Scott Yang's Playground

Glen suggested that I should port the Scripturizer for Javascript to GreaseMonkey, and I finally managed to give it a go this weekend. It is trivial to get the script working. In fact I got to trim the bulk that provides Internet Explorer compatibility. The only tricky thing is variable scoping for a running GreaseMonkey [...]

Imagine this. Like a Buffet Restaurant?! You have booked yourself and a couple of friends to this nice seafood buffet restaurant downtown. It has everything — nice food (and lots of them), good experience, live music, and the best of all — it is cheap. It costs you only five bucks to enter, and you [...]

Stupid thing I did this week: In the process of moving Bargain Blog back to my own home server, I somehow rsync’ed my entire design/test site, including the robots.txt, which contains deadly commands to forbid all bots/spiders! No wonder for the last few days my AdSense ads on that site are totally irrelevant, and CTR [...]

SMH: For the cost of putting a baby born in 2006 through private schooling, parents could pay off a mortgage on a two-bedroom suburban Sydney flat. The estimate shows that the cost of an elite school education for a baby born this year will approach $300k. (Btw, congratulation to the Phoons for their baby girl [...]

Google has announced Google Earth for Macintosh. Google Earth has to be one of the most interesting desktop application (read “time wasting”). Unfortunately it requires Mac OS X 10.4 (I only have Panther). Check my “geo.position” in this blog to see where I live!

Guido van Rossum started his work at Google, and is able to commit 50% of his time working on Python. That is great! Hopefully we’ll see a beta of Python 2.5 soon with PEP 342 Coroutine via Enhanced Generators implemented. Also, Google is mostly C++, Java and Python — so is the place I work, [...]

I am talking about hosting and my Bargain Blog. I moved the site to DreamHost more than 2 months ago, but have decided to move it back to my poor old home server yesterday morning. Problems? There are two. (1) Google (2) DreamHost.

There are a few annual events that are really influential in the tech world. MacWorld is one of them. Every year Steve Job’s Reality Distortion Field rocks Mac geeks, and this year is no exception. Here is the coverage. Software wise there are Mac OS X 10.4.4, iLife and iWork ’06. They bring in new [...]

Google Fanboy Essentials — actually Google calls it the Google Pack, announced on their official blogsite and press release. So we created the Google Pack — a one-stop software package that helps you discover, install, and maintain a wide range of essential PC programs. It’s yours today – and it’s something we hope you find [...]

Bought a webcam from eBay for $23 — yes one of those $0.01 win + $22.99 posted from China. Very average cam at this price point — 350k pixel CCD that does 640×480 at 15fps or 320×240 at 30fps. Powered by USB with a built in mic, it also sports 6 LED that emits weak [...]

Microsoft has finally released security patch to a vulnerability in reading Windows Meta File (WMF). Hurry up! Run, download and apply this patch (if you haven’t got yourself infected). Unless you are running Mac or Linux of course :)

Peter Hunt took a look on “How Python wins on the Web”. He argued that framework does not really matter — not all those efforts mimicking Ruby on Rails anyway, as RoR and .NET has already won the hearts of developers. Instead, Pythonists should focus on killer re-usable applications. Here’s what I propose: screw Web [...]

InfomationWeek psychic Mitch Wagner thinks 37signals is the new Google, and then he spent the rest of his article praising 37signals and its web apps. It’s an interesting company with “interesting” products, riding on the fame of RoR and AJAX. However the next Google? I don’t think so. Google has an technology that hardly had [...]

Jason O’Grady of ZDNet exercised his foretelling ability on the up-coming MacWorld 2006. #3 — 1Gb iPod Nano (to replace the sold-out 1Gb Shuttle), #2 — Intel Mac Mini (another step to conquere the living room) #1 — Widescreen Intel iBook (13.3″ and dual-core Yonah). I would love to have the latest dual core Pentium [...]

Remember Aaron Swartz’s post on rewriting reddit.com from Lisp to Python in 7 days? Besides a “blow” to the Lisp community (people you don’t want to offend), it also introduced issues with existing Python web application frameworks. The end result? web.py, and 0.1 was released today under an open-source license. You can download the Python [...]