Scott Yang's Playground

Saw Rob Bryanton’s Imagining the 10th Dimension on YouTube tonight, and the 10th dimension has been described as infinite possible beginning plus infinite possible ending of universe + time as a single point. That reminded me of someone, who is omnipotent in all these…

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 [...]

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 The main functionality of this plugin has been replaced by WordPress’ redirect_canonical() function since WP 2.3, but somehow some people are still using this plugin for its remaining functions (permalink structure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’ [...]

DailySearchCast: Microsoft Wants to Buy Yahoo! Some of the best commentary from Danny Sullivan the Godfather of “search” on the whole Microsoft offering $45b to buy Yahoo event.

Via Reddit, Who Killed the Software Engineer? “One of the most ill-considered steps that universities took was to adopt Java as the most widely used language in introductory programming courses…” Why are the universities replacing Miranda/Haskell/Modula-2 with Java/C#? Because that’s what the IT industry uses, but not necessarily because they are good languages to learn [...]

SMH: Worst day in Australian stock market in more than 18 years, where All Ordinaries fell 408.9 points, or 7.26 percent. Tomorrow is probably going to be ask bad, if not worse, after US starts trading this week. It was RED on the trading screen throughout the day. “Don’t panic!!!” the analyst said. I don’t [...]

Bought a new toy today off eBay. Yes, the ASUS Eee PC 701 with 4GB SSD and 512MB RAM, for a bit over 400 bucks second hand. First impressions: Small. Not tiny, but very small. The above picture shows its size comparing to my Dell Latitude D630. Booting up and shutting down is fast. Very [...]

Via Jason Calacanis, thanks to Mahalo Daily for compressing Steve Jobs’ 2008 MacWorld Keynote into 60 seconds, I have just saved 89 minutes of my life! Yes, it is better and better.

All right. I guess everyone has seen the new MacBook Air when Mr. Stevie pulled it out from the brown paper bag. Wow, it is thin! According to the Apple website, MacBook Air is ultrathin, ultraportable, and ultra unlike anything else. But you don’t lose inches and pounds overnight. It’s the result of rethinking conventions. [...]

Amazon SimpleDB — released last week that provides access to a scalable storage of structured data via a REST API, which runs along side with EC2 and S3 to provide the “scalable backend” for online applications. Comments over the weekend have ranged from “it sucks” to “who needs Oracle/MSSQL/DB2?”. I personally won’t be using it. [...]

DreamHost Blog: A Strike on One Laptop Per Child — why Nicholas Negroponte’s OLPC is flawed and how replacing the custom laptop with Nintendo DS might actually work. Exactly what I have thought. Providing starving kids with consumer electronics is not going to help them more equipped for the “real world”, and as a kid [...]

Agency Fusion’s latest ad campaign, Make My Logo Bigger Cream, where for merely $29.95 you can get not only the Make My Logo Bigger Cream, White Space Eliminator, Starburst Dust, Fluorescentizer, you also get Emotionator that transform your design and website! Funniest ads I have seen for ages, but I think my sites do need [...]