Slashdot Mirror

As part of our 10 year anniversary celebration, I've decided to post a story here telling the tale of the transition from Chips & Dips to Slashdot back in 1997. For those of you who are new here (cough), CnD was the precursor to Slashdot, hosted on my personal homepage on the CompSci cluster of Hope College. Along with a number of random Linux related webpages, themes for window managers, random bits of code I wrote, this page was read by a great number of folks, mostly from the IRC scene. Hit the link below to read the tale of its transformation into an Internet superstar (and maybe later I'll write the the sequel where I talk of the transformation into sellout mega corporate evil and eventually irrelevant blemish on the history of the net ;) And don't forget to check for a Slashdot 10 year anniversary party in your area.

In the summer of 1997 I was contacted by a stranger out of the blue with a kind of random offer. During the previous school year Nate Oostendorp (who now works with SourceForge, Inc. while working on his Masters) had coded a Space Invaders clone. He wrote a Java sprite library, and I wrote the game and illustrated the alien armada. This guy had an old DEC Alpha Multia 166, and a client that wanted to remake the game with popcorn instead of aliens. So I drew the popcorn up, replaced the gifs, and he mailed me my first non x86 box since the 286 I got in middle school. (Later Sun sent me legal threats forcing me to take the game offline since it was called Java Invaders, and clearly this was an evil crime against the universe. My hatred for Java has never died since that moment.)

I immediately installed Red Hat on it. I was working at an ad agency called The Image Group at the time as a webmaster. I coded whatever needed doing and handled various admin tasks to keep their clients happy. At the time they needed full control over email addresses on the domains they built. Since they shared their mailserver with their ISP, there were frequent name collisions -- if the client wanted bob@theirdomain.com but there already was a bob on the system, they couldn't do it. They agreed to let me move my little Alpha onto their network to host their email... and I could use it to fart around with on my personal hobbies.

I named the box Ariel. It sat under my desk. I learned enough Perl to write a stupid simple CMS to replace the functionality of Chips & Dips, which up until that point was just a text file. Dave DeMaagd wrote a simple comment system. Since we both had a long history with BBSes, it seemed obvious to us that there needed to be a discussion system. There were no user accounts -- you entered whatever name you wanted each time you posted. If you left it blank, it auto-filled the space with the name 'Anonymous Coward', a title that stuck and spread throughout the net.

The original system was written in Perl because I wanted to learn more Perl. All the data storage was flat text files. (We lost most of the original stories during a data import a year or so later) The files were named like 0000001.shtml and so forth and were all rendered at time of page request. Best of all, since the system was written as a CGI, the whole script needed to be compiled every time there was a page request. It was months before I ported the whole thing to use MySQL and mod_Perl.

I registered the domain name Slashdot.org as a joke. It was 'org' because I didn't want a .com -- those were so common. I always thought org would be cooler, and besides, I had no commercial plans in mind. (Years later this bit me on the ass since someone else registered the .com. Doh!) The URL was meant to be unpronounceable by anyone -- a joke ultimately that has backfired on me countless times when I'm called and asked what the URL is to the damn thing. Jeff 'Hemos' Bates (now a VP of something or other with SourceForge, Inc.) was in the living room when I was registering the domain name. We all wanted email addresses with a unique domain name that wasn't attached to our school, so he chipped in on the registration fee.

When it came time to design the website's look, I took elements from a theme we had designed at The Image Group -- Paul Hart and I spent hours on it -- that was supposed to be the new website for the company, but it was passed on for another look. I still liked it, so I redesigned it more to my personal aesthetics (choosing #006666 as the dominant green replacing an earth tone green) and putting drop shadows all over everything (a habit I still haven't broken, and for which I am still mocked). Within days, most of the design elements you see on Slashdot were in place... the curves, the greens, the polls, the vertical list of stories so common in 2007, and, of course, discussions on each story.

And Slashdot was born. At first it had just a few thousand daily readers migrating over from Chips & Dips, but in a matter of weeks it had grown so fast that we started really having fun with it. One night we put up a poll asking how many shots Kurt 'The Pope' DeMaagd should drink. (Kurt later became our defacto HR man when we formed Blockstackers... today he is a professor at MSU.) But that night, Slashdot readers told him to take a dozen shots of alcohol -- he failed, but he tried.

