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For those of you who remember one of our most famous stories, the culmination of said event has happened. The team, plus other friends gathered in scenic Las Vegas this past weekend. The wedding happened on Sunday, 4:11 local time (would have been 4 sharp, 'cept the cabbie bringing the bride got lost). For those of you are nice, you can send congrats to Rob at wedding@malda.org or be a big meanie, like me, and send it to his regular address, like he has done to me. More detail below for other ways - and you can tell Kathleen what a mistake she's made *grin*. And pictures are found online, along with some video.

Wedding was held at the Excalibur Hotel, which was nice. If you want to send postal congrats/bundt cake/fondue pots/yet more place mats, I've included the postal address.

Rob and Kathleen Malda
PO Box 192
Dexter MI 48130-0192

After a super long break, We return with a smaller than usual crew, but with special guest Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison. We talk about KDE/Debian issues, price changing, GPG vs. PGP and more. We don't know when our next episode will be, so savor this one, and find it at TheSync.

Today Jeffrey "Hemos" Bates got married to Adrienne Lane. We've posted several pictures for those of you who are visually inclined. I'd also recommend everyone send hemos@slashdot.org a congratulatory email to help celebrate this great occasion (and mainly because we wanna see how much mail we can get into his box). Now we're off to the reception ;) (BTW, thanks to CowboyNeal for getting these up asap. The photographers were me, Mandrake and Chris DiBona). Update: 06/25 03:01 by CT : The reception was nice. Keep those email to hemos coming.

Mandrake wrote in: "CMU Sphinx (the speech recognition software being developed at CMU being funded by DARPA and NSF for the last 15 years) has gone open source and is up for download on SourceForge. You can check out the announcement, go to the home page at CMU, or download the code for yourself. It should build out-of-box on several platforms, linux, freebsd, sun4m, etc. - but work is still needed. Help with documentation would be greatly appreciated, too. It's important that people grab this stuff ASAP, too, just in case some people decide to go after it for potential patent violations (we all know how much people love the patent system)."

Every year I pick a new years resolution and ever year it doesn't come true. This year I've opted to set my sights low so I can greatly increase the chance of suceeding for once. This year my resolution is to continue converting oxygen into carbon dioxide. Read on to learn what resolutions RMS, ESR, Jon Katz, CowboyNeal, Mandrake and others have for the year 2000.

Jason Haas from LinuxPPC has the following resolutions: "248x768 @ 85 Hz, Merge my world domination plans with Linus's tree, Kawasaka W650:It will be mine (a Virago would be ok), Restart akido, and mv competition to /dev/null

Jon Katz , Slashdot's favorite gasbag says " I wish for Walt Disney to thaw himself out, climb out of his Cryogenimatronic Vault, show up at Walt Disney World and wreak havoc on the corporate weenies who desecrated EPCOT, his model city of tomorrow. Maybe join with the Seattle protesters and touch off a war against corporatist weenies everywhere. "

Emmett Plant is the latest editorial addition to the Slashdot Authors roster. His resolution is "to start a company called 'EmmettLinux,' which will be responsible for creating no product whatsoever. We will employ a highly-paid staff of fifty people who will show up every day and start throwing money into a furnace. I hope to IPO by March and use the cash to hire 2,000 more moneyburners and open an office in Hong Kong. I will leave soon after, selling all of my stock and retiring to the Bahamas."

Chris J. DiBona , Linux Community Evangelist for VA Linux Systems, President of SVLUG, and Grant Chair for LI, has resolved the following: ".Sleep is high on my list, but I really just like to have more time to read, this year has been pretty hard-core. I'd also like to spend more time learning power supply electronics, dc-dc transformers and such. I'm already pretty good with the digital side of things, but this is a big gap in my knowledge. Can I give more than two? I'd also like a puppy. A puppy with an X10 Cam mounted on its collar so I can put a "puppy cam" online."

Rusty Russell , kernel hacker and mad genius wishes to Learn to cook. Or trade kernel code for food. Or buy a fire extinguisher.

Eric S. Raymond is perhaps better known simply as esr... and if you don't know who he is, well, ouch. He resolves to " Catch up with my email and cut down on my traveling. It's nice to be needed, but 50% time on the road is getting ridiculous..."

Raster aka "That Enlightenment Guy" who is the only living person with more typos than me resolves simply to use procmail to allow more sleep time.

Mandrake resolves "I really need to start taking better care of my body. I haven't really worked out in about a year - and I eat too much garbage (junk food / fast food), and I REALLY need to stop drinking coke. I go through 2liters like most people drink cans of coke. I don't think it'll happen any time soon - but hopefully I'll at least be a little healthier by the end of the year."

Trae McCombs , aka X, aka MC, aka 'That Linux.com guy' resolves to "Learn to eat more foods, Incorporate working out into my lifestyle, Work less than 14hrs a day, Be kinder to others, Listen more, Talk less, Learn to code, Read more, Keep true to my ideals..."

Scott Draeker , the President of Loki Entertainment Software resolves to release a first tier Linux game which is not available for windows. Hard to argue with that one.

Kurt DeMaagd , aka The Pope, aka Rob's Roommate and the BSI number cruncher has the following:

1. Combat bimetallism and establish the gold standard for currency.
2. Negotiate the DeMaagd-Hay-Pauncefote treaty, allowing the U.S. to unilaterally construct an isthmian canal.
3. Establish an American protectorate in Cuba.
4. Suppress the Boxer uprising.

Mind you if you look closely at Kurt's resolutions, you might notice that they look strikingly similiar to President William McKinley's adminstration's high points. I'm going to have to up kurts medication.

