Scott Yang's Playground

Chinese hacker reverse engineered a .DLL in QQ to reveal the words that you would never see in Chinese cyberspace. Not surprisingly, high percentage is politics related. Like “江贼民” and “江猪媳” – you won’t see it in China!

Here is what everyone has been waiting for, and it is finally released to the public. Welcome iMac G5. And yes. I want one! It has either a 17″ or 20″ wide screen LCD screen, to the same quality as the Apple Cinema display. It also boasts either 1.6Ghz or 1.8Ghz PowerPC G5 processor and [...]

Via Jeremy Zawodny. Joyce Parker, who recently made the news when she helped reconstruct Friendster with PHP, was terminated by Friendster because of blogging. Crap. What can you say about the management? Another reason for keeping your professional life and your blogging life separated…

It’s my first time joining the City Bible Forum – a public meeting held in CBD where the Bible is taught. A company of 4 from the office went down to AAP tower, which is just a short walk from us. Meeting starts at 1:10pm. Al Stewart is the speaker, and today the passage is [...]

Nah. It is not about G’n’R’s song. I am talking about Sydney CBD – truly a jungle of its own. It is my first day at the new office – it has been nearly 4 years since I last worked at the city. Jumping off the bus at the Martin’s place, and immediately sensed that [...]

After church and Bible study on Sunday we attended the farewell for the Driscoll family. We had a lunch meeting at the Sam Cracknel Pavillion. Joshua led some presentations, and he interviewed Robert and Sue about the past, present and future. I also had a chance to catch up with some friends that I had [...]

GlobeTrotter – a 40Gb mobile hard disk with USB interface preloaded with Mandrake 10.0, so that you can use your favourite operating system wherever there is a PC. I wonder whether there is a Gentoo version with Firewire…

It was our last day at our Alexandria office – we are moving to the Australian Square in the Sydney CBD next Monday. So the whole office spent the last few hours packing and cleaning, so that the removalists can come on Saturday to transport all our belongings to our new office. Ain’t time flies? [...]

Just a discovery this week. Putting the following setting inside the Apache configuration (virtual host or .htaccess) seems to have positive effect on combating Movable Type comment spams. SetEnvIf User-Agent libwww-perl NOPOST <Limit POST> Order Allow,Deny Allow from all Deny from env=NOPOST </Limit> It seems that many spam bots are written in Perl, so here [...]

Yahoo! has launched its MovableType powered blogsite on its search technology. Sounds like Yahoo! is striking back. Well, in this era we all think that Google is the bad guy, and Yahoo! is the underdog. How things have changed! So far this month Google still brings me significantly more traffic than Yahoo! (Google 5254, Yahoo! [...]

RAII is a good programming semantic. It is great in C++, but it is less useful in languages that come with automatic garbage collection, like Java or Python, due to the nature of object destruction is indeterministic.

What I have been working on recently is a re-construction of the FOCUS website, which I have explained here. I have been doing a bit of work on a new simpler FOCUS website using an existing content management software. Here is what I would like to achieve: Simple and clean interface. CSS driven, and avoid [...]

My first +5 Funny comment on Slashdot! Yeah! Having been reading /. for 5-6 years, it is definitely my first. Now I just need enough karma to be able to post at score of 2…

Saw it first time today on one of the Blogspot site that I usually visit. Basically Blogger removed the ugly banner ads, but replaced with a Blogger NavBar that sits at the top of the page. It provides site-wide search powered by the almighty Google, and has a one click blog-let that enables you to [...]

Mark Pilgrim wrote this interesting (and humorous) article on why specs matter, saying you can categorise all coders into two groups – assholes or morons. Assholes read specs to pick out loop holes to demonstrate why specs are wrong – they are management nightmares. Morons do not read specs properly and get picked for writing [...]