I remember around the same time just watching 'tail -f' on the access_log. My world was rocked over and over again as I watched the domain names... mit.com! ibm.com! redhat.com! Hell, even microsoft.com kept scrolling through the log. I knew we had something... people from around the world, from the highest institutions in the land, from the biggest companies in the tech sector and to the most influential in the Linux world were all reading Slashdot. In fact, they were posting comments... as were a lot of people. It became commonplace to see hundreds of comments on stories, and the so-called 'Slashdot Effect' slowly grew into our lexicon as site after site buckled under our links.

In those days the content was a lot more personal then it is today. Stories would frequently refer to alcohol-related activities. I'd constantly mention that I had to leave to go to class so there wouldn't be more stories posted for a few hours. And when a professor in my pottery class assigned homework of to mass produce and sell some pottery as a lesson in being a commercial artist, I posted it, and ended up getting over 100 requests to buy my shitty mugs (all glazed teal ;) In the end I never did sell them -- I fulfilled the assignment locally. I think I still have one of those mugs left but I'm not sure- over the years my mediocre ceramics have been filtered out of a home increasingly tastefully decorated by my wife.

I continued to go to class and work my part time job. Ariel soon had loads so great that the machine was unusable during the day. And occasionally I would accidentally kick it and knock out a cable, bringing the machine offline. Soon after it saturated the office T1, I started realizing that there was no way I was going to be able to do this as "Just" a hobby. Essentially, every second of my life was consumed without time for a break. I'd go to class -- and often just work on Slashdot in the back row. (This was the first year we had computers at our desks in the CS dept at Hope.) My classwork suffered. On the upside, I became far more proficient at webwork, which really helped the part time job. I'd go home and code, post stories, reply to email until 2-3 a.m. and repeat it the next day. It was going to eventually be a full time job, requiring revenue and infrastructure that didn't exist back then. But I guess that's another story.

GizmoDuck writes "I'm working in a computational chemistry lab, and we find ourselves using memory and CPU hogs like Amber and Gaussian. The CPU hogging isn't a problem, thanks to Condor, but when submitting one of the jobs that request (and pretty much require) all the physical RAM in the machines, Linux promptly starts swapping so hard that the mouse pointer in X stops moving, NFS and NIS halt, and things don't get back to normal for five minutes. I've tried toying a bit with the settings in /proc/sys/vm/kswapd to no avail. I've done some poking around on the 'net looking for answers. Faster disks and swap partitions at the beginning of the drive aren't really an option at this point. I haven't found a good solution yet. I was wondering if the /. community has any input on how to keep the system from locking during periods of necessarily high swap activity?"

GizmoDuck writes "I'm working in a computational chemistry lab, and we find ourselves using memory and CPU hogs like Amber and Gaussian. The CPU hogging isn't a problem, thanks to Condor, but when submitting one of the jobs that request (and pretty much require) all the physical RAM in the machines, Linux promptly starts swapping so hard that the mouse pointer in X stops moving, NFS and NIS halt, and things don't get back to normal for five minutes. I've tried toying a bit with the settings in /proc/sys/vm/kswapd to no avail. I've done some poking around on the 'net looking for answers. Faster disks and swap partitions at the beginning of the drive aren't really an option at this point. I haven't found a good solution yet. I was wondering if the /. community has any input on how to keep the system from locking during periods of necessarily high swap activity?"

Let's start this off with some violence! BigBlockMopar answered the age-old question: what happens when a tank runs over a hard drive. NeoCode sent the The Illustrated Guide To Breaking Your Computer, and finally, matticus discovered The Overclockerz Store is selling burnt-up athlons/durons made into keychains. Now that we've got that out of our system, lets get some schoolin' by learning about the facts of life: spankweasel sent in the invisible condom. Now math: Jonathan Hayward sent us A four-dimensional maze. And some history: John Willemin sent us a nostalgia inducing Microsoft Ad from the days of yore. After a hard day of education, why not travel home on your lawn mower powered hoverboard at a cool 15mph? (thanks LenZ) Then we can play some dot-com monopoly (thanks to gmag3) and see what's on TV. MTO sent us Trailers for the Dune miniseries, and David Hume sent an abc article about Vinyl Video which attempts to generate images from your records. Finally, we better check the weather channel to find out what the weather is gonna be like ... on Mars (thanks noctis).

