Scott Yang's Playground

SMH: the religion-lite today — prosperity Gospel, charismatic churches, cheap grace, etc. “Why are they attracting so many followers?” First, they make people feel good. Second, there is an energy and buzz to most of the services that are totally lacking from most traditional churches. Third, they are optimistic — you won’t hear much talk [...]

Heard from Vivian last night after the basketball that I have been tagged by this blogosphere influenza known as four things. Not sure who passed that one onto me. However, while I don’t always agree with fine developers at 37signals, and I just want to say what Matt has said. Next! Btw, I always wondered [...]

After my article on Bargain Blog about the cheapest .au registrar, I decided to transfer my yang.id.au domain from NameScout, whom I registered with since July 2002, to IntaServe, because it is (a) $2/year cheaper (b) having an Australian contact number. However, the transfer didn’t proceed that smoothly.

Steve Rubel thinks Scuttle is ridiculous because why the heck do we need another social bookmarker. Probably because Steve did not get it — Scuttle is an open source project that you can install on wherever PHP is (it is actually one of better written PHP app that I have seen), and that alone makes [...]

It’s almost Friday.

Google Page Creator — your WYSIWYG site creator in the Ajax style. Loading the site up and playing around with some editing sends my Firefox all the way to 77Mb in memory. Thank you Google, but I’ll take my Vim everyday. Update 6:30pm: it seems to be sending 404 now when I am half way [...]

It all starts with Tim Bray’s little rant on PHP a few days ago. Tim can’t stand PHP, because …all the PHP code I’ve seen in that experience has been messy, unmaintainable crap. Spaghetti SQL wrapped in spaghetti PHP wrapped in spaghetti HTML, replicated in slightly-varying form in dozens of places. I have seen some [...]

I have finally had a chance to update my Permalink Redirect WordPress plugin. The new release is 0.5 which has some bug fixes as well as new features. /author/%author%/ should work properly now. It was broken in WordPress 2.0 due to changes in userdata cache. Permalink Redirect page under Options menu. Currently it allows you [...]

52% of Chinese office workers blog, 41% of them prefer MSN Space, and only 27% have their blogs public. Not just office workers but I can see lots of NBFers have their semi-public blogsites on MSN Space. Moreover, “A brave 60 percent of white-collars bloggers criticize their boss on their blogs” Will we see a [...]

There has been a series of acqusitions amongst database companies. Oracle bought InnoBase Oy and Sleepycat, two makers of transactional storage engine for MySQL. MySQL AB has then acquired Netfrastructure, a web aplication development framework. However, what MySQL AB actually acquired is not just the company + its software, but the main brain behind it. [...]

The wireless access point that I bought almost 3 years ago is dying! It actually started a few weeks ago, probably around Christmas, that its signal strength just gradually dropping. AP sits inside the study room, and we used to get Good to Excellent connection from our bedroom. But now the signal strength is always [...]

I played guitar at FOCUS church this morning. The earth would have been on the mary go around a few times since the last time I played there. The fact that (1) my finger hurts after only 5 songs (2) quite a few people told me later on that they did not know I can [...]

Flash tennis game — play as top woman pro players. Gotta be one of the most addictive online flash game I have ever played. Just use arrow key to move your player (be that Seles, Venus or Hingis), and spacebar to hit the ball, but beating the game requires some skill (I haven’t even got [...]

Last night Upgraded my test box’s lighty to the latest 1.4.10 via Gentoo portage (I have lighttpd keyword masked). And then suddenly none of my CGI works. It just kept on complaining: 2006-02-16 23:24:18: (mod_cgi.c.1186) cgi died ? 2006-02-16 23:27:07: (mod_cgi.c.1186) cgi died ? 2006-02-16 23:27:14: (mod_cgi.c.1186) cgi died ? 2006-02-16 23:32:19: (mod_cgi.c.1186) cgi died [...]

Discussion on how Apache prefork MPM handles HTTP keep alive can kill a site under Slashdot effect. That’s the price to pay when each httpd process is stuck handling one pending connection, and that’s why I am keen to migrate my server to lighty + PHP on FastCGI.