As an escape from pumping lemmas, N-DFAs, Turing Machines and the like, I finally put the finishing touches on Rob's Amazing Poem Generator. It generates poetry based on either fortune, or a URL that you submit to it. Sometimes it produces crap, sometimes it is kinda eerie. Have I mentioned that I love perl recently?

ULINX has given Slashdot an award for being a Resource Leader, along with Freshmeat, LinuxHQ and Woven Goods. If that wasn't enough fun for one day, We also are now registered in the Top 100 on Worldcharts.com, although we seem to be in the Homepage catagory. The fun part about this thing is that they have a poll for their Global Chart. If All of Slashdot's readers follow this link and vote for me, I'll be a happy camper. In any case, thanks to both of these sites for the recognition.

So finals are next week, and I need to de-stress for a few hours before I start the hardcore studying. And what better way to waste my time then code features on Slashdot? The reason I mention this is that if you get start getting error messages in the next few hours, don't worry about it to much- it's just me breaking code. Hit the link below to read a few details about what I'm working on.

Allright for those of you who haven't been paying attention, I fully intend to open the Slashdot source. This has always been the plan. But first, hit the link below and let me say a few things about it. Updated

First let me just post a little celebration:Yesterday Slashdot had a new hits high- for the first time we broke 100,000 hits in a single day (that's pages, not counting images people). I'm happy as a clam. And the Slashdot T-Shirts should be ready RSN. Now the bad news:

A lot of email and posting has been flying around about Slashdot, Geek, OpenScape.org, and several other web sites, and I want to give my 2 cents. First, I thank the many of you who appreciate Slashdot so much, that you are willing to defend it so strongly- but a few of you went to far. Other web sites are entitled to do their thing. If you don't like their thing, stay here. If you don't like my thing, go there. Or read both. I work damn hard to make sure that as many people as possible enjoy slashdot, but that doesn't mean there can't be competition. Hit the link below for more.

Ok sorry already, stop emailing me! I forgot PowerPC from the poll booth! I reset the poll and added PowerPC. It definately deserved to be on the list, and forgetting it only proves that I shouldn't mess with poll questions early in the morning.

Side note, I'm kinda debating making weekends a little different on Slashdot. Since the 'normal' news slows down, I was thinking about filling the space out with funny posts, older, but still interesting links etc. Since we typically post half as many news articles on weekends, should I kinda stockpile this sorta stuff all week, or does everyone like it sorta jumbled together? If nothing else, it would give me some variety *grin*.

<RANT>Ok I'm going to ask this just one more time. Stop bashing the comments threading. I am very sick of hearing this. We have a flat mode coded, but it has some problems that need fixin'. There will be an alternate homepage that links to flat versions of each story. Buuut I'm doing the best I can to stay on top of a job, a course load, Slashdot, and whatever bit of a life I have left, so please be patient.

Mainly there are a few people who feel the need to post that they hate threads in every other post. It's only a few people, but it's really making me mad. Worse, it is taking way to much time to delete all of these annoying off-topic posts. The worst case scenario is that we don't post any comments until someone has had a chance to confirm the validity of the post. I don't want to do this, I want things nice, open and friendly, so I'm begging that those few offenders (you know who you are) play nicely so I'm not forced to make this sort of very nasty decision.

I've got a gigantic list of cool stuff that's going to happen here right after exams are done. Everyone will be happy. Now relax for a couple of weeks so I can pass my finals</RANT>

Ok, two things today. First is that I've actually finally almost finished designing the Slashdot T-Shirts. They are basically the logo you see next to this story, and will available soon. If you are definately going to be buying a shirt, I'd like you to email BEP so we can figure out how many of these buggers to print. We're open to suggestions (mugs, hats, stickers etc) so feel free to express interest in these sorts of items as well.

The second note is a bit trickier- it pertains to credit on articles on Slashdot. A lot of egos have been bruised, and I just want to explain things so nobody else gets angry. Hit the link below to read more.

Just going to take a minute here to throw a few notes out to everyone so I can stop getting a few of these FAQs in my mailbox. hit the link below to read several notes, some of which are quite important and some of which, well, really don't matter much in the grand scheme of things. I cover fonts, NS2/Opera, Flat Comments, Mugs, CDs, Books, Southpark and MST.

