Scott Yang's Playground

There are a few bonuses when you recharge your Three Prepaid Mobile (in my case, a Three Skypephone). You get 150 minutes of free calls to other Three users, and 100 free SMS to any mobile network. Well. That’s all good. Except when there is some glitches. After I recharged my mobile yesterday I saw [...]

Amazon SimpleDB — released last week that provides access to a scalable storage of structured data via a REST API, which runs along side with EC2 and S3 to provide the “scalable backend” for online applications. Comments over the weekend have ranged from “it sucks” to “who needs Oracle/MSSQL/DB2?”. I personally won’t be using it. [...]

What exactly is Agile Programming Methodology anyway? During interview for developers, we usually asked our candidates their preferred development methodology and whether they have heard of agile programming, although we are not structurally practising any of these unstructural programming methodology anyway (just that they are buzzwords these days and nothing more). Seriously, in a small [...]

After the previous incident with my Nokia 1100, it has not been working well. It still works — it can take calls, it can make calls, it can send SMS — what else do I need from a mobile phone? Except it does not ring at incoming calls. So I decided it is time for [...]

DreamHost Blog: A Strike on One Laptop Per Child — why Nicholas Negroponte’s OLPC is flawed and how replacing the custom laptop with Nintendo DS might actually work. Exactly what I have thought. Providing starving kids with consumer electronics is not going to help them more equipped for the “real world”, and as a kid [...]

Watching the live stream from Kevin Rudd’s victory party in Brisbane right now. Looks like the election is now finally over — no more election campaign ads everywhere! Oh, Australia also has a new Mandarin-speaking, me-too echoing Prime Minister. Yeah. A new era. I went to vote this morning (in Kingsford-Smith). It was an easy [...]

TechCrunch: Google OpenSocial to be common APIs for building social apps. Instead of building yet-another social network, Google is releasing something this week that provides a platform to link all the partnered social networks out there — Orkut, Xing, Friendster, Hi5, LinkedIn, etc. It allows developers to write applications for all these social networks using [...]

Agency Fusion’s latest ad campaign, Make My Logo Bigger Cream, where for merely $29.95 you can get not only the Make My Logo Bigger Cream, White Space Eliminator, Starburst Dust, Fluorescentizer, you also get Emotionator that transform your design and website! Funniest ads I have seen for ages, but I think my sites do need [...]

In my pursuing of monetising this blog I joined Text-Link-Ads back in September last year. It was simple to deploy their code and then start to generate income by selling text links — it was almost effortless. So I used TLA to earn some petty cash from a few sites that I got lying around, [...]

Google Finance Blog: Australian and New Zealand pricing data. “We’re pleased to announce the availability of pricing data for Australian (ASX) and New Zealand (NZX) listings on Google Finance.” Great! Time to throw out that dated Yahoo Finance with oversized advertisement and 90′s user interface. Here is the company I work for.

John Linton of Exetel: Why Are Victorian’s So Different? “… Victorian users average twice the bandwidth usage of all other State and Teritory users.”, and that was his experience over 12 years setting up and operating ISPs in Australia. Sounds like the Garden State should also be nick-named “leecher state”.

There is an advantage and a disadvantage living on the southern side of Gardeners Road. I live in Daceyville, where most of my neighbours are of the state housing commission. As I have suspected that it is the reason — I actually do not get many unsolicited commercial mails, i.e. spam. Compare to the Kingsford [...]

One of the best news today — Automattic acquires Gravatar. From the new owner of Gravatar, Automattic‘s Matt Mullenweg: So we worked out an arrangement to transfer the code and service from Tom to Automattic, and here we are. Here’s what we’ve done so far over the past few days: We transferred the Rails application [...]

Do we need another tax cut? According to the latest promise from the Coalition, it seems to be a good thing for all Australians. No doubt that it is more likely the Coalitions need it more than the Australian tax payers, as November 24 the election day draws closer, but looking at the benefits — [...]

A few minutes passed noon today, I received an SMS message from some number I did not recognise. Reminder: Your tax return is due 31 Oct. You can use e-tax at ato.gov.au Please ignore if recently lodged. Australia Taxation Office. Thanks for the reminder from our considering government, not. Is it the first time ATO [...]