Back in the Elder days of the resnet (resident student network) here at Texas A&M, there was a Linux hacker named Phillip. He put together a set of perl programs that used Samba to crawl the network looking for windows shared files, and present the results as a web page. The box that it all ran on was called Hobbes. He provided a neat searchable index of all the stuff people were sharing. When Phillip graduated, he left the system to a friend, Leo. At the beginning of this year, Leo re-did the entire interface to hobbes in PHP3, adding a forum system, news, and a dynamic list of which computers were online and which weren't.

The new interface appears to have been lifted directly from linux.com. Someone using the handle "wildag-02" posted a story on slashdot yesterday, pointing out that the layout and graphics were a direct copy of l.c. After having the wrath of the angry linux zealots combined with the slashdot effect brought down upon him, Hobbes has shut down. Maybe Leo is rebuilding the site to look less like linux.com, maybe he's just pouting about being caught. Either way, I can't find my pr0n and mp3z.

Hobbes was a great resource, a nifty hack, and a medium for communicating. Now it's gone, partly because Leo ripped off linux.com's graphics, and partly because someone with a grudge couldn't settle things between Leo and linux.com directly, and brought in the slashdot crowd. Thanks, jerk, I was hooking up a ride to Houston to go to a rave, but the post about where to meet and who to call is gone because of you. Yeah, thanks a bunch loser.


Updated: Sep 07 2000 00:26 UTC

Hobbes is back up, with a link to Linux.com. Apparently, Leo got an email from octobr x saying he could use all the graphics go could download, as long as he linked back to linux.com

Yay for open content