Scott Yang's Playground

It’s going to be the week of catching up. Last Friday I went and picked up my primary school friend from air port, and brought him around Sydney Eastern suburbs on Saturday and Sunday. I have not seen him since migrating to Australia back in 1990 — which makes that 18 years. Neither have we [...]

Python 2.6 final has just been released, and What’s New in Python 2.6 would be one recommended reading. Quite a few syntax sugar, although a lot of them are preparing for Python 3.0 (which would introduce quite a few incompatibility with Python 2.x). From the previous experience with upgrading from Python 2.4 to 2.5, I [...]

Firebird is faster than file system for BLOB storage, and subsequent Reddit discussion. Exactly the same experience that we had at work with our document management system. Backing up the entire FDB file is a bugger though — rsync many files on the file system is much easier.

After Tech.Ed 2008 (I think) I have some new thoughts on Microsoft. It is in fact a different company than many Internet users and mass media have perceived. It is a lot more than just Windows, Internet Explorer, Office, Live/MSN, and Xbox 360. It is really about developers, developers, developers. For those who have read [...]

I am tired. It’s almost 12am (and by the time I finish this post, I am pretty sure it will be over 12am). I had a long day at Tech.Ed today and I went straight to the regular Friday night Bible Study afterwards. However as I have blogged about my last two days of Tech.Ed [...]

2nd day at Tech.Ed and it was actually not bad — I guess I am well on my way of getting brain washed. Got out of the house at around 8am this morning, and saw Cherry on the bus on the way to the city. She thought I was early (I normally arrive work 9:15-9:30am), [...]

Django 1.0 is finally released today and looks like it is going to be a good stable platform for many Python developers to build their next web app on. Tried to pick up Django 2 and half years ago but I’ve never managed to write a full application from it. Just let me append it [...]

“Enemy Territory” — because I went to a conference promoting Microsoft products and were surrounded by Microsoft-worshipping geeks today, from 8:30am to 6:45pm. Not the greatest experience, and I was totally overwhelmed at how many “stormtroppers” who actually attended Tech.Ed. It did not end up as bad as I thought would be (i.e. I did [...]

I said I was going to download Google Chrome first thing in the morning, didn’t it? Well, I had a hectic morning trying to get to Tech.Ed on time so I did not manage to download the freshly baked Google Chrome Beta, but then I still managed to get it up and running after I [...]

I have been trying to install Laconi.ca so I can break free from Twitter, but haven’t really got around to it. Then here comes the thoughts for today — why there isn’t a Open Micro Blogging plugin for WordPress, so I can just Write a short 140-character micro-blog-post, and then assign it to a special [...]

Top news item at TechMeme today — Google has revealed its own browser — Google Chrome, via a comic adoption by the artist Scott McCloud (ain’t that presentation brilliant!) By browsing the 5-chapter comic book you basically learnt that Chrome is a new Open Source web browser developed by Google. WebKit is used as the [...]

It has been more than 3 weeks since my last blog post, and I blame it sorely on Twitter and I am sure it has nothing to do with my laziness. Hmm. It wasn’t the first that my blog was threatened by Twitter, and you would think that I have migrated to Jaiku already?! Okay. [...]

Whenever something claimed to be the “Google-killer” coming out from the closet, everyone went Wow! So here we have it, Cuil, from the old Irish word for knowledge, claimed to have indexed 121 billion pages. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else.three times as many as Google and ten times as many [...]

Back to the real reason why Permalink Redirect 2.0 was released. When you visit your WordPress’ plugin manager page, and see the following notice… … do not click on “upgrade automatically”. Let me repeat, Do Not Click on Upgrade Automatically. Because if you do, you will not be upgraded to Permalink Redirect 1.0, but rather [...]

It has been a while — you might have thought that I have abandoned that little WordPress plugin. It has been hanging at 0.8.x for a long time, but Fear Not! Let me introduce “Permalink Redirect Two Point Oh“! When the Web is about to enter into the era of 3.5, I have finally finished [...]