SoylentNews

The long and short of it is, there won't be one. We're pushing it until January due to me and PJ being occupied too much with holiday and Life stuff.

What you can look forward to:

• Moderation Rework

Not a final version and we haven't touched meta-moderation yet but this will cut down on the echo chamber effect, mod bombing, and lay some groundwork for combating spam as well.

• Input vs Output Wackiness

Currently if you put html entities in and hit preview they get transformed into literal characters. There's also wackiness if you try to put double quotes in a submission title. I hate this, you hate this, and it needed to stop so most of the code for it is already done and being tested on dev.

• RSS/Atom Feeds Moving to SSL

There is really no reason to have http links in the rss feed rather than https links, so they're changing. I'm also doing my best to get them to encode only the necessary characters and display properly but it seems like no two readers display the same.

• A Couple New Themes

Occasionally I get bored and do up a theme instead of actually working. This time around we have the VT100 and the OMG PWNIES themes. These are actually pretty easy to do. Feel free to mod and submit your own. All it takes is a custom stylesheet if you're okay with reusing existing favicons/logos.

• Support for Additional Tags

We're adding standard support for sub/sup/abbr/strike tags. We're also adding support for the custom tags sarc/sarcasm and two forms of a "user" tag.

• Additional Minor Bug Fixes

Bunch of minor bugs, some of which you would have never seen because they were on admin pages.

I think that's all but I'm not sure what the last one that went into our point release after the 14.12 update was.

Sundays at noon an old friend has a blues show on a local college radio station, WQNA. Of course, since the blues and booze go so well together, Sunday is my "drink too much" day. So by eight I was too drunk to edit. I put the book down and picked up the notebook and started typing.

It's only started, with only a few more than 600 words so far. The title is "Voyage to Earth". It starts in John's bar five years after arriving at Mars. He's gone to college, learned chemistry, and is brewing the most popular beer on Mars.

Meanwhile, They're going to Earth so Destiny can collect a Nobel in astrophysics for her paradigm-shifting results from her new telescope, John is going along with a shipload of beer to export to Earth ("Earth is buying beer from Mars? Even with the shipping costs? What the hell?"
        "Rich dumbasses trying to be cool. Mars is cool now, I could piss in a can and they’d buy it.").

Tammy is getting an award for her work with drug addicts, not the Nobel and will be accompanying them.

I have no idea how long it will be. It could be a short story or a novel, I don't know yet.

I sent for another copy of Mars, Ho! yesterday. I'm hopeful I'll be able to release it for publication this round, but I doubt it will be on sale in time to buy them for Christmas presents. Bummer.

Saturday I'll post a secular Christmas carol I wrote back in 2005 that almost nobody has seen.

After installing PC-BSD, I found that the computer (a Shuttle XPC from circa 2005) wouldn't make it past BIOS. Moving past this minor setback, I put the hard drive into a far newer computer (built last year from parts released the year before), and the installation continued.

At this point, I was asked the standard OS install stuff, like what my username is, etc. One change that will likely interest the Mint/Ubuntu users out there is that PC-BSD actually asks you for your root password. Any Debian users reading this will likely snicker, but I like the fact that the PC-BSD devs actually trust my competence enough (for better or for worse) to have complete control over my own computer.

Anyway, moving on from that, I found that the MATE system monitor was consistently reporting very high memory usage, and that the system would eventually grind to a halt after enough usage. In the name of fairness (and to try out ZFS raid on 4 80GB hard drives I had available), I decided to do a fresh reinstall on this machine with all default settings.

Needless to say, it worked. I find that the KDE 4 desktop that comes with PC-BSD by default should be a welcome relief for anyone sick of having GNOME shoved down their throat. The only problem is that desktop effects don't work yet, but I should be able to sort that out in time.

The Good:
1. It's fast. PC-BSD starts and stops far faster than Mint 17 did after being used for a while. I hope that it stays this fast after updates make their rounds though the system.
2. There's plenty of software to be had. I was able to install gcc49, LibreOffice, and Seamonkey (because Chromium and Mozilla's Chrome-alike leave a bitter taste in my mouth) from AppCafe.
3. It's far easier to pick up than FreeBSD due to the integrated package management and inclusion of X and desktop environments by default.
4. There's no SystemD in sight! In Mint, if you type "mount" at the console, you see that systemd actually has its own mount point. It's amazing how refreshing it is not to see that. Additionally, user management is D-free. As far as I'm concerned, the SystemD project can screw Linux as much as it wants. I'm sticking with a sane OS.
5. There's quite a bit of choice. See my discussion on the installation process and multiply that by 10.

