Scott Yang's Playground

Via MacSlash, Apple’s recent SEC filing stated that they felt being challenge by Linux and pirates. Not that the Penguins are pirates, of course, but it suggests that without Linux, Apple would be in a better position today. So what will happen next? Mac moved onto x86 platform? Almost done. Apple teams up with Microsoft [...]

Friday night at the Sebel Hotel, Melbourne — crazy. Trying to talk to colleagues that I have no faintest idea what their names are, over eardrum-beating dance music that’s no where near my taste. Well. Not surpriningly by the time I woke up this morning I have lost my voice. A great catch up though. [...]

As December draws closer, it is again the time of the year weaving good-bye and singing sayonara. In a high turnover church like FOCUS, it is not uncommon to see people coming and leaving. People come to church for various reasons, and sometimes these motivations change over time. At the same time, people depart for [...]

Via /., Firefox 1.5 has been semi-officially released. I haven’t been able to find them on Australian mirrors early this morning, but you should be able to pick them up in the US mirrors. Actually, it is exactly the same as RC3 released over a week ago, so there is no need to upgrade if [...]

Last Sunday was Mandarin Bible Fellowship‘s annual review. It has been something that we are trying to run every year — just before students catch their plane home. I did not recall whether we have managed to run the review last year, but anyway, it has been an interesting review this year.

Haven’t posted here for a week. Yeah I am getting slack. Work has been hectic. We have just deployed a major version change, and I have been busy last week ironing out bugs on clients’ sites. Looking a bit better as of this morning so I am getting back to devel work now. I don’t [...]

What to expect in 2006 for Firebird database. Looks like next year will be an interesting year for this open source RDBMS. 2.0 (query optimisation, removing annoying limitations) and Vulcan (fine grain locking + SMP) in Q1, and 3.0 in Q3 (merge of a few independent branches). Yum.

Every sci-fi has interesting ways to get around interstellar travel. At the end, no one will be interested in stories that whenever two solar systems are involved, it’s always “2,000 years and a long hibernation later”… Star Wars has hyperdrive that propel X-Wings through the alternate dimension of hyperspace, and Star Trek has warp drive [...]

Vivian and I have actually watched it on the DVD more than a month ago, when I blogged the item on the Babel fish. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (H2G2) is a Disney published sci-fi comedy featuring late Douglas Noel Adams‘ fictional work of the same title. Arthur Dent, an average Brit who craves [...]

My first Google AdSense cheque finally arrived yesterday, since I started putting ads on this blog 4 and half months ago. More than enough to pay for my DreamHost hosting for one year. Yahoo!!! (no pun intended) Now, shall I frame it (my very first cheque from Google), or shall I cash it? Hmmm…

According to this article in the Sydney Morning Herald, apparently IT workers are the worst dressed in Australia. And the help desk people are the worst amongst the worst, closely followed by those of the Internet start up. Why is it the case? To quote the article, a “corporate stylist” said, “Because the majority of [...]

I have updated Bloglines2HTML, a small’ish Python script I have written over a year ago, to 0.2. Bloglines2HTML downloads your Bloglines subscriptions and feeds, and convert them into static HTML from a simple template. It enables you to easily “catch up” your news feeds without getting on-line. This script has been working fine for me [...]

Google bought Urchin a few months ago, and the first fruit of this acquisition, Google Analytics, was released a few days ago. It is basically a web stats application. You know, the ones that show you who your visitors are, where are they coming from, which pages they visit, etc. It also gives statistics for [...]

Disrupting weather change yesterday and totally unprepared clothing only brought one certainty — I was sick again. It was massive headache kind of sick. Lying one the bed last night trying to read something, but the information feed seems to be causing more destruction. What was the headache like? It felt like the entire history [...]

I have been a fan of OpenLaszlo — an open source Flash based thin-client technology that can really bring out the Rich Internet Application (RIA) experience. Think Macromedia Flex, but free. Over the last couple of days, the team at Laszlo released LaszloMail (product link) to the public, showing us what a Flash based UI [...]