Scott Yang's Playground

Thursday sometime in the morning I was at work, trying to solve some “problems” as usual, and CJ from City Bible Forum called by direct line, asking me to come to Ecom’s meeting to kick start the ministry in 2007. “Hmm. Yes?” (Put that into my Outlook calendar, remind myself to confirm with Vivian, etc) [...]

Alrond’s technoblog: The performance test of 6 leading frameworks. Very interesting read, as Alrond tested Django (Python), TurbGears (Python), Ruby on Rails 1.1.6/1.2.1 (Ruby), Catalyst (Perl), Code Igniter (PHP) and Symfony (PHP), using various load and memory testing utilities. His conclusion? Django is fast, and can be very light on memory as well. RoR 1.1.6 [...]

The Programmer hierarchy — who are considering themselves superior to whom. Very funny, and “people who insist on calling HTML a programming language” seems to be at the bottom of the stack, being considered inferior than everyone else. Another interesting point is the Ruby programmer, who consider themselves superior than Perl programmers, however the foot [...]

WordPress 2.1 “Ella” has been released, only a few days after RC2 was out for testing. I have upgraded all my WordPress blogs (and shared my experience here). So far so good, but I won’t say there’s any wow-factor in it. Mark was frustrated that Atom 1.0 is not supported. Well, so far FOCUSer blogs [...]

WordPress 2.1 “Ella” has just been released. The upgrade is much more painless than upgrading some of my sites from Drupal 4.7 to 5.0. Just do the following on the command line. $ cd /var/www/scott.yang.id.au/htdocs $ svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.1/ $ curl http://scott.yang.id.au/wp-admin/upgrade.php?step=1 > /dev/null 2>&1 And that’s it! Don’t let the detailed step-through scare you, [...]

Mark Pilgrim: WrongRoom “These programs ((Write|J?Dark)Room) aren’t for serious writers at all. They’re for the writer’s equivalent of script kiddies — people who want to go to Starbucks and pick up chicks with their MacBooks and their iPods and their glowing full-screen text editors.” Exactly what I thought when I first looked at WriteRoom. If [...]

“So, how is the Mandarin Bible Fellowship?” It seems to be one of the most frequently asked question when you bump into some old friends who you have not contacted for ages. It happened on a few occasions last Saturday when we went to Florence‘s farewell. I think maybe it is a good time to [...]

No, we didn’t sleep in, nor forget to turn up to church yesterday, just in case people asked (and indeed some have). We went to visit St. Paul’s Carlingford Anglican Church yesterday, bringing two friends who recently moved to North-Western Sydney to their Chinese congregation. We had late breakfast in Eastwood before heading to Carlingford [...]

Drupal 5.0 released after 8 months of development. When I blogged about WordPress’ maintanence release this morning, I was thinking, since both WP 2.1 and Drupal 5 are in released candicates, I wonder which one will go gold first. I think no more guess is needed now :) There has been massive changes since Drupal [...]

10 days after WordPress 2.0.6 has been released, the developers have just announced the release of WordPress 2.0.7, because of an SQL injection issue. Kudos to the dev’s for such a quick turn around, unlike some unnamed big company who would only patch on the holy Tuesday day of the month. Just updated 4 of [...]

SMH: Australia Trials Low-Cost Laptop. Such a misleading title from the Heralds! The article talked about someone liaising with Australian local governments for trials of OLPC, but (1) no response from the actual government body, and (2) no response from the actual OLPC group/distributor. I thought OLPC was initially developed for 3rd world and developing [...]

MySQL Performance Blog — InnoDB vs MyISAM vs Falcon benchmarks. Great test and lots of figures and graphs. It highlights two things. (1) Falcon is far from being mature, Jim still got lots to do, but I guess that’s still pretty impressive after 11 months of work (2) MyISAM toasts InnoDB in read performance is [...]

DivShare is a free file hosting service that allows you to upload unlimited files, serve unlimited downloads, no expiration date on the files, no/minimal ads and does not require registration. Very simply app, but I guess with its list of features it also needs a very deep pocket to keep it in operation. Now we [...]

Am I the only one that found this year’s MWSF Keynote “boring”? Like Josh Jones of DreamHost, I think I am a bit disappointed. So what have we got here? A massive (in terms of both size and cost) phone that we are not going to see in Australia for quite a while, a media-streaming [...]

Habari: a new PHP5-only, object-oriented and PDO driven blogging tool. Well, everyone has written a blogging tool or two, but I think what differentiates Habari is the momentum behind it — well known names like Michael Heilemann, Chris Davis, Scott Merrill and Khaled Abou Alfa (i.e. many WordPress contributors) were amongst the developers. I guess [...]