The Annoying:
1. To set up SSHD took some manual configuration, but for most people it isn't a problem.
2. AMD graphics support is still in its infancy, but is expected to improve. For those of you with nVidia graphics, expect smooth sailing.

The Bad:
1. It comes with PulseAudio

One word: Whoooooaaaaaa.

I'm speechless. I really don't know what to say. I have NEVER been given this much choice in an OS install before. For those of you who are Linux users looking to try out a BSD, go for this one.

First things first: to get the install started, I first dd'd the PC-BSD disk image onto a portable hard drive that I had lying around. After plugging it into the test computer and starting, I was greeted with something familiar to quite a few of the people reading this: "Loading GRUB". Now, I have heard that opinions on GRUB are varied, however I have to say that I quite like it just by virtue of already knowing how to configure it.

After a bit of a wait (this was off a hard drive, so those of you installing from a DVD or slow flash drive will need to be patient), I was greeted with the installer program.

After a few prompts, I was met with a screen asking me what I wanted the computer's role to be. At first I was going to just click "Desktop" and be done with it, but then I saw that I had the option to customize the install. Seeing that there was no reason not to, I proceeded to do so. Needless to say, I was impressed. The installer listed out categories of options to choose from, like, which desktop environment you want (of something like 10 choices, including KDE, I picked MATE because I wanted to. This was in direct contrast to Debian, where you have to explicitly select one of a few desktop environments in the bootloader of all places, or Ubuntu where you basically have to pick an entirely different version of the OS from a few choices. I proceeded to check off the other options that I wanted, like Java and Chromium (Maybe with enough support, we'll see a Pale Moon port to *BSD).

Following this lovely first impression, I was greeted by a disk partitioning screen featuring several options for the amount of control I wanted over the whole process. Seeing that this was going to be the only OS on the machine, I went for the easiest option. So far, so good!

Once the installation had completed, I had the option of saving my specific configuration and settings to a USB device in order to install with the same settings again later on. That was quite nice of them, and I really appreciate that touch.

I'll keep you folks posted as I use the OS.

It looks like a triumph of the designers...over the users. It's Android 5 Lollipop and the associated app changes. For those who haven’t had the privilege yet, we have:

– Integrated private and business email and calendars. These used to be separate, but now both appear in the Google apps. It will be very easy to accidentally send business email from your private account or vice versa. If you create a new calendar entry, will it go to Exchange, or to Google calendar? I would have thought it obvious that most people prefer to keep their business and private lives separate. Now, doing so will be a huge effort, or else will require the installation of third-party apps.

– Reduced UI functionality. Just as an example, the font size in Mail and Calendar is now huge, with no option to reduce it. There is no longer a zoom function, so you cannot change the size that way either. To compensate for the huge font,, they have reduced the days you can see to 5, so as you scroll through your calendar, it is no longer by week – the day on the left is Monday, then Wednesday, then Friday. You can turn the phone to landscape to see a full week, but then you can only see 4-1/2 hours of your day (again, no zoom option).

– Arbitrary UI changes. Designers just cannot leave well enough alone. Just as an example, at the bottom, the “back” function used to be a curled arrow pointing left and the “home” function was a house. Now the “back” function is a triangle and the “home” function is a circle. Huh? What brain-dead designer thought changing things like this was a good idea?

A sign of the apocalypse? Until now, Google’s software has clearly undergone a lot of user testing. This time, I cannot imagine anyone but the designers would like the changes they’ve made – they just ake no sense for the typical user.

I don't know of a better way to send comments directly to a user, so I'm just going to leave this journal entry as an inbox of sorts in case anybody wants to get my attention for some reason.

This story on Slashgear about net neutrality showed up in Google News this morning. I was appalled.

Not at the story, so far I've only read the first sentence. "Today, President Obama sided with you and I."

What the God damned FUCK?! I don't know what uneducated moron wrote that sentence... wait, I found a byline: Nate Swanner. Nate, you show about a fourth grade reading level. Nate, you uneducated moron, QUIT YOU JOB, go back and get your GED and learn the English language before you present yourself as a "journalist".

And you who run slashgear, have you not thought about just maybe hiring an editor who's spent a semester or two in college?

One more question: how do these rank amateurs wind up in the Google News feed?

Oh, and Nate, for your information, it's "you and ME." Would you say "Today, President Obama sided with I"?

Moron. I hear McDonald's and Wal Mart are hiring.

