Modern Street

The Web as we all know it could be radically altered soon, by some proposals made by ICANN, the domain name regulatory board. According to proposals which are being discussed in Paris, and which the results will be made known after Thursday, we may all see major changes in the way we think of Web addresses in the near future. This has already been called the most major change to affect the Internet in the past few decades it has existed. If I’m not mistaken, I blogged on this last year, and now ICANN is keeping good its promise. But what a huge surprise, in that they basically allowed the extensions to be “public-submitted!”

What exactly this means, is that anyone with enough money and backing, can essentially register his own TLD and with that, you don’t just have .com/net/org/biz/info and so forth, but you are looking at unlimited TLD extensions. Anyone with $39,000 to $390,000 and enough backing can propose and create (almost) any domain name extension, it seems. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re one of those who haven’t downloaded Firefox 3 and planning on doing so, you might want to consider holding off for a while. Firefox 3 seems to have some issues and maybe more to come. You might recall the mania preceding the Firefox 3 Download Day; I haven’t even downloaded Firefox 3 to my personal machine, and won’t be doing so (yet). It took me a long time to upgrade to Firefox 2 from Firefox 1, and I’m going to hold off on this one again. When it comes to software, a sound practice is to hold off and let the bug reports filter in first. Also, it’s because the new features in Firefox 3 are things I can live without, for now.

I do like the ability in Firefox 3 to store my favorite sites, zoom in on small pics, and resume downloads, namely the Smart Location Bar, Zoom feature, and Download Manager (which has been a standard Opera feature from the start), but these things are not that important to me as the issue of memory hogging, which have so far been the bane of Firefox 1 and 2. Read the rest of this entry »

Domain hacks are created by adding a subdomain (SLD) to a top level domain (TLD) in order to create a word or name of some sort. For example, the popular social bookmark site, Del.icio.us is created using a subdomain del, and the US ccTLD, .us - del + icio + us. Domain hacks are an alternative way of obtaining a domain name, for the simple reason that good quality domain names are quite hard to come by these days. Domain hacks need a whole lot of energy and promotion going into them, just to make them visible because hardly anyone knows about them. Recently, the Landrush period began for an extension that could be perfect for hacks - .ME. Read the rest of this entry »

The deadline for Window’s XP is just around the corner, with June 30 being the final deadline before XP goes “off market.” Since there are still so many people who want XP to stay on, many people got a brief surge of hope, when Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer hinted at a possible extension past that deadline back in April, depending on what users wanted. As the clock keeps ticking, with Microsoft having yet to make any official budge on the deadline, it looks like they will really stop selling XP on brand new computers after June 30. Read the rest of this entry »

This must be one of the more interesting news in my RSS reader. Hip hop and online chess mixing together. Or more precisely, if you’re a fan of hip hop music, and you like playing chess online, then playing chess and getting your dose of hip hop; does that sound like fun? Well, that’s the piece of news on the collaboration between Wu-Tang Clan and an online chess site, ChessPark, called WuChess.

For those who didn’t realize it yet, chess is big online. In fact chess is one of the main reasons for a large number of people to go online, everyday. How do I know that? Well, at any given time in 24 hours there are many tens of thousands of people at various online chess sites - playing chess. These games can get pretty intense, and it’s not uncommon to have some people playing for hours on end - everyday. Did I say it can become addictive? Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re like the millions of audio buffs out there, you’ll find that quite often, certain mp3 songs end too quickly. That means, they have little or no period of silence after the ending of the song. It could be due to sloppy editing of the song copy by the person who edited and saved the mp3.

How do we fix this? I’ve been searching for a way to add a few extra seconds of silent time to some of the mp3 songs, I have because I find their abrupt ending a little too jarring. A few extra seconds of silent time added to the mp3 right after the anding should make it sound better, and more natural.

Rather surprisingly, searching and asking this question in forums did not turn up a suitable answer. But enter Audacity. This is a free and open source digital audio editor software program that helped to do just what I wanted.

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