Scott Yang's Playground

I have just released Trackback ‘em All 0.1. It is basically an RSS/Atom feed to pingbacks/trackbacks converter. It fetches a list of RSS/Atom feeds, scan through the entries, and send pingback/trackback to all external links in the feed entries. I have actually been using it for a few months already. It basically: Speeds up your [...]

Google has released its Google Apps for your domain, Premier Edition. At $50/year per user, it looks to be quite an attractive alternative to self-hosted emails/office apps. Moreover it comes with 24×7 support. I guess small SaaS providers need to watch out as both Microsoft and Google have entered the market.

Got an email from MyBlogLog about 2 days ago. Hi ScottYang, I would like to add you as a co-author of my MyBlogLog community below: Blog/Site: Blogmemes Belgium (http://www.blogmemes.be)MyBlogLog community: http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/community/Blogmemes_Belgium/ Your MUST click on the link below to accept this request: <Link Deleted> Thanks,Blogmemes_Belgium Instead of clicking on the link, I went straight to [...]

Just uploaded a small WordPress plugin, URL Absolutifier, that converts relative links and image sources in WordPress RSS/Atom feeds into absolute URL. For example, from <a href=”/code/url-absolutifier”>URL Absolutifier</a> to <a href=”http://scott.yang.id.au/code/url-absolutifier”>URL Absolutifier</a> It was written because (1) I like to use relative URL when I write my blog posts (2) feed should not contain relative [...]

It has to be one of the most frequently asked questions here. “I have changed my WordPress Permalink Structure, and now all my internal/external links are broken. My most popular posts have dropped off from the Google SERP completely, and I am loosing thousands of dollars per day! How can I fix them?” Well, maybe [...]

John Pasden: 10 reasons I hate Chinese New Year. Obviously it applies to only those who live in big metro city in China. Funny that we, the Mandarin Bible Fellowship, are going to watch the craptacular tomorrow at someone’s place, as it has been such a tradition in many Chinese’s life. Welcome the year of [...]

Daily WTF: The Inner Platform Effect — “The Inner-Platform Effect is a result of designing a system to be so customizable that it ends becoming a poor replica of the platform it was designed with.” Way too many examples these days. Think Java-based enterprise systems that can be configured into everything via XML files, but [...]

A few humourous programming language stories — Raganwald: Programming Language Stories — where it looks at the attitude of C, Ruby on Rails, Java and Scheme programmers. The RoR one is my favourite as it was a derivative from another popular joke. Just inside the gates of heaven, St. Peter sits at a desk checking [...]

Cooperative threading in Javascript 1.7 using the new yield keyword. Only works in Firefox 2 (or whatever browser that supports JS 1.7 with all its Pythonic features). It’s no preemptive “real” threading though, but it does make massive parallelism easier to implement. Online realtime strategy game written in Javascript?

ESV Blog: Collaborative Bible Study Materials. From the article — “The barriers to entry for managing a project of this scale have fallen so far that anyone with both passion and commitment can produce and make available something potentially helpful to Christians everywhere.” Yes, I don’t deny the fact that the technical barriers were long [...]

Jon Schwartz of Sun argues for Open Document Format on his blog + a ODF plugin for MS Office that has just been released by Sun as well. “Durability of information and file formats is exceptionally important to institutions or businesses with document retention policies that extend beyond the useful life of the software (and [...]

Tom from Gravatar has releaed the new site as public beta. It has a much cleaner design than the previous one, and it is great that people can sign up gravatar and update their pictures again. Gravatar serving is running lighttpd + PHP, but the admin interface is developed in Ruby on Rails. I have [...]

感謝環球聖經公會的Jack弟兄從新加坡寄給了我一份他們出版的『眾裡尋它－如何選擇聖經中譯本』 。 I requested that booklet in late December, and it finally appeared in our mailbox last week, although I later found the online version on their website as well. The title of the booklet suggests that it is about how to choose the right Chinese Bible translation, although the content is more about how [...]

I did blogged about MyBlogLog back in October, didn’t I? Quite a few things happening afterwards. A few days after my previous “short review”, I actually deleted my account there, because I just cannot stand their aggressive tracking script that “rings home” whenever someone clicks on some links. I guess that is why they are [...]

Thought on Music, written by Apple CEO Steve Jobs on the topic of DRM protected music. Problem: “The problem, of course, is that there are many smart people in the world, some with a lot of time on their hands, who love to discover such secrets and publish a way for everyone to get free [...]