Scott Yang's Playground

In my pursuing of monetising this blog I joined Text-Link-Ads back in September last year. It was simple to deploy their code and then start to generate income by selling text links — it was almost effortless. So I used TLA to earn some petty cash from a few sites that I got lying around, [...]

Google Finance Blog: Australian and New Zealand pricing data. “We’re pleased to announce the availability of pricing data for Australian (ASX) and New Zealand (NZX) listings on Google Finance.” Great! Time to throw out that dated Yahoo Finance with oversized advertisement and 90′s user interface. Here is the company I work for.

John Linton of Exetel: Why Are Victorian’s So Different? “… Victorian users average twice the bandwidth usage of all other State and Teritory users.”, and that was his experience over 12 years setting up and operating ISPs in Australia. Sounds like the Garden State should also be nick-named “leecher state”.

Do we need another tax cut? According to the latest promise from the Coalition, it seems to be a good thing for all Australians. No doubt that it is more likely the Coalitions need it more than the Australian tax payers, as November 24 the election day draws closer, but looking at the benefits — [...]

John Gruber: Forever is a long time: “There’s only one way to pressure Apple into opening up iPhone development, and it isn’t by developing underground iPhone apps. It’s by not buying iPhones.” You can actually buy an unlocked iPhone in Australia for less than AUD$800 (although I suspect it is going to get more expensive [...]

WordPress 2.3 “Dexter” is now ready for the world, and the new features include native tagging support, plugin update notification, URL handling improvements and more. It has been five months since the release of 2.2 “getz”, and they are indeed picking up the development speed. Great if you love the bleeding edge of everything. Not [...]

eWeek: Opening a PDF file on your Windows PC can get you pwn3d, recently discovered by researcher Petko D. Petkov (his blog is no longer online at this point in time). It’s the same guy who discovered Apple’s Quicktime flaw and how you can infect someone’s PC via Firefox and Quicktime. Interestingly the open source [...]

Dilbert: Wally showed Asok how to dodge a question in the meeting by bringing up the term “Web 2.0″, and a debate will sure follow. “Um… I was wondering if our new service is Web 2.0 or Web 1.0.” Maybe I should give it a try at meetings sometimes.

Yes. It was released this morning. Now the iPod family consists of: iPod Touch 8GB/16GB solid state with iPhone-like touch-screen interface, 3.5″ widescreen display, Safari web browser and Wi-Fi. $419/$549. iPod Classic 80GB/160GB 1.8″ hard disk with an all metal design, 2.5″ widescreen LCD, weight at 140g/162g, $349/$479. iPod Nano 4GB/8GB solid state, 2″ widescreen [...]

Sorry I have not been updating this blog. There are simply way too many commitments in life for me to maintain “yet-another-blog”, so I think I might eventually fold FuCoder.com after two years of on and off writing. I will continue to publish code snippets at our personal blog, Scott Yang’s Playground, but even that [...]

As Matt Mullenweg has pointed out in his blog post, Pligg is selling out, Vanilla is adding spammy links and guess which other open source program will be sponsored by other shady SEO’s — not for the sake of advancing free software ideology, but that they can resell massive amount of link-love for commercial gains. [...]

Herald Sun: Futures trading halt ‘lead to big stock fall’. From the report, “ASX halted futures trading about 12:45pm to address an urgent ‘hardware rectification’, and that lasted until about 2pm. In the meantime it left traders with no where to hedge risk, so they took to selling physical stocks instead.” If it is really [...]

Anil Dash: Presenting Movable Type 4.0. It has come a long way since Movable Type 3 back in 2004, and the new version has certainly contained many new features. However the Open Source version is still “upcoming”. Whether there is going to be mass-exodus between platforms is still to be seen. I am not moving [...]

Apple has Just unveiled the latest aluminum iMac. It is an all-in-one just like all the previous models, but thinner, faster and (more importantly) cheaper. Starting from AUD$1,698 for a 20 inch 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo, to top spec AUD$3,339 for a 24 inch with 2.8GHz Core 2 Extreme with 4 logical CPU cores. It [...]

I have been using both ReviewMe and Text-Link-Ads to monetise some of my websites and blogs. However two recent discoveries made me re-consider whether I should continue to go with them. 1. Text-Link-Ads Not Google-able Text-Link-Ads is one of the biggest text-link broker. Site-wide text-links cost my advertisers around $25-$30 greenbacks a month here, and [...]