Before S/N opened, I spent a lot of time commenting at /. Any more, I check messages and read little of /., partly because stories have been showing up at S/N before /. and partly because there are so many more short bus riders at /. Oh, and slashdot's "stupid quotes" annoy the hell out of me.

I hadn't had mod points at /. for years, despite being at karma cap.

So two days ago I had five /. mod points. Today I had fifteen. I guess heavy posters don't get points.

This story takes place in a bar on Mars over a century later than "Mars, Ho!".
        “Joe? Is that you? You're still tending bar? I thought you'd be retired. How you doin', you old rascal?”
        Joe frowned. “Sorry, son, I must be getting old, do I know you? And can I get you a drink?”
        “It's Dave, man. Give me a Knolls lager, draft.”
        “Sorry, Dave, we're sold out of Knolls. We have some Guinness, that's almost as good. But I'm sorry, but I still don't know who you are. Memory ain't as good as it used to be.”
        “Dave Rayfield, Joe. Of course it's been a lot longer for you than me. Yeah, Guinness will do.”
        “Dave Rayfield? I haven't seen him since I was twenty. You his grandson?” he asked, pouring the beer.
        “No, Joe, I'm Dave. Same Dave you knew back then.”
        “But you're so young!”
        “It was the trip. I piloted the science expedition to Grommler while you were throwing rocks from the asteroid belt at Mars.”
        “The terraforming is still going on here. I'm a little old for space hopping. Hell, if I spent any more time traveling through space I'd live forever. But how the hell did you stay a damned kid?”
        “Same way you're not dead at a hundred twenty five. Time dilation. Most Earthians die before they're ninety five, but speed stretches time. You'd be dead by now if you hadn't been a spaceship captain. It's been a hundred years since you've seen me, but it's only been ten years since I've seen you.”
        “So where have you been for the last hundred years?”
        “Ten years to me. We went to Grommler.”
        “Where's that?”
        Dave laughed. It orbits Sirius, but it was the least serious place I've ever seen! Really weird place.”
        “Weird how?”
        “Every way weird goes. First off, there was no fauna at all, not even insects. Only flora, despite having more oxygen than Earth. The geologists said it was because of the CO2 from volcanoes that there could even be any flora.
        “But the weirdest was the plants. We were there for two years, and that's in real time, and every single plant the biologists tested had cannabinoids and other psychoactive components. There were a lot of brush fires because of the wind and lightning, so every time you went outside you got stoned. Hell, some of the guys practically lived outside!”
        “Need another beer?”
        Dave eyed his glass and downed it. “Yeah. Jesus, Joe, things sure changed in the last ten years.”
        “It's been a hundred years since you left, Dave. It only seems like ten to you.”
        “I guess. But you know what, Joe? I'm going to clean up!”
        “What do you mean?”
        Dave pulled out an envelope. “These. Grommlerian tomato seeds. Grommlerian plants have a completely different ordering than our plants, it's something different than DNA and the scientists are still trying to figure it out. But they make seeds like Earth plants.”
        “Tomatoes?”
        “Not really. They look like tomatoes but taste way different, but they taste really good. And they get you really stoned.”
        “Well, okay, you found a reefer planet. When you find a beer planet, let me know.”

I "finished" writing Mars, Ho! early in the summer, and since it became a horror story I was aiming to publish it by Halloween. Well, that didn't happen.

I wanted it to be done by then so it would show up in bookstores by Thanksgiving. I still had hopes of getting it at least for sale on my web site by then, especially since a fan wrote with news he was planning to buy several copies as gifts.

It doesn't look like that will happen, either. I just finished making the changes I'd made in the second printed copy (the first goes to my daughter Patty, the second to Dewey, who stirred the muse) and sent off for a third. It will be a couple weeks before it shows up on my porch, and if there are no more changes, which is doubtful, it would be at least another week before I cleared it for publication.

I'll be lucky if it's for sale this year. I'm frustrated.

Oh, well. I'm not in it for the money, just for the satisfaction of writing novels and actually have people read them. It's a good thing I'm not in it for the money because I'm barely breaking even, after copyright registration, ISBNs, and buying copies, many of which are marked up in pencil, not completely edited, and not for sale.

However, even though I'm not in it for the money, I'm still planning to sell the e-book on Amazon. If I got on their best seller list it would get more people reading, and many might read other of my books from the web site. Mars, Ho!'s HTML and PDF will still be free. Few are downloading the free e-books of the first two books, most are either reading it online or downloading the single HTML file.

Anyway, I guess I'm on vacation again... oh, wait, there's Random Scribblings.