Scott Yang's Playground

Bruce Schneier Facts Database, along the line of Chuch Norris Facts. For example, “Bruce Schneier eats 0s and 1s for breakfast. And snacks on pi.” Being a Schneier fan myself, it is very funny indeed. Via ELER.

Prrof of concept of port scanning arbitary IP addresses from nothing but client side Javascript. From the code it looks like creating IFRAMEs and setting the SRC attribute to try to connect to ports, and has a list of web server signatures to check against. Pretty scary in what client side JS can do. I [...]

An interesting article via Slashdot: Hoarders vs. Deleters: What your inbox says about you. The tagline is, “You are your inbox”, as your inbox reveals your personality, your mental health and even your up-brining. Because “inboxes are metaphors for our lives,” Dr. Greenfield says, there’s no cure-all solution to inbox management. We’re all too different. [...]

IBM released the original PC, the IBM 5150, 25 years ago, and its decision to open up the BIOS started the “clone wars” (sorry not this one), which led the revolution that almost everyone is now having an “IBM-compatible” PC at home. I still remembered my mum’s first BASIC book has a 5150 on the [...]

Alessandro Vernet: Ruby is on its way of fixing unicode issues, and he concluded that lacking of proper unicode support in Ruby might be caused initially designed by Matz who is a Japanese, who have been relunctant to support Han unification in charset and migrate to Unicode. I am not sure whether it is really [...]

Simon of the Django fame has put together Python Developer Centre for Yahoo! Developer Network. Many useful articles on how to access Yahoo’s API with Python, and hopefully there will be more upcoming.

Everyone enjoyed Steve Jobs’ keynote at WWDC ’06 yesterday. Leopard got a great preview, and Windows Vista got bashed for trying to copy good features from Mac OS X. Mac fans everywhere enjoyed the humiliation of Microsoft, but at the same time others wondered whether Apple themselves are ripping other products off. … while Jobs [...]

First of all, I like FLOSS, a podcast where Chris DiBona and Leo Laporte interviews various respective figures in the free/libral/open source software scene. Ever since they advertised that Guido van Rossum will be in the next show, I have been eagerly waiting for this interview. Well, it is finally here, where Guido talked about [...]

It’s pretty much what everyone has expected, at WWDC 2006 early this morning, Steve Jobs released the worthy PowerMac replacement — MacPro. Together with also newly released Xserve, Apple has finally completed the transition from PowerPC to Intel x86 processors. Externally, there does not seem to have any major changes, i.e. the big jump between [...]

A list of 90+ resources on online file storage, and many of them those “Web 2.0″ style companies. I guess with recent storage associated disasters, having a good online off-site backup is high on my consideration. However, I don’t need to know 90+ of them providing this service. I need to know, how many of [...]

Goggles: the GoogleMaps flight sim — “This flight sim uses images loaded in from Google mapping service…” A nice bird eye view flight simulator that flies over real sceneries in London, New York, Paris and Tokyo. Quite fun — would be even better if I can flight over streets in Sydney.

It is a gloomy day today — just like yesterday. Dark sky from one end to another end of horizon. There were glimpses of sunshine, but nothing to cheer about. Well, at least this picture cheers me up. Took this on the Gold Coast when we went on holidays 2 weeks ago. It’s the big [...]

NeoOffice, the OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X with a UI developed in Java, has released the Aqua beta to their supporters. NeoOffice 2.0 Aqua Beta is our first full Aqua release and uses native Aqua menus, file open and save dialogs, print dialogs, buttons, scrollbars, and many other native Aqua user interface elements. What is [...]

Another round of interest rate raise yesterday which triggered lots of news yesterday. I found Ross Gittins’s simplified view on economies very interesting: The key to understanding economies is to realise that keeping them on an even keel involves a balancing act. Managing the economy is like walking a tightrope. It’s possible for skilled performers [...]

Electrician came in the morning and fixed the power switch, which was actually burnt pretty badly when we looked at it last night. As you can see the Netural line has been burnt. They came and replaced the fitting, and the power is good again. Everything is up and running. I have also been experimenting [...]