Scott Yang's Playground

Two famous Aussie died last week, and one controversial Israelite died almost 2,000 years ago. I did not expect to put those three names under one sentence, but somehow Joshua managed to used them as illustrations to conclude his talk this morning on John 6. If I remembered correctly, the logic basically goes like this. [...]

Yesterday’s story continued. First of all, the switch over seems to be pretty quick. Incoming call issues were expected to be resolved in 24 hours, but Vivian had started to receive calls at home merely 5 hours after the line dropped. It could be less, as we don’t receive calls every 10 minutes. Arrived back [...]

I watched Harrison Ford’s Firewall on DVD on Tuesday. It is an interesting and engaging thriller. Jack Stanfield is an IT security expert in a Seattle bank, and his family has been kidnapped. The kidnappers wanted 100 million dollars transferred to his off-shore account, and need Jack to get “behind the firewall” to activate the [...]

Glenn Slaven: Australia and New Zealand Get Geocoding. You can now take Australian or New Zealand street address, feed it into Google Maps geocoder, and it gives you back latitude and longitude for you to plot on the map. Domain, the FF real estate website, has got this in action so you can easily see [...]

At around 10:30am, my SSH connection back home suddenly got dropped. “Aargh! ADSL glitches!” I mumbled. Host is not pingable, but it came back up after 5 minutes of outage — only to go off-line 2 minutes afterwards! Now if you call my home phone number, you’ll get a voice saying this line is currently [...]

IronPython 1.0 has been released. IronPython has been on my “to-play” list ever since the start of this project, and being an “old school” developer I would love to take a look on .NET.

Saw it on Slashdot yesterday, where COWS Ajax was introduced. What is COWS first of all: Ajax has been revolutionizing the web. However it is greatly limited by the browser same-origin policy, meaning that your site can only be as good as the web applications and tools that you create. But there’s a lot of [...]

Via SMH, Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin reported dead. But not by a snapping crocodile nor a biting snake. “The 44-year-old is believed to have been killed by a stingray barb that went through his chest” I guess he will be missed. One of my favourite Colin Buchanan’s video was his parody “Beware of Sin” on [...]

HostingFu: Greylisting spams with Postfix + Gld. I have previously used only Amavisd + SpamAssassin + ClamAV, but the amount of incoming spams really work my poor server hard. After running greylisting for a month, spams virtually disappeared from my inbox. Highly recommended if you are running your own mail server.

Don’t like the fact that there is no braces in Python? Fancy to have curly brackets around your code blocks? Well, not a chance. $ python Python 2.4.3 (#1, Jul 22 2006, 23:54:13) [GCC 3.4.6 (Gentoo 3.4.6-r1, ssp-3.4.5-1.0, pie-8.7.9)] on linux2 Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information. >>> from __future__ import braces [...]