Scott Yang's Playground

I’ve been trying to think of some deep and meaningful thing to say on the last day of 2002, but I am really tired at the moment. Debugging the Interbase driver this afternoon. Fixed, but I’m exhausted. Well, it is just another day… I’ve also been wondering why people talk about new year’s resolution. I [...]

I’ve read two news articles today. One disheartening, and another encouraging. First of all, an article on The Australians titled “‘End is nigh’ for the church” talked about the declining of Christian church attendance in Australia recently. It does not really have proof on the figures, nor does it have comparison on church attendances each [...]

I’ve spent a bit of time coding and testing during the Christmas break, and here it is – mtsend.py, a command line tool for Movable Type (SY: Works fine in WordPress as well) written in Python. It uses XML-RPC exported by Movable Type to retrieve posts, edit posts, make new post entry, fix up categories [...]

There was an article on the Australian IT: Religious Calling. “A PROJECT by the Catholic Church to pool its telecommunications spending has flared into an ecumenical powerhouse – using the muscle of its multi-billion annual spend to stitch-up deals with a range of suppliers.” It talks about Catholic churches set up entities to deal with [...]

Just came back from the Randwick Ritz cinema today because I went and saw Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The movie is awesome, but it can be a bit difficult to follow if you don’t know some of the story already. It is good watching it at 10am in the morning because the [...]

Merry Christmas and be joyful! I went to the church service @ St. Matthias Paddington this morning with other people from the Mandarin Bible Fellowship. Phillip Jensen is giving the message in the service, and it is probably his last sermon here before he moves to the St. Andrews. Ecclesiastes 3:1-15 and Luke 2:1-20 were [...]

Sounds like Yahoo is doing their own Christmas shopping this time. Yahoo! is actually acquiring Inktomi, and that is a big news to the webmasters/SEO communities. Yahoo is probably one of the biggest portal site on the Internet, challenged only by MSN I think, where as Inktomi is a pay-for-inclusion search engine company that sells [...]

Over the past few weeks, the Playground has been hit hard by some strange users with strange user agents. Not only the Playground, but in fact all of my sites hosted here are crawled by a user agent identified itself as “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT; DigExt; DTS Agent” (note the lack of closing [...]

We had our Mandarin Bible Fellowship’s last leaders meeting this afternoon at our place. We discussed the summer events for the students during their holidays, Bible studies next year, etc. However, it is quite hot today in Sydney during the day time, and my balcony is facing west so the sun heats up the room [...]

At 8:30pm, I’ve halted the server. Powered down. Unplugged all the cables. Put in a new hard drive. Take out two old hard drives. Power up the upgraded server box. Back on-line. And it is nearly 11:00pm. Actually it was not that trivial. There was already 3 hard disks in this dual celeron box – [...]

Having been preparing this for 3 weeks, sleeping late every night for the past few days, we had our Mandarin Bible Fellowship Christmas mission today, in the morning starting at 10:30am at the Macauley Theatre. The title of the mission is “The Myth of Christmas”, and we are trying to set up a theme that [...]

Yeah. They are all Pelita engineers. I registered FOCUSer.net a while ago to set up blog sites for current FOCUS members, and so far I have 6 bloggers registered there. However, they are all from Pelita, and they are all engineers. Well, not quite for Sui for he is a bio tech guy, and I [...]

I am not sure which category should I place this blog entry – it is about Google, an Internet search engine company where all serious webmasters love/hate. It might just be a geek stuff because the article is actually not about the web and how to optimise for it. At the end, it is also [...]

I have upgraded my dual celeron server to Mandrake 9 early this morning in a twisted way. It did not turn out to be a smooth upgrade, and meanwhile I am still trying to iron out the things that are broken. Last night (or 1am this morning, to be more precise) I was working on [...]

I saw this great invention on the Hippocampus Extensions – blogDirect. It claims to be able to help bloggers around the world to blog with their thoughts whenever and where ever they are – even without Internet connection! However, the current version still requires the optional pencil and paper to operate properly, but a wireless [...]