Scott Yang's Playground

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 The main functionality of this plugin has been replaced by WordPress’ redirect_canonical() function since WP 2.3, but somehow some people are still using this plugin for its remaining functions (permalink structure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