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. Why did you do this?

Slashdot keeps growing. The overhead and costs associated with running this beast has become astronomical. Hemos and I work marathon weeks, and there still isn't enough time to get everything done. There are always banner ads needing selling, stories needing posting, perl needing hacking, and readers with questions needing answering. Besides that, our single channel ISDN connection is awfully saturated, and the "Business" work of running this website is beginning to be nearly as much work as the "Website" part of the site.

We had 2 options: get cash from some investors and hire a staff, or or find a company that we felt understood what we wanted to accomplish here, and use their money to hire help.

Hiring our own staff would mean hiring suits and marketing people. We decided that simply being acquried would allow someone else to worry about the suits and marketroids- we would simply benefit from their existing business infrastructure, and we could concentrate on what we already know how to do: Run a website.

What do we intend to do? Well for starters we'll be able to pay several of the guys who have been volunteering their time for so long. Plus, we'll be able to hire people to help sell banner ads, and the administer the servers, and maybe to debug code. Basically, a support staff so that Hemos and I can simplify our lives, and Slashdot won't have to depend on us 24/7. And we have new things that we want to do on Slashdot, so offloading tasks from me will us to focus on other things that we want to do around here.

We'll start doing things like content mirroring. We'll have more servers, and hopefully soon servers will pop up on each coast. And we'll be able to have experts help pull it all together. The end result will be a faster, more stable Slashdot.

Why Andover?

We talked to several companies: Some that you've heard of, and some that you haven't. We were looking for a company that would guarantee us complete and total creative control, but provide us the financial resources necessary to expand Slashdot in the way we consider best "right". And whoever became involved, they had to be "Outside" the linux/open source world to a certain degree: we didn't want anyone to think that a company might buy us simply to gain an advantage in the story select.

Andover is good for that- they aren't a "Linux" company - they run Linux, and they read Slashdot, but they don't sell a distribution, or Linux boxes, or anything related to Linux . In fact, we've only mentioned them on Slashdot a couple of times in the past.

Best of all- they're smart guys. They understand what Slashdot is, and they respect that they can't change it without destroying what it is. So they are happy to guarantee (it's even in the contract!) that Hemos and I would retain full control of the site, while taking advantage of their business resources to take care of that icky part of running this monster. To guarantee that, I've also been appointed to the Andover.Net board. (I'm still not sure if I'm supposed to wear a tie)

What is Andover

A Media Company. An internet company. They run websites. Sorta like Earthweb or Internet.com. All of their existing sites are done essentially in-house. They have several sharp hacks over there and I'm looking forward to working with them. They also have top notch guys-with-ties, and a real keen grasp of where things are going in this business.

Conclusion I couldn't be more excited about this. I finally will have the ability to expand Slashdot the way I want to. I'll have the ability to pay people that have been volunteering hundreds of hours of time to help. And I have complete control over Slashdot's future, without the financial burden that has been growing over the last year. This couldn't be better for Slashdot, and I hope I haven't offended anywone to bad. We fundamentally will not change anything, we'll just have a better infrastructure to do what we've always done.

The final cool part of this is that I get to say thanks to you guys. Most of what we're getting is a piece of Andover.Net. And after I pay off my student loans and Hemos pays off his credit cards, we want to make sizable donations to some causes that we think are important. This seems like the best way for us to give back to the community that made us successful.

• The Free Software Foundation - How can we not give back to them for making so much cool stuff possible.
• Debian - I love Debian. I just want to make sure that they keep going strong. Debian's success is critical to the future of Linux. Besides, I wanna make sure that my apt-get command gets the newest version of everything cool.
• Project Gutenberg - Keeping books online and making them available to the world is important.
• The Macatawa Area Community Network - They give free network access to our hometown. They were the original home of Slashdot- and they let us keep it there for several months even when we were saturating their T1 every afternoon.
• Hope College - We both graduated and we want to set up a scholarship or something there. I want it to be for a "Hot Chick Going into CompSci" but we'll have to see if they'll let me do that...
• Foresight Institute - So hemos is obsessed with nanotech. He wants to give them money in exchange for a campbell's soup can of nanites He's wierd, but hey.

