Piercing, a cartoon by David Gaddis. Wicked!

R&S Erections is a nice design site. R&S stands for Ralph and Sarah, we soon learn. Hey, they also have a few of those powered-by-Blogger pages! Well worth checking out.

Another "Hey!": Sulake, the finnish company that makes Mobiles Disco and Habbo Hotel, is giving away the multiuser chat server behind it all as free GNU software. It's thought as a replacement for Macromedia's proprietary Shockwave server.

This reminds me that I have the skeleton for a pretty scalable chat server sitting around on my hard disk, catching dust. It uses the Non-blocking I/O library written by Matt Welsh at UC Berkeley and scales well to thousands of busy connections on an average PC running Linux (around 10 times more than current commercial products costing #0.000 $), and it can be integrated in the Hop seamlessly. Now what to do with it? Open source it? Search venture capital? Or just let it rot? Serious advice is welcome.

let it rot? sell it hot! (seriously: I dont' know if would work, but you could use it as tractor application pour le Hop/Antville - log + chat works surprisingly well to form Instant Public Spaces^TM). on a totally unrelated note: please redirect salon.at to /news. this service wants to be known. and then, have a great time all over europe!

well, Im not sure about the future of text-based chats anymore. After having seen habbohotel (about a month ago Ive seen exactly the same graphics and functionality somewhere else, but at that time i was the only chatter there (boring)) and knowing about the avatar principles on compuserve (one has to admit, some things appeared there much earlier than on the net) I could assume that sooner or later noone wants to use irc-based chats anymore. also my experience is that a chat can only work with less than 15 people in a single room and with not more than 50 people online at the same time. Having more than these numbers results in something less cosy...

...but making fuselight correspond with hop is something that makes me very interested (anyone with spare time here? *g*)

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