Scott Yang's Playground

Microsoft might support OpenDocument if there is enough customer demand. OpenDocument is an OASIS standard, submitted to ISO, and is the standard file format for the up-coming OpenOffice.org 2. Way to go, Microsoft, and please show us how you will embrace the standard! However, if native PDF support in Office 12 can be regarded as [...]

Rather, must-do for this week: Submit my bloody tax return!! It appears that I have beaten my own record to procrastinated it later than last year, but I shall not try to compete against Tim to match up his last year’s effort by submitting it on the very last day. Not game enough to go [...]

Aristotle Pagaltzis wrote about keeping the signal to noise ratio high in your weblog, and there is no need to write frequently for the sake of keeping the readers, as most of them will keep up with the news feeds anyway. I love the analogy of busy wait and sleep. And there is no point [...]

Well, I won’t talk about Peter Jensen, Kim Beazley and John Howard. I am sure Jensen is criticising the possibility that workers might loose their bargaining rights, and are forced to work overtime/weekend, where they should be at home with their family. I am sure Howard did not bring out WorkChoices just to piss the [...]

Via MacRumors, Apple has just updated their iPod — which should probably be referred to as the “iPod Biggy” to distinguish between its smaller cousins (Nano and Shuffle). The new iPods can now play videos — that’s right. Why anyone would want to watch videos on that tiny 2.5 inch in 320×240 resolution is beyond [...]

Mercury News: Taiwan is not a province of China. Oh well, from Google Maps‘ prospective anyway. Taiwan, the dumpling shaped small island on the rim of the Pacific Ocean, is now displayed as just “Taiwan” on Google Maps, instead of “Taiwan, a province of China“, which took up too much space, let along political controversies.

Thanks to Evers for showing me the bug, I have fixed some regexp issues with Scripturizer for Javascript (plus some minor changes) and call it a release. Scripturizer for Javascript 2.1 Fix a regular expression bug that prevents scripturizing a lengthy text node. Change the onload mechanism.

The Daily WTF — where people sending in really dodgy code pieces and have laugh, but some of them are actually not that funny, especially if you are also someone working on the same code base! Sometimes you just get to go “WTF?!“, start weeding and put the code into right shape.

Douglas Adams said in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy about the origin of the “Babel Fish”.

Last time it took 20 minutes for someone to snap up my WordPress.com invitation. This morning when I logged on, and found they gave me another one. Then I remembered that Glenn wanted one, so I dispatched mine straight to him. However, it spilled error back to me, saying that he has already been invited, [...]

Now everyone should know that Oracle, the big commercial RDBMS vendor, has recently acquired Innobase Oy, the development house behind InnoDB, one of the data storage backend for MySQL that provides ACID compliant transaction support, row-level locking and foreign key constraint. Jeremy Zawodny has this story well covered. You know you are doomed, when your [...]

Sydney Morning Herald reports, study finds HSC pressure is cracking our kids. It says: The study of 320 students in this year’s HSC class uncovered deep despair, with many describing the exams as the “be-all and end-all” moment in their lives. Two amongst the 320 were quoted by SMH. “If I do poorly in the [...]

Via Slashdot, Google has a new “Web 2.0″ application pre-released to the public — Google Reader beta, a heavily Ajaxified RSS reader, in the field against other popular aggregators like Bloglines or Rojo. It has a nice very-Gmail-like interface, with short-cut keys like j for next unread message, and k for the previous one! Must [...]

One of our clients has two of his PDF files corrupted. Trying to open the file from Acrobat Reader, and all you get is an error message prompting you “There was an error opening this document. The file is damaged and could not be repaired.” Since those PDF files were previously saved into the document [...]

It has been a well known news, thanks to the power of blogosphere. PaidContent first leaked the acquisition of Weblogs Inc. by American Online, and then every second or third blogs I have been reading have reported on it. LcF blogged about this sale, concluding: Weblogs Inc. is a successful blogging network. Many of its [...]