We're happy about this, but I know not all of you will be. To those of you who think I'm wrong, I'm sorry. I really believe that this will allow me to make Slashdot into something even better then it is today, without sacrificing what it already is. Its been a crazy ride so far, and now its only going to get crazier.

If you want to contact jeff or I, you can email malda@slashdot.org or hemos@slashdot.org. We'll try to respond, but I suspect we're going to get flooded, so be patient.

Update: 06/29 02:12 by CT : Just FWIW, this has no effect on the Slash source code release. It will still be released whenever I have time to work on it. In fact, hopefully now since I'll have some help around here with the sysadmin stuff, I'll be able to focus on it some more...

I've finally gotten off of my duff, and written my take on Erik Davis' Techgnosis: Myth, Magic + Mysticism, one of the more esoteric books that we've reviewed. For those of you interested in the sociologic roots of our culture, click below to read more. Techgnosis: Myth, Magic + Mysticism author Erik Davis pages 304 publisher Harmony Books rating 7.5 reviewer Erik Davis ISBN summary An interesting book, exploring the conjunction of technology and mysticism. Academic feel.

Erik Davis, a journalist in his own right, and a self-admitted geek is the author of Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, + Mysticism in the Age of Information, a book which purports to attempt to understand and explain how technology, magic and mysticism aren't really all that far apart. Davis makes an interesting arguement, and this is an issue that I've given some thought about to before. The perception of engineers, scientists and technical people is not one of fuzzy, soft images; it's a hard, straight edge image. But if you spend much time talking with anyone of that ilk, you soon realize that this group, like any other one, is one that has it's idosyncratic tendencies.

This image is one that hasn't come up accidentally - in many ways, the image of the technical person as a pure-logic person is one that has been built up and developed by the community of technical persons itself. This image of science as unquestionable and infalliable is one that quickly corrodes if you spend much time inside of graduate and scientific communities, watching the politics run rampant. But on a broader level, this image of science as a monolith began to fall apart with Schrodinger and Einstein and the notion of relativity. Kurt Godel also contributed to this notion in discrediting the Principa Mathematica

So, the issue of exploring this in literature, and exploring what in some ways is the unacknowledged side of the technological community. Recent issues like Joe Firmage's The Word is Truth, geeks fascination with shows like X-Files, and movies like Star Wars belies the notion of the one-sided, all logical personality.

Davis does an excellent job exploring the roots of our present technological society in the alchemical secret societes of the Middle Ages, and the present day raise in paganism amongst technologists. This is perhaps the strongest segement of the book, dealing with the religion issues, and why people like us choose alternatives or non-conformity.

The book has several drawbacks, the most glaring of which is the book's seemingly dual personality. While its research and tone are that of a book that wants to be an academic book, there are numerous points in which the facts cited, or a point is made that seems more soft-cover, and less hard-cover, if you can forgive my analogy. My other complaint, and one that shows my true colors as a history major - the book rests on itself on too few references. While I appreciate and understand Davis' points, and would recommend it to my fellow geeks, I wouldn't recommend this book to a non-technical person. The feel of the book in many ways is one of a book written for the commuity, and one that will work within the community, but not something that those outside the community would appreciate.

In the end though, for this audience, I recommend it. It's an academic read, but if you need a break from learning Perl, then this book is worth picking up. It can be slow at times, but ultimately is worth the time spent.

Buy this book at Amazon.

