HyperionReactor The Middle Child of History

!(alignleft)http://www.opendns.com/who/logo/opendns_logo_150.gif!

FYI: OpenDNS is great even if your living in a free country.

*DNS Servers*
Primary Nameserver: *208.67.222.222*
Secondary Nameserver: *208.67.220.220*

Everyone knows time and again the Indian Department of Telecommunication, DOT as we have all know sends a lists of URLs to be banned. Recently they had sent a list of URLs which contained a number of blogspot and geocities websites. This angered a number of bloggers.

Most ISP ban a website by playing around with the DNS entries, example when you try to go to banme.blogspot.com it translates to something like 72.14.219.191. The ISP generally changes this to point to something like 127.0.0.1, also know as home. Due to this you cannot access the website and all hell breaks lose.

Not to long ago I was looking out for a good open source project management software for a friend. He was using Basecamp, but did not like it, cause it was not free software and working for a organization which really pushes for free software, he was in the market looking for alternatives. This is when I stumbled on something called ActiveCollab.

ActiveCollab is written in PHP5 and uses MySQL as a backend, I have not had the time to look under the hood. I have not had any unsuspected issues yet with it. Although it still feels like Basecamp 2005'. There is no AJAX, just a little JavaScript here and there. But the road map seems bright. I have also heard a lot of developers are interested in helping the project out. A while back a friend of mine, told me he and some friends at Stanford were developing a GPLed version of Basecamp written in Python, they did not use DJango but instead wrote their own framework.

One of the best ways to manage large amounts of information and knowledge is using a WIKI. This is also a great way to work in groups and allow people to freely add and update content and information without a lot of effort.

Emacs is my favorite editor, and I would like to use when ever I have to play with text :) This lil tutorial will show you how you can use the editing power of Emacs and maintain a WIKI.

Emacs does have a bunch of WIKI modes, the issue with those modes are that they are static wiki pages, I do not think a WIKI is of any use if the pages are static and users are not allowed to modify and update information on it.

Everyone seems to want a piece of the online music market. Richard Branson will be now making a move into the online music service, "Virgin Digital". Virgin Digital will be offering a "pay as you go" and "a monthly subscription" service. The service is said to be compatible with a number of mobile music players. Hope they do better than Real's Rhapsody. Some of the features planned are, audio sampling, rip and burn, search, live radio, ask the expert and music manager. They will be going with the "Plays for sure" (windows media audio) bandwagon.

I am very excited with this new release of iTunes. This is mainly cause Apple has added Podcast support. They also release a iPod update so you can sort your podcasts. I had a bit of a rough time updating my iPod for some reason it kept on creating a playlist and not a menu. After a while I got sick of it and decided to stick with the play list. When I reached home and powered on my Powerbook and connected my iPod it finally updated the firmware on it.

I like the engadget podcast, they are really cool. I am looking out for some good political interviews and shows. Any recommendations? Apple has also published a small document on how you can create good podcast using the Apple Garage Band. You can find that document here.

The page contains the list of CSS properties. The chart also contains a the level of compatibility with a particular browser. The author has listed, sample code too.

"http://www.corecss.com/properties/full-chart.php":http://www.corecss.com/properties/full-chart.php

Finally after combating spam in my inbox for years now I have to deal with it on my blog. Im not a serious blogger like "David":http://loudthinking.com or "Evan":http://anarchogeek.com. But I know this for sure, It pisses me off to see Poker and Viagra advertisements at the bottom of my blogs.

To counter this I have a new spam filter installed. This should help me keep the comment and trackback spam under control, for now.

[textile]
It just isn't fair that Windows users get all the viruses. I mean really, shouldn't Linux users be in on the fun as well? Well... thanks to the folks running the Wine project, Linux users can "catch the virus bug" too -- sort of.

Linux just isn't user-friendly when it comes to viruses. You have to work to find and run them. It doesn't happen automatically as it does with Windows. The GNU/Linux folks really should improve this glaring discrepancy.

To read the full article click "here":http://os.newsforge.com/os/05/01/25/1430222.shtml?tid=2&tid=78&tid=138

Google is now an ICANN-accredited registrar of domain names, providing it with yet another potential line of expansion. The fast-growing search provider is approved to sell names in seven top-level domains (TLDs) including .com, .net, .org, .biz., info, .name and .pro.

"Read the article":http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/01/31/google_is_now_a_domain_registrar.html

[textile]
For all those of you who think that the radio is dead this goes out for you.

I got hooked on to internet radio a couple months back while I was working for the "World Social Forum":http://www.wsfindia.org. The best part of internet radio is the choice of music stations you have to chose from. To start a internet radio station is very easy so the number keeps on increasing ever day. The cool part is that more and more radio stations are moving to the "Ogg Vorbis":http://www.vorbis.org format. Which is a really cool open standard, music format thats slowly taking over MP3. "Ogg Vorbis":http://www.vorbis.org is good quality in small packets ;).