Scott Yang's Playground

This is Sydney’s weather forecast on Sydney Morning Herald for the next few days. Looks very gloomy to me. And we already had almost-non-stop raining for the past week! It was windy, rainy and chilly, and Sydney’s winter has just started. And it wasn’t the bad weather that troubles me. Flu and cold often follows [...]

Dries Buytaert compared different web server and PHP set up for a Drupal powered site. It turns out Apache2 + mod_php4 + APC cache is actually the fastest configuration. However, pre-fork with APC cache on each apache process can use quite a lot of memory as well, if the site has been hit hard. Personally [...]

Got an invitation to Google Spreadsheet this morning, so I quickly logged in, played around, and do up a quick spreadsheet. Here’s a screenshot: Aussie personal tax calculator in Google Spreadsheet Yeah it is a very simple spreadsheet that calculates how much you need to pay the government from your annual taxable income. It has [...]

Via /., Lenovo desktops and notebooks are now Windows-only. What?! Linux loves to run on IBM ThinkPads because the Big Blue is actively advocating it, and I know a few sysadmin-type geeks swear by their ThinkPads. At least they can now buy Macbooks and run a decent x86 unix system.

Jeremy Zawodny revived the discussion about the actual usefulness of rel=”nofollow” mechanism in hyperlinking. In short, it does not prevent comment spams. Moreover, it hinders visitors from commenting as there lacks “reward”. Jeremy concluded, which I completely agree. Look. Linking is part of what makes the web work. If you’re actually concerned about every link [...]

Bruce Schneier blogged about 2.5% of all passwords start with 1234 from a big sample of database. I know how common bad passwords are — plenty of them in the web apps we have deployed (though they are all hashed when stored in DB). I also remembered running Johnny the Ripper over all CS1021 accounts [...]

WordPress 2.0.3 has been released and available for download, and it is mainly a bug fix/security release, some back-ported from 2.1. Just updated this blog and it seems to be okay, and I will upgrade blogs at FOCUSer.net tomorrow morning. If you are using SVN to update your site, the revision number is 3825 (btw, [...]

A RAID mis-configuration yesterday completely corrupted the hard disk on my poor old home server (yes, I know, again!!). And the reiserfsck rebuild just shuffle everything into lost-found, but since all files are now renamed to their inode number without extensions, it is now almost impossible to recover them. Wasn’t a good start yesterday morning.