Scott Yang's Playground

Instead of going to work, I have been sitting around at home doing nothing for the last two days. I was sick — that’s why. Got a flu on Monday, and then went through all that temperature, running nose, dizziness, headache, coughing, etc. I am getting better now, and hopefully will head back to work [...]

Zoooom Zooom!! Went out doing some shopping last night (thanks Tim for babysitting!) and came back home with a nice silver blue Porsche 911 Turbo! A 997 series I believe. It actually took us quite a few minutes to decide on the purchase. You know, it can sometimes be difficult choosing between Dodge Viper, Nissan [...]

Via Slashdot, apparently you are infringing copyright law and could be fined if you get caught singing “Happy Birthday to You” in public in Australia. The phrase has not only been trademarked, the 4-lines of lyrics has also been copyrighted by the Warner Chappell Music, and they won’t expire until 2030. Aargh!! I’ve just realised [...]

I was listening to net@nite episode 2 with Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte on my way to work last week. They were discussing a new service, MyFinalParty.com, a website that helps you to plan “not only your funeral but also everything else”. Then a website called MyDeadSpace.com, a tribute site for all those who have [...]

TalkCrunch: Interview with Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, talking about their web services business unit, and all the weird usage of S3 and EC2. The Matrix Amazon is really doing some great stuff amongst web developers at the moment, and with the infrastructural services they provided you can easily scale to the next MySpace or YouTube. [...]

ReviewMe, which launched a week ago, pays me 30 US greenbacks for writing this review! That’s free lunch for the week! Moreover, they are planning to pay bloggers up to $100,000 to write a review about them! More dough for the bloggers, how good is that?! Now I just need to wait for the ching-ching [...]

Java has been released by Sun as free software, licensed under GNU GPLv2. I’ll vote this as the coolest event this year, for software developers at least. Java creator James Gosling’s letter here. Sun is really re-positioning themselves in relation with the open source communities, and how much has changed over the last 10 years! [...]

NY Times: Web 3.0 is on the horizon. Yes, Web 2.0 is so yester-year and we are eagerly waiting for the latest upgrade. Web 1.0/Sun: “Network is the computer”Web 3.0: “World wide web is your database” Web 2.0: Mesh-up of web-servicesWeb 3.0: Searching the big mesh-up with warm fuzzy term such as “Artificial Intellegence” Robert [...]

Sydney Anglicans: The Rev Al Stewart was announced last night as the new Bishop of Wollongong. Congratulation, and busy work ahead. The very first sermon I heard when I came to Sydney was given by Al — I still remembered that big sunny day during O’week when CBS ran their “taste test” (or whatever it [...]

Tim Bray: Java is free, or soon to be free, with Jon Schwartz and Rich Green announcing it in a few hours. It will be released under GPLv2, with SE and ME now and EE in a few months time. Way to go Sun, and once it is open sourced, it’s never too little too [...]

I have just committed a small update to ESV Popup Javascript, resolving an issue where Good News Publisher generated Javascript is cached by Internet Explorer 6/7, which prevents the passage shown in the popup to be updated. I’ve also fixed a few stylesheet glitches with Internet Explorer 7.

Last Friday at work we were trying to figure out a strange behaviour with the destructor of some of our wrapper objects in Python. We used a lot of wrapper object in Python to handle object life cycle of our CORBA objects, as they don’t have the built-in reference counting and garbage collection. So whenever [...]

Jonathan Schwartz: I believe in network clients. Quite a big claim from the CEO of Sun Microsystems, especially when you have lived through the late 90′s when the ex-CEO Scott McNealy kept on talking about “network is the computer”. Schwartz clarified what is “thin”, and argued that innovation on the client side is back. Great [...]

Apple has long been running their switch Get a Mac campaign, luring the PC users to abandon Windows to come to the paradise. Then we have geeks migrating from Mac to Ubuntu out of frustration from the built-in apps. Now, we have David Young, theJoyent CEO, is talking about his switch from Ubuntu to Windows [...]

It’s November! Two more month to the new year, and blogging here has also been winding down. I’ve got back to reading books on the bus again, as I found it better use of time than reading SMH, new feed items or listening to podcasts. Anyway, these are the books that I have been reading, [...]