Allright I have a whole slew of announcements worth making related to the site, so I'm just going to get them out in a bundle. First off, the variable width thing is now working pretty well. Hopefulyl everybody likes it. Next, we've been having server problems- I'm not sure if its Mysql, Mod_perl, or one of my scripts, it just seems that occasionally the database connections slip up. Quite wierd. Hit the link below to read a bunch more notes.

After all the feedback I've been getting lately regarding the Slashdot rewrite, I decided to listen to the huge number of readers who were complaining that Slashdot was still just to narrow. Hopefully everyone will find this new 1280 template much more pleasing. Later today we should have the comments replaced with better code that eliminates clutter by never displaying more than one comment on screen at a time. Update Thanks to the hundreds of you who fell my april fools day joke. I should strip the addresses and post some of the irate email I got. Hope everyone likes this template a bit better.

Scott Miller (who obviously has to much spare time) has written 'SlashHOT' a java application that monitors Slashdot headlines, tracks them, and saves you the time of pressing reload only to find that nothing has changed. Grab it here. Please direct questions about the app to Scott.

We've squashed most of the bugs, but we have a few more to go, so bear with us. Please stop emailing about the page width. We're going to vote on it next week and that'll be the end of it. We'll have a link to view threads in a flat list like the old site as well. A few smaller features have yet to be implemented, and the comment code will have a few more refinements but we're almost done. Slashdot's load has dropped from 2.5-7.5 on a normal day to 0.25. mod_perl is cool.

In a somewhat related note, I'm currently toying with writing an editorial on Cookies, and analyzing why people hate them, and why people like them. If you have strong opinions on the subject (and I know you do!) please send them to me (and put 'cookies' in your subject somewhere.

Allright, the new site is up, and just about fully functional. Thanks to everyone who has been just wailing email on me all day (and all last night) with comments/bugs etc. Please follow the link below and read a few points and help me smooth everything out before monday when my spring break is over and I stop having spare time to fix bugs :)

Well we tried to put 64 megs of RAM in the Slashdot server this morning (hence the downtime) and some wierd EISA error appeared- we tried some stuff, and eventually went back to 64. Not so great, but we'll try again tomorrow morning when you guys aren't trying to get your fixes :) Also the rewrite is coming along well. I have a 75% complete version ready to go. Some of the new comment code needs some fixing, and a few minor HTML and graphics changes and we should be ready to go. It's designed for 800x600 now, and the vast majority of hits can be handled now without resorting to CGI so it should be much faster. Oh, and mod_perl is very cool. I'll hopefully have a beta version for everyone to test tomorrow night.

Well guys, we got number 2 million a scant couple months after our first million. Thanks to everyone who keeps visiting, especially the guys who send us cool new stories and post good comments to the discussions! Keep it up. The lucky winner was a Netscape 4.04 user under Linux 2.1.90 over at appliedtheory.com. Half a million hits a month... any potential advertisers paying attention?

I've Been real busy lately. I started the Slashdot rewrite this weekend, and have some rough code and some HTML running on my machine at home under mod_perl. Its going pretty painlessly. But I really wanted to a minute to comment about a few FAQs on Slashdot. Hit the link below and read them: several of them are important.

Now most of us are into nerdy toys, but something I think looks really interesting is the PC110. It's a tiny palmtop from IBM based on the 486sx. I've been trying to find one- new or used at a bargain since, well, I'm broke *grin*. If you have one and want to sell it, or have a company that wants a really good bargain on Slashdot advertising, email me and lets talk. This would be a great deal since hand held computers have tremendous geek appeal, and last I checked, so does Slashdot.

Wayne Roberts wrote in to tell us that Slashdot apparently has been banned over at Powerwave.com. Wayne says "Congratulations, slashdot has been blocked at powerwave.com by the microsoft loving NT admin. I guess the teardrop story did it :)". I'd like somebody to confirm this for me, but I do suggest that nobody have anything to do with any company that is afraid of a little old web site. It's nice to know that we're getting noticed!

Several people have suggested this, but I figured I'd give it a whirl today. I was browsing CDnow last night looking to buy some CDs and realized that I'm broke and need some new tunes. And I since Slashdot isn't exactly paying the bills, maybe it could at least provide me some new music. If you follow This Link to CDNow, and buy some stuff, I get a 5% store credit! I know you guys listen to a ton of music, and CDNow is a cool site, so if you appreciate slashdot, say thanks buy buying your next couple of CDs through that link. It won't buy me beer, but it'll give me something to listen to while I drink it!