Robert Flemming wrote in to say that KDE 1.1pre2 is out. I also noticed that GNOME has 0.99.3 RPMs available now if you're into that. LoCoPuff sent us a link to a CNN article about theWindows Refund that mentions Slashdot and quotes me (cough cough). Nate wrote in to say "Brian Eno's "Oblique Strategies" meet the Everything 2 code in The Oblique Strategies Garden. Indeterminacy=fun. " Robert Dale sent us a parody of Iggy Pop's Lust for Life called Lust For Linux (surprise) For todays Star Wars bits, Alan Shutko sent us a link to pictures of Official Star Wars Legos. And the todays flashback comes from The_Black_Macrame who sent a link to the complete errata list from the original Star Wars. It's an oldie, but a goodie. hangman got bored and decided to trash a DEC 2100 and post pictures. Check it out if you're into computer mutilation. An anonymous reader sent us a link to one image you don't want to see on an ATM. And lastly, jhack sent us a link to a nice little page on painting your mac black if you happen to think that blue color is a bit excessive. The final results are pretty sharp. Now stop reading quickies and go compile your 2.2 kernel.

After a long night in the darkroom working on photography projects, nothing will make me happier than cleaning out the submissions box. So hit the link below and read the huge flood of stuff that has been accumulating while I've been trying to vanquish my end-of-the-semester projects. There is a ton of cool stuff in there worth checking out. Realcosmo commented that OpenBios Project Is looking for a logo. Visit their page for info. James Keller wrote in to send us an entertaining article about using Microsoft Manuals as Targets . Idan Shoham wrote in to say that the The Linux in business reference page has grown to 300 entries of companies that use Linux in a mission-critical setting. Good PHB data.

jahn wrote in to send us a link to Linus and RMS in a techno remix of Join us Now and Share the Software. I think we mentioned this a few months ago, but probably bears repeating anyway. I'm on a total MP3 craze again (4.5 gigs and growing) so this is entertaining me all over again.

[-SwM-] wrote in to send us a link to an online version of Rock Paper Scissors. Goofy. DaveWhitinger from Linux Today wrote in to say that Linux Mandrake 5.2 is available. Gordon Delp sent a link to a new FreeBSD news site called (appropriately enough) FreeBSD Rocks

acb wrote in to send us an entertaining parody of O'Reilly book covers. Several folks commented that WindowMaker v0.20.3 is now out, and several other folks commented that it has a new logo "Well, as you can see the new official logo has been put in place, and the logo contest is officially over. We appreciate all the logo submissions and the people who took time to vote. You can read about the winning entries here." LynXmaN wrote in to send us a link to Sololinux.com, a Spanish Linux News site. have opened. Ant wrote in to send us a link to Quake 2 Penguin Models for you penguin nuts. YogSothoth writes "I've always been interested in fractals, but what I always thought would be fun would be a scripting language-based approach that would give you a lot flexibility (with regard to choosing equations, bailout conditions, coloring techniques) without requiring a math degree to enjoy. Its hot off the presses but works quite well." you can check out Samples or Source Code. Vorx wrote in to warn everyone that this weeks User Friendly has been featuring a strange Star Wars/Linux/ESR takeoff that folks might enjoy reading. Bain wrote in to send us a link to a company that is selling Tux Stuffed Animals that actually look like tux.

Nate, My roommate and all around swell guy, has put a bunch of his Gimp Artwork online if you're interested in that sorta stuff. Its pretty excellent. Chris DiBona wrote in to send us a link to Chick Magnet which has some cool essays including one that explains that the best place for women to pick up guys is at Linux User Group Meetings. Quite funny. J. David Eisenberg wrote in to send us A response to his article on Linux and the Consumer Market. This addresses comments made by Slashdot Readers. Also, his opinions on the KDE thing which probably isn't all that relevant anymore.

See? Lots of good stuff! Anyway, I'm gonna get some sleep so I can get up nice and early and get back on the grind. The zany thing is that in 340 or so hours, I'm ton. Forever. No more school. Then I can finally finish Slash v0.3, fix the rest of the bugs in Slashdot, and actually start working on all the new stuff thats coming. Yee haw. In the meantime, I just wanna beg folks to go easy on the email. Don't hesitate if its important, but please read FAQ first and save us all some time.

Nate, resident Everything developer and consumate chef-and book reviewer has written a review of Gary William Flake's The Computational Beauty of Nature : Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation . This is an excellent book for those interested in more of the theory and philosphy behind nature, and is recommended for all geeks out there. The Computational Beauty of Nature author Gary William Flake pages publisher Mit Press rating 10+/10 reviewer Nate ISBN 0-262-06200-3 summary A remarkable and fascinating tour through aspects of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaption. The Computational Beauty of Nature is a major work, spanning and relating subjects as diverse as fractals, neural networks, genetic algorithms, infinite sets, and the game of life. Geek/Hacker Gary Flake introduces and explains these concepts in an informal tone, which makes reading it enjoyable and understandable.

