Scott Yang's Playground

Don’t Distract New Programmers with OOP. The shift from procedural to OO brings with it a shift from thinking about problems and solutions to thinking about architecture. That’s easy to see just by comparing a procedural Python program with an object-oriented one. The latter is almost always longer, full of extra interface and indentation and [...]

Internet Explorer 9 has just been released and here’s Microsoft’s promotion site. Now get ready to code some HTML5. Oh wait. You mean no offline application cache? No web worker threads? No WebGL? No drag and drop from desktop aka Gmail’s file attachment in Chrome/Firefox? D’oh.

Via James Yu’s farewell blog post on his startup employee life at Scribd. This brings us to the most important quality that enables impact: trust. Without trust, employees aren’t empowered. And without empowerment, there can be no impact… This is exactly the reason why startup hiring is difficult: the amount of trust required in the [...]

Went and watched Unknown with Vivian at Westfield Eastgarden today — something that I would never been able to do with a day job. 10:40am in the morning with bunch of oldies in the cinema, and almost felt like one as well. As of the movie — acting was good and Liam Neeson was great. [...]

Martin Kleppmann: Accounting for Computer Scientists. Certainly very useful for those who are starting out.

According to Google Analytics, out of 6 web properties that I have the tracking script, they receive a total of 26,170,964 visits and 72,950,295 page views in 2010. Some sites went up and up, and some sites went down and down (like this very blog). Managing all that has certainly burnt all my mid-night oil [...]

Bought an ATA from Cormain back in January. It’s ugly, but it works. Connected to our new Billion 7800N ADSL2+ router and makes calls via PennyTel. No problem what so ever until a week ago. Suddenly VoIP stopped working. I am also unable to connect to ATA’s web admin interface to figure out what might [...]

Situation: Bought a new big LCD TV with HDMI input. Got an year-old HTPC with Athlon 64 X2, Gigabyte motherboard and ATI Radeon HD 3200 integrated graphics. HTPC has a HDMI output. Connect it up with the LCD TV, but only gets video (Windows Vista desktop in 1920×1080 glory on a 55″ LCD TV). No [...]

Introduce my new toy — a Lenovo ThinkPad T410. I have been a Dell man for the last 10 years — having a total of 3 Dell laptops (Inspiron 8000, Latitude D600 and Latitude D630). Well now I am having a change and migrated off Malaysian product to Chinese product :) Built quality is probably [...]

Much better looking 404 Not found page at Google. Interestingly this is a single HTTP request — despite the Google logo + that blue’ish broken robot, that is embedded as url(data:image/png;base64,…) as inline CSS inside the HTML.