Scott Yang's Playground

Harry Fuecks wrote about his predictions of PHP in 2005, with unrealistic ones like ‘In January 2005 PHP will win an award as “Programming Language of the Year, 2004″‘. To me, PHP has never out grown its stereo type as a web language, and a program who knows only PHP but nothing else deserves no [...]

Nice guide on getting the now-much-faster Acrobat Reader 7. Acrobat 6 is one piece of giant bloatware that makes reading PDF a pain, and I always use Preview on Mac OS X which is blistering fast. Downloaded Win32 English version here, and tried on my Dell – wow it is much faster. Highly recommended.

Agnostic journalist Kenneth Nguyen of The Age expressed his opinion on God’s responsibility in the death and destruction caused by the tsunami. He could not match the idea between an all-powerful, benevolent and interventionist God with a disaster in this kind of scale, and wondered whether people’s “faith” would be affected. He cleared assumed that, [...]

ThinkSecret reports a new low-end headless Mac at around USB$500 will be introduced by Jobs at MacWorld in Janduary. This would be interesting, and will definitely attract a lot of white-box PC market. Now if Apple can introduce a cheap G5 box…

因大學昨天不開，早上與國語查經團契剩下來的弟兄姊妹去北岸的一個華人教會參加他們的禮拜。路上接了一位剛從中國大陸回來、之前有來過我們團契的阿姨，便與她談起這幾個月來發生的事情。她看到我們家 Anna 快六個月大了，就問到是否有開始教導她認字。然後就說到她在澳洲的小孫子，四五個月大就讓他學習掛在牆上的字母與單字，兩三歲就可以認得四五百個中英文單字… 面對這樣的問題，我和 Vivian 真的是不知道要如何回答－不知道是要表達慚愧呢，還是要覺得可憐。現在小 Anna 過的真的是無優無率的生活－就像其他六個月大的嬰孩一樣，每天不是吃、睡、舔手指、就是玩，最多聽聽故事，看看圖片，我們真的從沒想過現在要教她背單字。慚愧啊慚愧！另一方面覺得現在的小朋友真的是辛苦。不但沒有了童年，連在嬰兒時期玩樂中自己摸索的機會也被剝奪了。打從一生下了目標只有一個－考進中學、大學、研究所，擊敗身邊的其他小朋友，做大業賺大錢，之後再回來報效父母… 可憐啊可憐。 這讓我聯想到 Grace 從中國幫我們買回來的嬰兒用救生圈。根據包裝上的標籤以及所附送的光碟影片，讓小嬰孩學游泳的最大目的就是幫助他們早點發展，所以之後在學校在社會都能夠比別人更早一步，成就比別人更高一層。難怪每個父母都要他們的兒女學游泳… 教會結束之後往 Chatswood 的路上，看到了街旁大大小小的補習公司。那位阿姨又提到她們曾經去詢問給小學生補習的價錢，好讓她的孫子能進精英中學，但因補習班的高價而作廢。讀書需要補習，對於曾經在昆士蘭省讀中學的我是一個十分陌生的想法，但是因近年來移民與從亞洲來的海外學生的增長，中小學生，甚至有些大學生，課外要「補習」也受此影響而越來越普遍。將來我們也是要面對這個問題－補還是不補？是該感到慚愧呢，還是要為這一批新生代可憐？

Christmas this year is surprisingly chill. The temperature has not risen above 30″C this week, and the forecast for the next few days seems to be quite cooling as well. Sydney was buring by Christmas for the last few years in a row, but this year we haven’t had a bush fire! Really really thank [...]

Tim Challies has written an interesting and detailed two part article on Sola Scriptura – the reformed doctrine on the Scripture alone. There are also interesting feedback and discussion from the comments. Part 1 and Part 2.

Henry Frost reckoned that he has learnt something from J. Hudson Taylor when he visited North America for the first time in 1888. He learnt a lesson about guidance. It was first prayer, then common sense, and it was child like trust all the way through. (J. Hudson Taylor “A Man in Christ” pp. 310)

I know it is going to come sooner or later, but now there is a wide-spreading worm that attacks vulnerable phpBB installations, by exploiting its now infamous “highlight” bug prior to 2.0.10. It overwrites every .php file found on your system, which makes a quite big mess. I patched the only copy of phpBB installed [...]

Thanks to Glen Piper for pointing out the incompatibility caused by Bible Gateway changes, I have made some minor modification to the Scripturizer for WordPress and release it as 1.4. Download Scripturizer 1.4 Changes: Bug Fix: Change the URL so it shall now work with updated Bible Gateway. If you are a user of a [...]

What sort of entertainment can you have in a hot Sunday afternoon right after a big lunch? Want to have some kind of arcade action without being a couch potato? That pretty much described what Vivian and I did today. The “hero” and “heroine” equipped with lethal weapons, seeking and defeating the “baddies”, encountering the [...]

Comment spams DDoS’ed servers hosting MovableType. Not surprising, especially in slow servers where even spawning a new process of perl is considered “expensive”. Maybe for FOCUSer.net to move to WordPress would be one resolution for 2005.

For the last 2-3 days, I have sold 3 items and bought one from eBay Australia, and I think I might have started enjoying the process. You can always find bargains on it, and most importantly you can buy pre-loved second hand items in good working condition at a fraction of the original price. It [...]

Having used OpenOffice.org 1.9.62 for the last couple of days (while m65 has just been made public today), I gotta say that the up-coming OpenOffice.org 2 is really impressive. Functionality wise it has quite a lot of enhancement, and is already far exceeding my needs. Visual wise it looks great – no more “emulated” user [...]

Brice Schneier talked about how one should secure your own personal computer against uninvited intruders from the Internet. Many pure gold here, straight from one of the best security experts in the field. You might think of it as being too paranoid, but these tips might save your life one day.