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 [...]

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 have [...]

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 for [...]

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 has the [...]

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 and [...]

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 [...]