Scott Yang's Playground

SMH: Clerical error exposes Google as anonymous eBay critic. Worse, it has not only revealed that it is Google who hides behind the mask criticising eBay’s latest policy on payment methods, meta data in the PDF file has also revealed that some Google employees used Microsoft Word to construct the document!! Well. Google, listen — [...]

Recently when I tried to upgrade my ASUS Eee PC from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04, it made a complete mess — 4GB internal drive is just not enough to hold all the applications, data + new packages for upgrade. So instead of trying to fix a borked Ubuntu installation, I tried to install Hardy [...]

Via ReadWriteWeb: SocialHistory.js can detect what popular social networks your visitors have recently visited by (1) creating a small hiden iframe (2) populate the iframe with links to those social networks (3) check the colours of those links, as visited links will usually have a different colour. One of the most wicked hack I have [...]

I was watching Bourne Identity on DVD with Vivian this evening, and in the bonus feature section they interviewed someone who’s actually a veteran at CIA. In the interview he said that the marble walls of the lobby of the CIA Headquarters are actually inscribed with a passage from the Bible! It says And ye [...]

Alex Payne, a Twitter developer, talks about its architecture and scalability issue. Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected as a messaging system, however. For expediency’s sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practises that are more appropriate to a content management system. Over the last year and a half we’ve tried to [...]

Via SinoSplice, Chinese Map according to Beijinger and Shanghainese. Although it is a bit of generalisation, you can pretty much see the culture difference between those two mega cities. Click to see the full size image.   It is interesting to see that they both agree on Shangdong, Wenzhou and Xinjiang. And their different opinions on Taiwan. [...]