Scott Yang's Playground

It is weird when you company have just bought out your biggest competitor. Just a few months ago we were still fighting for the same clients, doing data conversions for those who “defected” to us, and treat their office as “enemy territory”. Then last Friday they all came to our office for a chat, looked [...]

Saturday morning. Almost lunch time. Doing some vacuum cleaning. Two people knocked on the door — a Caucasian guy and an Asian lady. They had Watch Tower on their hands. Oh my. As I was busy changing Elsie‘s nappy, Vivian went and opened the door, told them that we are Protestant Christians, we are sure [...]

Wilson & Susana’s baby birth log — it is a boy! And his name is “Edmond”. Congratulation the Cheungs! We actually got a call in the morning on Saturday the 21st about the contraction and Vivian suspected that it was coming soon. Then it is a Sunday birth on the following day! Take care!

Adobe Systems announced plans to release source code for Flex as open source. The open source Flex SDK and documentation will be available under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Probably under the pressure of Microsoft Silverlight? I have only played with Flex 2 and half years ago when we were evaluating various RIA technology, and [...]

How did you spend your ANZAC day? Last night I have built a new computer for Anna, and here it is:

Since we moved to the new office, there has been quite a few “improvements” happening in the kitchen area that brought quite a bit of distraction. First of all, a new coffee machine was installed last week. Yes, one of those where you click a button and out comes a cappuccino.

Via CaveMoney50, Alister Cameron wrote about Two WordPress Plugins You Don’t Need and Shouldn’t Use. Number 1 on the list: Permalink Redirect, closely followed by Matt’s No-WWW plugin. Actually, since release 0.7, Permalink Redirect can already redirect on hostname mismatches, which makes No-WWW obsolete. That means, my Permalink Redirect is the Number 1 WordPress Plugin [...]

Two brothers — one in Christ and one in blood. Two weddings. One is Tim and one is Tom, and on the same day!! Tim has just launched his RSVP site (Vivian is still asking, why “unsync?”), but we pretty much know that it is 30th of June for a few months already. Then my [...]

Thunderbird 2 has just been released. There are quite a lot of new features in this new release. Most useful to me must have been message tags, i.e. you press 1 to mark the mail as important, 2 to mark it as work related, etc. It is a feature that has been available on Outlook [...]

Last week, Mark from Weblog Tool Collection posted his stand on sponsored themes, and asked all sponsored themes to disclose their sponsorship. A few days later Matthew Mullenweg also outlined the social and ethical issues with sponsored themes, and vote for removing sponsored themes from WordPress.org. These are the WordPress themes developed by web designers, [...]

Google bought Tonic Systems and is expecting to add presentation tool to its office suite by this summer. “Presentation tool” = PowerPoint-like slides creation/showing tool. “Summer” = winter for those of us living in the south hemisphere. It is such a good news — I love the collaboration features in Google Docs. It has been [...]

Blogpond: Top 100 Australian Blogs Index, listing all the top ranking Australian blogs using this algorithm, which is basically: R = (3 x A + X + T) / 5 R: Overall rankA: Alexa Australia rankX: Alexa rankT: Technorati rank Sounds fair to me, because this very blog is ranked number 17 on that list! [...]

Mark Pilgrim took the John Gruber-style translation of DHH’s response to Al3x/Twitter’s issue with Rails’ scalability. One of the funnies posts I have seen recently. “My ego is the size of Montana.” Now, if that is the size of DHH’s ego, I wonder what is the size of collective ego of the entire 37signals team? [...]

Jeff Atwood commented on the Twitter scalability problem and blamed on Ruby’s slowness. I have quoted from Coding Horror a few times (in my other blogs as well), but I still do not get how his opinions can be so highly regarded in programming community, when he cannot even distinguish between performance and scalability. Even [...]

DHH responded to Twitter’s scalability issue. Again that pin-points the “pain” of many share-nothing framework — database, and the lack of generic framework support to facilitate scaling out the database (yeah, I know it sounds oxymoron).