I made one accidental and pleasantly surprising discovery today. One my friends had sent me an audio clip as an attachment in gmail. I was thinking of donwloading it but I noticed a 'Play' link right next to it. It opens up a web based player and starts playing immediately ..... cool! and the streaming rate seems quite good too. This certainly means one can play his audio clips from a browser regardless of the operating system, and without the need of a software.
The audio clip I played was of a musical nature and was in mp3 format. I have not tried with other formats though .... I should get around to doing that soon.
The trend it seems is growing more and more towards web-based services and maybe pretty soon in the future all we will need is a web browser to access all the services we need .......... then we can peacefully forget about installing a plethora of softwares on our PCs. With free web based services like Writely starting up which gives free access to a Word Processing service, Gmail must be slowly becoming a major pain in the ass for Microsoft. I certainly hope more such services are on the way.
Funny I am writing all this on Windows Live Spaces though ...... hahaha.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/5372458.stm
I should get hold of and read this book. I read some excerpts from the book and I think I would agree with many of the things it's got to say, if not all. I certainly don't believe in religion. The books that zealots are holding in their hands to wreck havoc all around the world were probably just a set of rules for people to follow in ancient times. It's preposterous to take them literally in today's day and age.
To think that people believe Hurricane Katrina and the Asian Tsunami were acts of God, and not forces in the Earth's atmosphere or Plate Tectonics, to punish people for their sins is absurd.... and there are people who believe that they will go to Paradise for blowing themselves up as human bombs in the name of God. It's not terrorism that should be tackled ...... it's religious extremism that should be taken care of.

I have been doing some reading on OpenWrt for a couple of days. It's a Linux based firmware for embedded devices, specifically wireless access points and routers. The release is called White Russian. The developers took the name from a vodka cocktail and gave it to their own cocktail of Linux packages. When you SSH into it, it shows a cool line-diagram logo of OpenWrt and the recipe for White Russian ... hahaha .... these Linux developers are cool ...... and most probably twaate. I've attached a screenshot of it.
I flashed it onto a Linksys wireless router WRT54GS_v4 today. The base is BusyBox Linux which is supposedly the Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux. It uses compressed filesystems like SquashFS and JFFS and has also got an 'ipkg' package manager. What's best is that it comes in all packed into 1.5 MB, that too with a web interface included .. amazing!
The idea behind fiddling with this is to control some Wi-Fi enabled sensors through the access point and push most of the work as close to the sensors themselves as possible. With a 200 MHz CPU and a fully controllable OS riding on the access point, thanks now to OpenWrt, it seems possible. There's only 16 MB RAM inside the access point ... so I can't be storing msot of the data from sensors there. This is where remote logging syslogd and schedulers like crond should come in. I've got to do some more work on it ... well maybe a lot more work.

Just saw this picture on BBC. It's amazing how computing power and storage capapcity has increased tremendously, the device size being reduced at the same proportion. Three Cheers to Moore's Law.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/06/technology_enl_1158153014/img/1.jpg