Scott Yang's Playground

Busy busy this week. Little time to surf. So I’ll start with this week’s Friday Five.

• What time do you wake up on weekday mornings? Between 6 and 7, whenever the alarm defeats me.
• Do you sleep in on the weekends? How late? No. Not applicable. Usually we have things on Saturday morning (Yum Cha, tennis or something else) and church on Sunday.
• Aside from waking up, what is the first thing you do in the morning? Wash my face, make coffee, check email! Then take shower.
• How long does it take to get ready for your day? Isn’t my day starts at the point when I wake up? Oh. I get out of home at 8:30. Go figure.
• When possible, what is your favorite place to go for breakfast? Home. Otherwise Maccas.

Christianity

Interesting reads:

• Two kinds of Christianity: Attack on anthropocentric Christianity that dominates the North America and Western Europe now. They are now “hollow and putrid remnants of the Church of Christ in the West remnants with fine ceremonies, lots of good taste but no power of faith.” Time to get back to the word of God.
• Getting paid to go to church: a baptist church pastor is offering real cash for the white caucasians to attend his sermons, as his church is dominated by the black, and he believed that gospel is for all nations. Interesting…

Jabber

I have been playing with this console based Jabber client, IMCom, which is very cool. It is written in Python, so it is completely extensible. It has quite a comprehensive module architecture, that it lets the programmers to plug in his/her own modules, and hook onto the callback routines. I am going to use it to write a Jabber bot. I’ll blog about it a bit later…

Programming

Here’s news for you. Python 2.3 has been released. Yes – the long awaited Python 2.3 has finally gained approval from Guido and his gangs, and it marked a major update since Python 2.2 which was released back in December 2001. Some of the highlights:

• Faster VM – up to 30% faster than 2.2.
• New functions like sum(), enumerate(), etc.
• New basestring class, that is now parent class of both str and unicode.
• Boolean types.
• PyThreadState_SetAsyncEnc() – new C API to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception.
• …
• And a lot other improvements.

Also check out Andrew Kuchling’s what’s new in Python 2.3, which is a more readable run down on all the new features.

Coding in Python is good…

Webmastery

Got this from email through catalyst:

• CSS Border Slants.
• Slants How-To

Apparently, with CSS’s border style and some hacking style, it is possible to draw those slant-shape without using an image. With some combination of slant, it adds a bit of colour into your plain website. Now with Javascript directly accessing the style of DOM elements, you can even do fancy things like this rotating box. You can even draw lines with it. Impressive.

However, CSS was designed so that people can stop hacking HTML by separating the contents and styles. But now people just start hacking both the CSS and HTML.