A Labor of Love

The author refers to this work as a "labor of love," and it's plain to see that it is exactly that: the expression of a Computer Scientist's love for his work. If you've ever known the exhilaration of realizing a new computer science concept, this book will take you on a whirlwind tour of some of the most fascinating concepts in the field.

Difficulty

This book was engineered so that it can be approached at different levels. Anybody with a solid high school math background, or even a logical mind will be able to comprehend the concepts introduced. Reading this book from page one all the way through would be an ambitious project for a college-level course, but many of the sections are easily read independantly. As a senior Comp Sci major, the book was very enjoyable and easy to read -- though I had to stop reading it before bed because I never wanted to go to sleep. Readers who have not taken a Comp Sci Theory course will probably want to read the first chapter, which covers many of the fundamental ideas that are extrapolated on in later sections.

The author explains that if you hit a concept that you can't easily understand, you should skip and move on. The book is well written to give a good general view of a concept, but also provide specific details for the extremely CS literate. In addition, most sections have references to "further reading" in case you are completely smitten... The diagrams are also extremely helpful for visual learners, since many of the topics have basic graphic representations.

The Format

The book is in a standard textbook format, but this works well because it allows for a plethora of interesting digressions. Much of the time, a digression will reference another section of the book dealing with a completely different, yet strongly related topic. (Of course, in my ideal universe, this whole book would be browsable and hyperlinked, so I could stream-of-consciousness my way to my masters degree.) In addition, many of the examples have corresponding code examples are to play with. (I was impressed, there's even windows binaries...)

Summary

I enjoyed this book immensely, and would definitely recommend it to anyone with a lust for the science behind these ridiculous boxes. But you can't borrow my copy. It's staying in the basement next to my poof chair and my gun...

To buy this book head over to Amazon.

Visit the CBN Web Page which has more info...

--nate

john k. was the latest, but there have been many folks that wrote in to tell us that Mozilla has the HTML Slashdot Logo on their web site for stress testing their web browser. Its a fair test- its only a little bit harder to render than Slashdot itself. And FWIW, the logo was generated a few months ago by nate's gif2html program which I can't seem to find any more.

Joel sent in a link to Top Secret Recipes, which lists recipes for famous foods. Not only does it list McDonald's special sauce, but also the real Neiman Marcus cookie recipe, and not the one we've all been spammed with.

In a continuing stream of articles that really press home the need for personal privacy, Visa is teaming up with folks to produce a super smart card, one that you will supposdly be able to put money into from home. They hope to replace the smart card. Now, I'm not paranoid but credit cards already give me the chills. This just seems one step worse. Thanks to John Heemstra for this link.

JEDIDIAH writes " Does anyone want Westwood games on Linux? I dunno about the rest of you but, I sure do. I happen to rather like our games; that's why I work here. I just don't want to have to run 'that other operating system' to do it. So, as the resident Linux Zealot, I'm always trying to figure out just how I can get the rest of them (Westwood) to come around to my point of view... '-) Ideally, I would like to be able to walk over to Brett's office (Brett's our CEO) with a sufficiently large & verifiable list Linux users that are ready willing and able to buy his games such that he would have cause to pay some serious attention to us as a market. To that end I have posted a short, unofficial Westwood Games marketing survey This system is on a cable modem so please be patient if it falls under the slashdot effect. I only have a 64K outbound connection. Also, please do not indulge in forms of 'ballot box stuffing'. I need this information to be as accurate as possible. "

As many people can tell you, I love games. Stuff like this will get even more people involved, so go and register. Besides, Dune 2 is still one of the best games ever made.

With the X-Files movie opening up this friday, I just wanted to solicit links to articles related to Conspiracies. UFOs. Alien Abductions. Cattle Mutilation. Anything that is X-Filesish is probably worth a gander. Send submissions to Nate. By the end of this week, we'll post a collection of favorites and we can all enjoy the fun.