Illiad , creator of the ever popular User Friendly comic strip says "I resolve to only take responsibility for those choices that I have control over. That means I have to give up on the idea of educating the technically-resistant, the doublespeak-inclined, and the village idiot."

Richard M. Stallman , founder of the Free Software Founding and the GNU Project gave us suggested resolutions for Slashdot readers: They are 1. Do not install any non-free software your computers and 2. Do not buy from Amazon until they stop using software patents for aggression.

CowboyNeal , the man, the myth, the legend. The guy who responds when users can't figure out how to login. The guy who maintains the slashboxes. And the guy who inhabitants the living room in the Geek Compound, resolves that he shall "Shower Every Week, whether I needs it or not." All of the co-workers in this office who have orafactory functionality thank him. It doesn't matter to me much either way.

Jim Jagielski , aka jimjag or jim@apache.org or jim@jaguNET.com, resolves to call sleep(28800) a lot more often.

Nitrozac is the creator of After Y2k... which as best as I can tell means she's about to work herself out of a job. But regardless she says "If civilization manages to hold on to its tenuous existence, I'd like to find a cure for Agalmatophilia, and have others join me to rid the world of this illness that causes so much needless suffering. If civilization crumbles, my Post-Apocalypse Resolution is to learn how to do 16-bead graphics on my abacus, so I can continue the comic. ;-)"

And finally (thank god because my wrists are tired) is Jeff "Hemos" Bates , a man who needs no introduction (but he does need a solid smack to the head).He says "With the coming of El Ano Neuvo, I resolve that I'm going to continue my battle against the dread forces of The Krull Invasion. I think that I might also try to learn some grammar. Per'aps. And maybe I'll learn how to spell a few more words as well".

Mandrake writes "Enlightenment 0.16.0 came out this afternoon. Come play with what we've been toiling over for the past few months. Lots of new features from 0.15 - come check it out. Maybe now we can go and get some sleep. If you are at Atlanta Linux Showcase this week, we've even got shirts to hand out."

Mandrake, AKA Geoff Harrison, is a heavy contributor to the enlightenment project and has also left his mark on Gnome, XFree86, and a bunch of other excellent free software projects. In real life, he works for VA Research as (surprise!) a software developer. Mandrake is, without question, one of the leading lights of the Linux and free software development communities. Check his Web site, and post any question(s) you have for him below. Answers to most or all of the highest-moderated ones will be posted Friday.

hasse wrote in to tell us that Mandrake, co-developer of Enlightenment is meeting with Amiga. Amiga Central quotes him saying "So sometime next week I'm going to meet with the VP of Engineering at Amiga. That should be interesting. I wonder if I can get them interested enough in enlightenment that they would be willing to donate programmers to the project. "

drdink wrote to let us know about a SlashNET forum with Mandrake of Enlightenment fame. It will be at 01:30 UTC (9:30pm EDT) today in #forum. Open discussion about the forum will be held in #forum.d. If you're new to SlashNET, irc.slashnet.org will point you at a random server, and us.slashnet.org will point you at a random US server. Hope to see people there!Update: 06/14 12:50 by H :Get the log here.

We're finally settling it at ALS. Kinda crazy, but finally got ye old email up and running again. I'll post a lively entertaining full blown summary of the fun and games later today, but in the meantime, Mandrake and Raster are running a a webcam over at their booth (way off at the other end of the building).

A new Linux distribution has been released. This one is called Linux-Mandrake and has nothing to do with Mandrake of Enlightenment fame. Its goal is to provide an easy to use environment for beginners, and provides out-of-the-box support for French users (accents, etc). It's based on Redhat 5.1 (with all bug fixes up to 17th July) and a fully functional KDE. Users can mount their CD's without messing with /etc/fstab. It seems a good idea as an introduction as long as it does not lead to dumber users. Please, NO QT FLAMEWAR. It just gives our moderator more to delete.

Geoff Harrison (mandrake) writes "Just thought I would take this time to say a few words about the up and coming release (yes, we're looking at likely friday night / saturday morning FOR REAL this time) But I'm sure that a lot of people have likely been going nutzo about No it isn't out QUITE yet! how many times can I say that you can find copies of it floating around all over the place, but if you download something before this coming weekend, "it ain't the official release". Yes, there are rpms already auto-building. Yes, there will be daily snapshots from the source tree even after the release. Yes, it is true that there will likely also be daily rpms built and distributed of the source tree. Yes, the ftp server is coming back (it's been down forever and a day). Yes, it is true that there are no root menus, iconification, or pager in 0.14 (we decided to get a stable release out in our lifetimes). But there are a lot of new features including the beginnings of a configurator, real online help, an entirely new and improved configuration language, a completely revamped memory management codebase, and plenty of other nifty features (too many to go over here). Yes, the code was completely scrapped from enlightenment 0.13.3 for 0.14 -- we decided that the old codebase was getting too unwieldy for where we want to be able to take enlightenment in the future, so we rewrote the book again. It's looking very promising, and we hope that you will like it as much as we do. (I'd like to think that it was worth the wait) --mandrake "

J.D. Jordan wrote in to tell us that Mandrake has mentioned that E14 is in CVS now, and the rest of the world is just waiting for Anonymous CVS access. Very cool. Having personally witnessed some of the many wonders in E14 while at LinuxExpo, I'm more than excited to get my copy and start working on a couple of theme ideas I'm toying with....

Mandrake was kind enough to release Enlightenment DR 0.13.1. Mostly a bugfix release, the most notable improvement is the fact it will now compile under glibc, for those who were having trouble earlier.

I know I procrastinated on this one, but I've been really busy lately. Anyway, DR9 is available for download for the E FTP Server. Mostly bug fixes, but we now have sysnice/user in the load meter, and tool tips. Read more about this release at my Enlightenment page.