megs of old articles over yet) Update: 03/09 01:31 by CT : Wow! You guys kicked more pages out of that thing than I would have thought possible. It was doing about 3 times the load of Slashdot. I think its stable. You can be gentle again *grin*

Allright the big beefy new VA Research box (Dual P2/450 with 512 megs of RAM- replacing a dual P2/266 with 256 megs!) is up and running at 206.170.14.76. Go ahead an smash it around a little bit. I need a little bit of that Slashdot Effect before I try actually running Slashdot on top of it. If we don't have any major problems, I'll probably switch everything over later tonight. The old server was handling over a half a million pages per day. Hopefully this one will have muscle enough to support us while I work on the personalized homepage stuff. Update: 03/08 05:27 by CT : THUD. that didn't take long.

Proof once again that I shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a root password, Slashdot's httpd has begun crashing. It dies about every 4 minutes for no apparent reason. Nothing shows up in any of the logs. I haven't changed a single thing on this damn machine since last wed, and this started yesterday, so its either gremlins or script kiddies. Anyhoo, please hang in there- I'm working as fast as I can. I'm going to be shuffling around some hardware soon (including a much faster box for Slashdot) so hopefully that will help. This puts a delay on the new moderation system (grr) but I'll get to it. I'll be a bit balder but I'll get to it. I gotta hire a sysadmin. Ugh. Update: 03/08 01:15 by CT : Please stop sending resumes!

Tonight at 7 (for once on Slashdot, the times will be pacfic and not eastern!) we're going to hang out at some place called Cafe Babylon- its like a block away from the Convention Center. It meets my single requirement for an eating establishment: net access. So anyway, the BSI boys are gonna hang out there this evening (Alex is giving me free food! Yee haw) If you're in the area, stop in. We'll have our own little Slashdot pre-LinuxWorld party. It'll be fun.

The excerpting of my book "Running To The Mountain" on Slashdot last week was shockingly and surprisingly successful. Because of the excerpting here, I shot near the top of Amazon's Top 100-selling books in just a few hours, and stayed on the list all weekend. This experiment in digital literary empowerment flew in the face of just about every conventional publishing wisdom about how books and the Internet and Web do -- or don't -- interact. It suggested that for writers, as well as for so many other groups, the Net can, in fact, be just as empowering as gasbags like me have been saying for years. What happened to me wasn't supposed to happen. It shocked my publisher, and more than a few journalists. And typically,it provoked some especially ugly -- and for me, quite sad -- discussions and accusations on the site.

drwiii was the first to submit it and I guess I have to post it. Hemos and I have our pictures in the March issue of Wired (p45). We look like dorks, but when they took that picture it was like 5 degrees out and had something like a 25 degree wind chill. This is for the March issue they say as they order us to remove our coats and risk frostbyte so that we look timely. Eek. I guess this means I should buy this issue. Update: 02/15 10:34 by CT : I'm the ugly on. The ugly one on the right. The metal thing is a lighthouse.

Notice how all these stories are disappearing? Is it because I'm a censorship oriented Nazi? According to my inbox, thats the only rational explanation. The truth is that we've been having database problems for several days. Stories are randomly disappearing. Its making me really cranky. I haven't been eating or sleeping much. But I'm working on it. I'm really sorry about all this crap. Believe me, its pissing me off more than you.

Anonymous Coward writes "After reading about Microsoft's successful attempt to patent style sheets, I tried typing the word "Microsoft" into the IBM patent server. It is amazing how many of these bloody things they are generating in the patent office. I selected a patent at random to see how "novel" it was and just by chance I fell on this one. It was filed May 15, 1996. "

RandySC writes " Demoronizer is a Perl program which corrects numerous errors and incompatibilities in HTML generated by, or edited with, Microsoft applications. The demoroniser keeps you from looking dumber than a bag of dirt when your Web page is viewed by a user on a non-Microsoft platform. A little detective work revealed that, as is usually the case when you encounter something shoddy in the vicinity of a computer, Microsoft incompetence and gratuitous incompatibility were to blame. Western language HTML documents are written in the ISO 8859-1 Latin-1 character set, with a specified set of escapes for special characters. Blithely ignoring this prescription, as usual, Microsoft use their own "extension" to Latin-1, in which a variety of characters which do not appear in Latin-1 are inserted in the range 0x82 through 0x95--this having the merit of being incompatible with both Latin-1 and Unicode, which reserve this region for additional control characters. " So now we know what happened to Jon.

So something is blowing up over here. I haven't resolved what yet. Nothing has changed in weeks outside of little niggly changes here and there- we had 3 weeks of almost perfect uptime, yet now suddenly sql queries are randomly failing all over the place. I'm irritated and sleep deprived and over caffienated but still looking- hopefully we'll resolve this soon. In the meantime, hang in there, and you don't need to keep sending me email telling me- believe me, I know. It's all I've been doing since last night.

CopyLeft now has Slashdot hats available for those of you who for (whatever reason) feel the need to cover up your heads. The ones I saw look pretty smooth. The website still only has drawings and not photos though. We need Slashdot socks and boxers so we truly be draped head to toe in cheesy merchandise. Or maybe Spandex Slashdot body suits? Slashdot skull caps? Matching Bra & Panty set? Berets? Jewelry? Where will the insanity end? I'm gonna go post some real news now...

PsycoDoc writes "A while back Slashdot mentioned a lone man's plight trying to get DSL service for his Macintosh with Bell Atlantic. Well Bell Atlantic finally cracked and will now support Macs with system 7.52 or higher, in part because of hundreds of complaints due to the mentioning of Steve Godun's diary on Slashdot."

Grenamier writes "Stephen Adler analysed his httpd logs after he published some papers and had mentions made of them on Slashdot, freshmeat.org and linuxtoday.org. The results showed a pretty dramatic demonstration of the Slashdot Effect. " Where's the part where servers melt? Anyway, this amused me so I figured I'd share.

We've been working on getting to LinuxWorld in march. We've bartered banner ads for most of what we need to make the journey, but we've recently confirmed that we need to pay big bucks to get bandwidth on the show floor. If I can't read my email & post stories, I can't go, and that would be tragic since I haven't left the house in almost a month *grin*. We want 3 IPs and it looks like thats gonna cost like $1600 (apparently LWCE thinks we're going to be distributing porn from the show). If you can help, email Hemos. We'll gladly swap banner ads on Slashdot. If you just want to advertise on Slashdot, you should contact hemos about that too- Last week we averaged over 400,000 pages a day- We actually served 506,000 pages in one day. We've grown about 20% since the T3 was installed and since we pay bills by the mb/s, our bandwidth costs are gonna increase at the end of the month. So if you want your ad to be seen by thousands of geeks and help make sure we can post stories from LW, help flood Hemos's inbox. PBS Telethon mode off.Update: 02/01 01:37 by H :Thanks to everyone who wrote in-we've got it taken care of.