Scott Yang's Playground

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS “Hardy Heron” has just been released, with server edition getting extended support until 2013. It was “Coming Soon” half an hour ago, and it is now here! I am probably going to install that on most of my production servers as I am really growing tired of Gentoo.

Stackoverflow Podcast #2, where Joel Spolsky argued that all developers should learn C starting at around 39min. His argument is, that it is like driving with a stick and know about the mechanics, coding in C (or easy-to-use assemble) helps you to understand what’s going on under the bonnet, where Jeff does not exactly agree. [...]

TechCrunch: Alexa overhauls ranking system where it now uses multiple sources rather than just their toolbar data. I actually noticed the change in Alexa ranking before I spotted the post at TC. Good move I think, at least Alexa is now in the position of competing with Compete and Quantcast, which are almost useless for [...]

No one tagged me but saw history meme and wanted to test it out on my main “workstation” — a Gentoo Linux running inside VMWare Server on a Dell notebook running Windows XP. $ uname -a Linux vmgentoo 2.6.22-gentoo-r2 #1 SMP Fri Aug 17 16:56:49 EST 2007 i686 Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz [...]

shyam: Goodbye Litespeed, hello Nginx, says WordPress.com. Apparently the reason to ditch LiteSpeed for Nginx is, according to Matt M (but no quotes), that WordPress wants to run open source for their full stack. LiteSpeed is a nice (but expensive) async-IO based web server that provides full Apache compatibility (which is not that useful if [...]

Google has just launched a preview version of Google App Engine, a development platform for your next start-up web-based application that is designed to be scalable. Looks like it is designed to compete against Amazon Web Services, and it includes the full suit of development stack, including: Web serving environment, including a Python runtime environment [...]

Deep Jive Interests: TailRank Exposes Massive Number Of Blogs Hacked — turns out all the latest spam sites are legitimate but hacked WordPress sites. I have also experienced a surge of trackback spams over the last couple of days, from hacked WordPress sites with their wp-content populated with static spammy content. WordPress 2.3.3 wasn’t even [...]

Two small updates on my code snippet collections. Permalink Redirect 0.8.4 I have updated Permalink Redirect plugin to 0.8.4. The main functionality of this plugin has been replaced by WordPress’ redirect_canonical() function since WP 2.3, but somehow some people are still using this plugin for its remaining functions (permalink structure changes, arbitrary path redirect, etc). [...]

C’mon. There got to be a website that’s like LinkedIn for the clergyman. You know. You go up there. Tick on the box “Anglican”, put “Moore College” under education, and put “MTS” and “student ministry” under experience, click on Search, and voila! Print out the list and off you go to the next parish representatives’ [...]