Scott Yang's Playground

Matt of WordPress.com has announced domain registration and mapping for their blogging service — $10/year if you already have a domain registered, or $15/year if you register through them. Very well priced service on a very scalable platform. I’ll sign up if I don’t already have more blog sites than I can currently handle.

Google has released a guideline on how you can use the word “google”, and you are explicitly forbidden to use “google” as verb when you mean searching with an engine other than Google. Lorelle has also written a blog post to warn about using the word “WordPress”, as it is now a trademark of Automattic. [...]

Ohloh: PHP Eats Rails for Breakfast. A clearly link bait title, as it is in fact analysing by the “language”, i.e. PHP vs. Ruby, instead of frameworks. However, the analysis is interesting. As well as Brad Feld’s feedback on this article. Some of my thoughts: I won’t say it represents the “big picture”. Ohloh is [...]

MyBlogLog, the site that binds bloggers and their readers together. It’s basically a social networking site where you can create profiles, edit contacts, etc. What’s unique is its integration with Javascript based traffic logger, which enables bloggers or webmasters to see which MyBlogLog member is visiting his/her site. These statistics then enables forming of communities, [...]

Instead of going to work like most people do on Mondays, I took a day of leave and skipped work yesterday. Vivian’s ultrasound scan — yeah, that’s much more exciting.

Via AWS Blog, zBox is a PowerPC-based NAS box that automatically backs up itself to Amazon S3, so that you have the short latency advantage of LAN storage, and redundancy of online storage at the same time. They can even detect degrading disk drives and send you a new one preemptively. After several disk drive [...]

Just noticed that I have not been blogging here for a while, besides relaying exciting news like the release of Internet Explorer 7. Anyway. Here’s some updates. Everyone took turns to get sick at home. Anna was sick two weeks ago. I was sick last week, and Vivian was sick this week (and is still [...]

IEBlog: Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP is now available. WinXP SP2, WinXP Pro 64bit and Server 2003′s are supported. I am actually downloading it now and will install it on my development box. Hopefully it’ll be much more impressive than my previous encounter.

SMH: As rumoured, Google bought online video sharing site YouTube for 1.65 billion USD. I have to double check to ensure it is not a fake post. Looks like it is going well for them. Well, it will finally stop all the nay-sayers, like me. Update: Press release from Google.

Colin Buchanan has written a tribute to the late Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter. There’s an MP3 file of the song that you can listen to. Here’s the chorus: And wasn’t he a beauty Crikey what a gem A dinkum Aussie treasure A khaki larrakin Throwin’ it all out there With his heart upon his [...]

How to shoot yourself in the foot in any programming language. Very funny (if you happen to acquire different programming languages on your belt). For example, “Perl — You shoot yourself in the foot, but nobody can understand how you did it. Six months later, neither can you.”, and “Python — You try to shoot [...]

The answer is, you might be able to buy YouTube, and some even claimed that it is cheap. However, who would have 1.6B USD lying around, and who would be able to handle all all these lawsuits that will surely follow after the acquisition? Who else but Google alone? I still can’t see how a [...]

Bah! I thought it was crazy earlier this year when DreamHost quadrupled the storage space and octupled monthly data transfer. Apparently it was saner than I thought, as they have just increased the storage by 10 fold and doubled the bandwidth. Now there are over 200Gb of storage and over 2Tb of data transfer in [...]

Via OpenDNS Blog, PhishTank is a website that collects URLs of phishing websites that conduct fraudulent activity by tricking people believing they are on a legitimate website. I’m getting phishing emails almost everyday telling me either my PayPal is not working, asking me to confirm an eBay purchase, or my bank needs my password. Great [...]

vNES, a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) emulator implemented in Java, where you can play all these old NES games online right inside your browser, in all its 8-bit glory. Mario Brothers, Bubble Bubble, etc. Doesn’t work with Java 1.4.2 for me but Java 1.5 is fine. There are heaps of old-school games that brought back [...]