Scott Yang's Playground

Mark Pilgrim wrote a bash script to batch-encode videosto H264/AAC for iPod under Linux, utilising other open source applications like ffmpeg and mplayer. One thing I liked about the article is, after listing the prerequisites, Mark wrote “Please don.t ask me for help installing these prerequisites. Consider it a character-building exercise.” Maybe I’ll quote that [...]

Dan Warne of APC talked about Ubuntu Christian Edition in a sort-of mocking way. I actually took a look at this Ubuntu Christian Edition (UBE) thingy, and it is nothing more than one bash script (convert_me) that installs both GnomeSword + a few modules (an open-source Bible study software) and DansGuardian (a web content filter), [...]

On Google’s official blog, they are celebrating the birthday of Google Talk. Wait a minute. Google What? Or am I the only one who could not remember that promising Jabber/XMPP-powered Windows-based chat client? Google Talk has actually had a lot of improvement since its launch one year ago. File sharing. Integration with Gmail, etc. They [...]

Read/Write Web: Berners-Lee Disses Web 2.0 — “So Web 2.0 for some people it means moving some of the thinking client side so making it more immediate, but the idea of the Web as interaction between people is really what the Web is. That was what it was designed to be as a collaborative space [...]

Techworld.com: Is there a future for OpenVZ, which starts with an unavoidable comparison with Xen. I am not sure why they need to be compared at all — paravirtualisation and container-based virtualisation are two completely different technology, and both have their pros and cons. On one hand, if you need a hypervisor and want to [...]

Steve Rubel reckons the current Web 2.0 cconomic is a vicious cycle: The Web sites and blogs that cover Web 2.0 — sites that I really love — are largely supported by ads from startups that also are hoping to capitalize in the rising interest in online advertising. This creates a vicious cycle that’s unhealthy [...]

Christopher Diggins on closures and anonymous functions: … closures have a very clear downside: they increase code coupling. Passing a single closure can extend the lifetime of massive numbers of objects, leading to a huge performance hit. Closures are a very powerful feature, but dangerously so. They are arguably too easily abused. A language designer [...]

Ars Technica: Microsoft’s open source software lab is inviting Firefox and Thunderbird developers for a tour of their research centre, in hope to assist them to make Firefox running smoothly on Windows Vista. The question is, will they get out alive? Kidding aside, Firefox has been running smoothly on Windows XP without their developers having [...]

From Darren Rowse the ProBlogger, where he compared preaching and blogging: I loved working up a sermon in the lead up to giving it. Researching, looking at what others had to say on the topic, piecing together thoughts, looking for illustrations and examples (tangents) and then practicing giving it and making the last minute tweaks [...]

Unfuddle is a secure, hosted software development environment and project management solution for small software development teams. It’s like SourceForge which has good project management tools. It is like Google Code Project Hosting and very Web 2.0′ish, and has a Subversion repository. Unlike others though, is that hosted project does not need to be open [...]

It has been almost 10 months since I started running Gentoo inside VMWare on my Windows desktop. It made coding at work (mostly application server related) much more bearable. I have since upgraded to VMWare Server, keeping my Gentoo installation in sync and the uptime of my Gentoo VM usually out-lives the uptime of my [...]

Via TUAW, Jesus Saves T-shirt from MacMerc.com that has an [Apple]-S keystroke symbol. It’ll make a nice gift for Apple-loving Christians (or Christ-loving Apple zealots?) I might need one that says Jesus :w! :)

likebetter.com — guess what kind of person you are from your choice of two pictures. It is actually fun — pick one out of two pictures that you like better, and after awhile the “pink brain” will tell you what kind of person you are.

Well. Not the kind of birds with two flipping wings. In fact it has a set of propellors, weight almost 5 tons, and made loud “woo woo woo” sound when they fly passed our office building at around 2:30pm in the afternoon. They were in fact UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, and I was fortunately enough [...]

Drive.com.au: Why LPG is still a laughing gas — because (1) it actually uses more fuel (2) it reduces the power of your car (3) it makes your boot smaller (4) conversion is limited to only a few models. Vivian was very excited last night telling me that Johnny is giving $1,000 away for LPG [...]