Scott Yang's Playground

John Gruber: Forever is a long time: “There’s only one way to pressure Apple into opening up iPhone development, and it isn’t by developing underground iPhone apps. It’s by not buying iPhones.” You can actually buy an unlocked iPhone in Australia for less than AUD$800 (although I suspect it is going to get more expensive [...]

Just in case you have not noticed, I have not been blogging here as frequently as I used to be. It certainly feels pretty dead here. During the exercise of searching for the killer of my blog, I found that there has been an increasing activity at Twitter, where I wrote “tweets” on things popping [...]

WordPress 2.3 “Dexter” is now ready for the world, and the new features include native tagging support, plugin update notification, URL handling improvements and more. It has been five months since the release of 2.2 “getz”, and they are indeed picking up the development speed. Great if you love the bleeding edge of everything. Not [...]

Due to personal committment elsewhere, I have not been able to blog as much as I would like to so I am in the process of merging existing blogs that I have. I shall be closing down FuCoder.com, which was started 2 years ago, migrating all the posts back to my personal blog, and continue [...]

eWeek: Opening a PDF file on your Windows PC can get you pwn3d, recently discovered by researcher Petko D. Petkov (his blog is no longer online at this point in time). It’s the same guy who discovered Apple’s Quicktime flaw and how you can infect someone’s PC via Firefox and Quicktime. Interestingly the open source [...]

Went to the big crowded East Garden Saturday morning, and bought this from Big W. $14.82 each, and comes down to total $44.46. Once in a while my heart feels a sense of completeness. Saturday morning was one such occasion. Now with Episode I to III (all with double DVD), it is now complete with [...]

High Scalability: Making Twitter 10,000 Percent Faster detailing how Twitter, an RoR application running on Joyent Accelerators, scale to its current size. Information obtained from various sources. Interesting point on Erlang: “How do you get a broken server running at Sunday monday with 20,000 users waiting? The developer didn’t know. Not a lot of documentation. [...]

Dilbert: Wally showed Asok how to dodge a question in the meeting by bringing up the term “Web 2.0″, and a debate will sure follow. “Um… I was wondering if our new service is Web 2.0 or Web 1.0.” Maybe I should give it a try at meetings sometimes.

Yes. It was released this morning. Now the iPod family consists of: iPod Touch 8GB/16GB solid state with iPhone-like touch-screen interface, 3.5″ widescreen display, Safari web browser and Wi-Fi. $419/$549. iPod Classic 80GB/160GB 1.8″ hard disk with an all metal design, 2.5″ widescreen LCD, weight at 140g/162g, $349/$479. iPod Nano 4GB/8GB solid state, 2″ widescreen [...]

Saw it on Twitter: jjprojects: Honestly, you feel like you are being watched by snipers out there, which is probably the case. Warlach: @jjprojects http://www.flickr.com/photos/hugosharp/… thanks to @hugosharp. Yes. Watch out! There might be a sniper on your roof! (Credit to Hugo Sharp. Trying hard not to make any Team-Fortress/Counter-Strike inspired jokes) APEC 2007 has [...]

Sorry I have not been updating this blog. There are simply way too many commitments in life for me to maintain “yet-another-blog”, so I think I might eventually fold FuCoder.com after two years of on and off writing. I will continue to publish code snippets at our personal blog, Scott Yang’s Playground, but even that [...]

As Matt Mullenweg has pointed out in his blog post, Pligg is selling out, Vanilla is adding spammy links and guess which other open source program will be sponsored by other shady SEO’s — not for the sake of advancing free software ideology, but that they can resell massive amount of link-love for commercial gains. [...]

Herald Sun: Futures trading halt ‘lead to big stock fall’. From the report, “ASX halted futures trading about 12:45pm to address an urgent ‘hardware rectification’, and that lasted until about 2pm. In the meantime it left traders with no where to hedge risk, so they took to selling physical stocks instead.” If it is really [...]

Anil Dash: Presenting Movable Type 4.0. It has come a long way since Movable Type 3 back in 2004, and the new version has certainly contained many new features. However the Open Source version is still “upcoming”. Whether there is going to be mass-exodus between platforms is still to be seen. I am not moving [...]

A nice illustration that Ian Powell used today at the City Bible Forum. It is taken from the slogan of Matt Damon’s latest block buster, The Bourne Ultimatum — “Remember Everything, Forgive Nothing“. Ian made a comparison with God. Unlike Jason Bourne, through the propitiation of Jesus Christ on the cross, God Remembers Nothing but [...]