Administrivia

We run into the best of luck at KDE Dot News. This time the air-conditioner in our server room died, resulting in a temperature of 52 degrees Celcius and a core meltdown. Since we had also been suffering from limited bandwidth for a while now -- since the week of the KDE3 release when we managed to kill our host's pipe -- we decided to take this opportunity to move to a new hosting solution. Happily, we were awash with wonderful offers for help and support of all kinds from the community.

After a brief hiatus that seemed closer to an eternity, I'm pleased to report that the dot is back and all is good. A big "Thank You!" goes out to Chris McDonough and Jim Fulton of Zope Corporation, Chris Withers of Squishdot fame, and the wonderful Zope community at #zope for their excellent support throughout this matter.

Sorry guys, the dot went down again this weekend after 51 days of uptime on the new server. We suspect that the problem is an overworked harddrive. Bero is on it (bonus: woo, we have ext3 now), but you can expect minor flakiness as we fully work out the issues.

Lately, we've been spending some time improving the dot and implementing new features. While our efforts are far from over, we thought we'd announce a few of the things we've done so far.

As many of you have noticed, we have had a lot of downtime lately brought on by some severe server problems. With our regular server admin away on a well-deserved vacation, we have been forced to move to a new location, at least for now. The new server, bero.org, is owned and operated privately by our friend Bernhard Rosenkraenzer, but is hosted on the excellent network and resources of Red Hat Europe.

As the Dot has been getting more and more successful, and more and more popular, we've been attracting script kiddies and trolls like flies. As Dre previously reported: "On March 13, 2001, at 1:33 am EST, someone using the anonymizer.com service succeeded in putting malicious Javascript code into one of the posts.

For what has seemed like an eternity, but really was closer to a week, our beloved dot, as well as the kde.com sites, were down. Now, thanks to the tireless efforts of Dre and MieTerra, the server has been moved across the country and is again up and ready to serve. Many thanks to all those who made generous offers to host or help us in the meanwhile.

As some of you may have noticed, lately we've been getting more and more postings at KDE Dot News. With the increasing number of comments, we've also been getting more and more complaints about the fact that KDE Dot News automatically switches to threading when the number of articles in a forum goes over our global threshold.

Effective 12:00 p.m. EST January 5, 2001 the IP address of KDE Dot News is scheduled to change from 216.186.210.168 to 64.22.20.150.

Based on feedback we've received in the last week we have made some changes to
APPS.KDE.com. Most significantly, we have
introduced internal frames to replace framesets. This approach works great with Konqueror and IE, but works optimally only with JavaScript enabled; Netscape 4.x does not support internal frames.
We have also added the ability to browse categories and conduct searches