Scott Yang's Playground

Just got back to Sydney from Canberra this afternoon, after 3 hours of driving. Tired, exhausted, but quite enjoying this Australia Day long weekend. Originally we planned to have a MBF trip to the Australian capital, Canberra, on the Australia Day. We are going there to visit some ex-MBF friends who have left Sydney to [...]

Yes. I have finally got FreeBSD installed on my Dell Inspiron 8000. Everything (well, almost everything) works now – it boots, X11 works, sound works, and this time even the CardBus and Xircom RealPort work out of box as well! I’ve installed KDE 3.0.5 from the CD packages, and then the rest from the port [...]

As researching new technology today on the web (as always :^), I came across this site that have origins of many Chinese surnames – all the way beyong the Zhou dynasty! So I went and found my surname “Yang” listed in their site. Here is the entry – The 6th most common last name in [...]

While Claudine has populated her blog site today with Google related entries, I found this interesting new link from their index/home page – Google Tour. It is actually a great page. Most people would only use their web search, but Google has provided more than just that. The Google Tour page does not just give [...]

FreeBSD Release 5.0 is out on the 18th of January, even though the announcement did not go to the press until the 19th. I have not had any success with my previous encounter with FreeBSD 4.7 because of my piece of hardware was not supported properly under the 4.x release. Now the 5.x release is [...]

Being a Chinese and Mandarin speaker myself, blogging in Chinese should be obvious to me. However, scanning through my previous blog entries reveal none in Chinese. Moreover, when you surf through the Internet, most blog sites that I have come across are in English. While English is probably the official Internet language at the moment, [...]

I have been using ICQ since the early days. Well, not that early because my UIN still has 7 digits. For a long while ICQ has been my primary, if not exclusive, instant messenger (IM) client because most my contacts are on ICQ. However, over the last 2 years I have started getting more contacts [...]

This morning Vivian and I got up earl’ish (well, 9:00am is early for Saturday) to help Jade setting up her garage sale. While moving her things, Vivian has suggested to her that why not sending out an advertisement email to the FOCUS mailing list, since lots of overseas students want to buy and sell when [...]

I just saw the movie trailer of Hero (IMDB link), director Zhang Yimou‘s first martial art movie. The trailer shows great promises – great settings, good actors, and totally gorgerous outdoor scenes. It is going to be the biggest Chinese film epic as I have heard. I hope it is going to be as good [...]

I have recently upgraded the mailing list manager software for FOCUS mailing list to Mailman 2.1. I have been running Mailman 2.0 since its beta days 2 years ago, and it has been a great piece of software. FOCUS mailing list is quite light in traffic (average 70-100 posts a month across all lists), and [...]

Nigel sent an email to the Catalyst mailing list with a link to this amusing website. This “psychic prophet” guys from Singapore has some rather interesting content. The site contains lots of quotes from Bible, and he has listed Bible has something you must read and something you must get your hands on. And this [...]

Apple has announced two new PowerBook G4s – a 12″ PowerBook and a 17″ PowerBook. I am particular interested in the 12″ version because it seems to be a powerful little box, as a G4 version of the popular iBook. It has the same screen size and resolution as the iBook – 1024×768, but it [...]

Now I have learnt – never trust your passwords to Mozilla. I used to love the Password Manager feature of Mozilla, and I used it in my daily browsing. It basically keeps all your password centrally on one file, and then automatically fill out the username/password fields in the form, if they have been filled [...]

They said programming is an art, and syntax highlighting of source code really makes them look artistic.

Yawn… It is the second day of 2003, and I am already feeling tired. I am back at work, recovering from all the exhaustion of last year. I have received an email from a guy who used to come to the Mandarin Bible Fellowship last year. He joined us pretty much right after the Easter [...]