Scott Yang's Playground

Around this time last year I have signed up with Google AdSense, and implemented on this website. 12 months later — yeah I have made some pocket money with it, but for me it is more of an experience in online marketing, contextual advertising and the whole Internet economics. It was fun. It was rewarding [...]

Optus caused Exetel slowness — Exetel was in the process of migrating customers from Telstra to Optus, to a point where Optus’ ATM network can no longer handle the load. That pretty much explained the slowness of my connection over the past few weeks, to a point where one after I am having 1,300ms ping [...]

Paul Beach of IBPhoenix responded to Forrester’s “research report” on Firebird, and released a white paper on how FB has been used in enterprise.

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing, a long time Mac user, is talking about switching to Ubuntu Linux for desktop, following the steps of Mark Pilgrim, who has also recently migrated to Ubuntu and suggested Linux equivalents to Mac essentials. And as Jason Kottke has said, “If I were Apple, I’d be worried about this… Nerds [...]

Google has taken another step to convert the Internet into GoogleNet. The mega “Search Engine” company has just released Google Checkout to the world (via their blog). Now, as an advertiser, you can do more than putting text or image ads on the Google search result and/or its publisher network, you can also make direct [...]

This is way over due, but I have just committed a new version of Table of Content Generator WordPress plugin. Here’s a list of changes added in release 0.3. Inside page/post template, you can use <?php echo $post->post_toc; ?> to insert the table of content. TOC is now generated for every post, even the ones [...]

An interesting article in 27th June issue of Southern Courier (article can be viewed on-line with appropriate plugin). Article titled “Hillsong poll queried” on page 9, reporter questioned the result of the poll related to Hillsong buying the former RTA property at Rosebery, and how would that affect the neighbouring residents (corresponding article see Southern [...]

Via B. Schneier, Security Research at Cambridge has worked out a way to penetrate through China’s Great Firewall, by ignoring the reset TCP packet sent back by the Chinese routers to keep the connection going. Very interesting analysis, although the article also stated that censorship in China is more than just “Great Firewall”. Might be [...]

I’ve been listening to Joe Satriani‘s 2006 album Super Colossal over the last month or two. The opening riff of track #1, “Super Colossal” did not impress me. No, it does not sound like Satch. However, the rest of the album is great. I did not really like it the first time I’ve listened through, [...]

Sorry I have not been blogging over the past few days. Even Vivian can tell that my blog has somehow been deserted! (Yes, she checked focuser.net for all the gossips). I have been quite busy at work, felt tired when at home, and was mentally blocked to put things down on paper blog entries. I [...]