Scott Yang's Playground

Update: It seems that this patch is OBSOLETED as Universal Feed Parser is now supporting Atom 1.0 natively from version 4.0 onwards. I wrote about rakaz’s article on migrating from Atom 0.3 to 1.0, and requested the Atom 1.0 support for Python’s universal feedparser. I submitted the feature request on SourceForge, but then realised Mark [...]

Yesterday evening I went to David Aikman‘s talk on Jesus in Beijing, organised by Christians in Media, hosted by the Annandale Community Church. It had a big turn out, showing there are many who are interested in Christianity in China. 2/3 were actually Asians from different background and different churches, who were exactly who Joshua’s [...]

Sometimes, something new that you tried to introduce into your life, that was designed to patch up certain issues, has actually produced a negative effect and makes things even more miserable. No, I am not talking about computers, which is partially true I fear. I am talking about the Sydney CBD traffic this morning. I [...]

Yet another Google related news. Google has finally allowing signing up a Gmail account, and you can get Gmail and use Google Talk even you do not have any friend! However, you do need to have mobile phone (or a cell phone, as it is they call it on the other side of the Pacific [...]

Watched The Interpreter on Tuesday night on DVD. Directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, it has quite a twisty plot. An assassination plan that turned out to be fake, but someone who initially cared less turned out wanting to have the president dead.

Google Talk – Jabber based instant messenger with integrated voice chat. Yes, it is indeed based on the IETF’s XMPP, that is compatible with many existing Jabber clients. It is great to see Google embracing the standard. My Google Talk ID is “scott.yang”, and I shall be there in the evenings.

Can I smell a bit of competition in the desktop widgets arena, especially between mighty search engine portals? Yahoo! bought Konfabulator a while ago, which subsequently became Yahoo! Widgets. Now Google strikes back, released the new Gogle Desktop 2 beta yesterday with Sidebar, where you can also customise by adding widgets3rd party plugins. Fun. Search-wise [...]

Via ProBlogger: SixApart has announced unlimited blogs for MovableType’s free users. Mena from 6A said, … with version 3.2, *all users* will be entitled to unlimited weblogs. This goes for free users, as well. A lot of the rationale behind this was that the multiple weblog management is so good in 3.2, that we didn’t [...]

Moved! I have moved this project to my programming/Internet blog — Search Excerpt WordPress Plugin. WordPress’ searching capability is a bit mediocre at the moment. It splits up the keywords, digs out texts using SQL LIKE statement, and returns all entries that match the criteria, in a reverse chronological order. Then the default template will [...]

Real Simple Sydication Version 3. RSS 3 Lite has been drafted, to provide yet another feed format on the Internet. Why oh why? And where can I find the “compatibility” mentioned? Ain’t the whole idea of XML about how you can build on top of the existing standard, provide compatibility, by mixing tags with different [...]

Thanks to Alex for reporting the issue, I have updated my Search Engine Highlight Javascript to 1.2. Here are the changes: Fix up the bug when search keyword containing partial match of ‘span class=”hilite”‘. Having an extra boolean flag Hilite.exact, whether the parser should perform exact match. Default to true, i.e. searching for “search” will [...]

Via Google Blog, Blogger for Word toolbar is a 2Mb download Microsoft Word add-on that let you edit, save and publish via the most popular word processor. I think it might be powered by Blogger API via XML-RPC. Let’s guess how quickly it will be hacked to publish onto other blogging platforms (MovableType, WordPress, etc) [...]

rakaz: Migration guide for Atom from 0.3 to 1.0. Very useful for blogware developers to move to the new web standard. Now I just hope someone can fix Python universal feedparser to handle Atom 1.0, as I noticed that TextPattern 4.0 is already doing that by default.

Matt announced about the invites you need to be part of the recently announced WordPress.com. You cannot just “sign-up” to this latest WordPress based service. You will need an invite, just like how you usually get onto sites like Orkut, Gmail or Yahoo 360. Except the catch is — everyone will only have one invite. [...]

This name should have been named “Grimmo’s Induction”, but too bad Thomas has already chosen that :) At the same time I guess the fact that Paul has been induced as the new Rector of the University Churches, as well the new Chaplain of UNSW, should conclude my previously written blog entries on ordinance. (part [...]