Seems a batch of sites got unblocked. Wiki.edia (marvel as I blog in regular expressions) is accessible (again), Wikibooks, Reuters, CNN, and a lot more.

Still blocked: blogspot, livejournal, wordpress (no surprise here -- lots of political blogs), BBC, certainly more; most importantly, Sinfest and CRFH :-( (why the f* is CRFH blocked? Zombies? Satan?)

Also, the web feels slightly faster in general!

It goes like this...

I'm absolutely in love with Prism. It's like being set free.

See, the trick here, the main trick, is not running sites in separate, stripped-down windows. Rather, it's that each of those is a separate process, and these processes don't step on each other's feet. They're very light on memory, and if they do have all the Firefox 2 memory leak issues, I'll never know, because I have no reason to keep them open for extended times -- since they load incredibly fast.

The funny thing here is -- many people list tabbed browsing as the major Firefox innovation, or at least one of the top few. What we usually don't think about is how much that became a cage. Since all the sites I'm browsing run in the same process, any memory leaks or crashes become a big problem. I don't know about everybody else, but at least myself, and a few other "power users" I know, tend to leave 10+ tabs open all the time. When some of those tabs are heavyweight web apps like GMail... everything can get very slow very fast.

When I installed Prism, the plan was to leave GMail open on Prism all the time, so if I want to restart the browser, it won't affect my mail. But see... I don't need to have GMail open all the time. I did, because it takes a while to load, and because it was a bit inconvenient to get some new mail notification that integrated well. (If GMail runs in a tab, how am I going to know if it's already open or not?) Now I don't have it open all the time anymore, and I have XFCE's mail notification plugin on my panel, which launches the GMail webapp on Prism. It's brilliant; the speed and flexibility of a desktop app.

Absolutely worth trying.

Yay, yay, yay!

So last week I was out on the 'nets looking for music licensed under Creative Commons, for a possible project. I headed over to Jamendo.com to see what I could find... and I was absolutely blown away!

I was looking for a number of different styles, and I found almost everything I wasted. There was, of course, lots of unusable rubbish; it is, after all, a site where anyone can upload. But a little digging produced gold aplenty. You can try a few of my selections via the widget on the right of the blog.

My PMP (which is actually my mobile phone) now only has CC music :-)

I'm really impressed. I think we may be near the edge of a whole new era here; when this reaches critical mass (probably still a few years down the road), it will turn the way we listen to music upside down.

Go Killing Jazz! Go Poulp! Go Camelot! Go try^d, go Auvernia!

If you visit this site occasionally and you're annoyed that I don't post, you may want to also follow my google reader share. Where many bloggers would post an entry linking to some piece of news they find interesting, I only share them; but that's probably because I don't really consider myself a blogger. So, any news I find worth knowing about, can be seen there. (When I redo this page, they will be here too. Eventually.)