Scott Yang's Playground

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, [...]

Not an AC/DC fan myself, but I love this Firebird Hymn recorded by Rock Band “The Lost Century” (got any link?) I have a feeling that 2.0 is going to be released any moment (although we have been using release candidates on production sites for the last 6 months). Why can’t all the major open [...]

“Everyone has a dead line this week”, I joked about in the Bible study group on Sunday. Students have their assignments due this week (last week before the exams over here), and I have my tax return to do. Actually, I have two to do as I also have to do the tax return for [...]

Via Google Blog, The Domino Effect with lots of Diet Coke, Mentos and way too much time. Awesome video. The only annoying bit is that two guys in lab coat walking around making sure everything is smooth running.

Dana Blankenhorn of ZDNet suggested Mozilla should take over OpenOffice.org because of OO.o’s slow development. I think he is either out of his mind, or doing a “John Dvorak” style link bait (which I have bitten). For one, OpenOffice.org is leaps ahead of Office 97 — I’ll even argue that it is better than Office [...]