Pater sent this Salon story about one of their people doing a slackware install, and the perspective of the greater computer community finding out about Linux. Down right encourgaging, I say.

Phi1Abole writes "due to the huge popularity of Pov-ray (the raytracer), their server has been sucking an enormmous amount of bandwidth. now, due to finacial troubles, they might have to shut it down due to the traffic being too much to handle." If anyone out there has a nice fast connection and is willing to help one of the coolest programs out there, you should follow this link and read up.

Well guys, the fun never stops around here. Today Dave (the comments code guy) was bored in (**class name censored in case professors read this**) and decided to write a Process Roulette perl script. It's fun! It's exciting! Don't run it as root!

Well guys, the fun never stops around here. Today Dave (the comments code guy) was bored in (**class name censored in case professors read this**) and decided to write a Process Roulette perl script. It's fun! It's exciting! Don't run it as root!

With yet another update from Comdex, Pater: Even though not listed in the directory Sun is here, albeit on PC. It's kinda odd to see PCs running Solaris and OpenWindows in the middle of a primarily Win32 convention. The Linux pavillion was also quite crowded, featuring S.u.S.E., Red Hat, and Caldera. Linux Journal is there as well. Most of the atttendees here have no idea that another OS exists besides Win 95/NT. My personal favorite product is InstantBasic for Java by Halcyon Software. This program, touted by Sun, transforms Visual Basic code into Java, making it platform independent!

Slashdot has a man on the scene, making timely reports from Comdex. Here's report numero uno: Just finished seeing Bill Gates keynote address to open the convention. It was basically a showcase of Windows 98, with a few wry, pithy comments about OS/2, Sun, and Oracle's NCs on the side. If you don't like Microsoft's Internet Explorer, you're not going to like Win 98. The IE interface has been expanded from 4.0 to cover the help system, and become an integral part of Windows. Microsoft has a white paper which outlines the address. Bill was forced to pay for his comments later, when his Win 98 machine crashed during a demo. That's about all from here. I'm headed over to the North wing to review the Linux Pavillion.

Peace,

Pater

Nate Oostendorp, one of my beloved room mates (and co creator of the Mystery Project) and I came up with, and then he implemented the most stupid HTML trick of all:gif2html. Not only does it make a 1k gif into a 100k HTML table that usually crashes netscape, but its fun for the whole family! Check it out, he has an example of a Slashdot logo too *hehe*.

Nate Oostendorp, one of my beloved room mates (and co creator of the Mystery Project) and I came up with, and then he implemented the most stupid HTML trick of all:gif2html. Not only does it make a 1k gif into a 100k HTML table that usually crashes netscape, but its fun for the whole family! Check it out, he has an example of a Slashdot logo too *hehe*.

Nate Oostendorp (One of my room mates) pointed me to this wired article about a program that searches your hard drive for .wav files, and mixes them together to create ambiant music. It's called Sound Raider, it's only for windows, but it looks very cool for those of us who are into generative music.

Ok this is a wierd one:for those who don't know, I'm an Art Minor at Hope College. My next project in my Advanced Ceramics class is to make and sell 20 items. I intend to make either oversized coffe mugs or beer steins, but I need to sell them. They'll be probably $10 plus S&H for anyone in the US. I don't know about international orders. They won't have a slashdot logo or anything, but they will be hand made by me! Woohoo! So if you want to help me get a good grade, and would be willing to shell out $10 for a handmade ceramic mug, send me an email so I know how many to make. Only ask if you want one- I don't want to have a dozen leftover since they take quite awhile to make... and we all know how little spare time I have left these days.

Update:No logos. No Penguins. No Custom Requests. Sorry guys, these are art projects first and foremost. I started the first 8 today and they look pretty crazy though. If anyone wants a vase (mothers day is coming up!) let me know- a friend in the class (who is much better than me) is making vases so he can go to a ceramics convention over spring break. They'll probably cost more than the mugs, but they'll be really cool.

phi1abole wrote in to let us know that a new batch of Des Clients are available for download. This gives me a good chance to once again plug Slashdot's DES2 Team. We're ranked #8 overall. With over 2/3rds of the keyspace searched, this contest is almost toast.