Scott Yang's Playground

Got this on our iBook which we bought more than 4 years ago. Basically when we boot it up, there is the familiar Mac boot up chime. Then the screen greys out for half a minute, and then the flashing question mark inside a folder appears. If you see a flashing question mark when you [...]

Went to Dominic Steele‘s talk on Matthews 7 at City Bible Forum on Wednesday. Dominic told a joke on residential colleges at UNSW, which I had not heard of before. Here it goes: Shalom College. Run by the Jews. No pork. New College. Run by the Anglicans. No beer. Warrane College. Run by the Catholics. [...]

How many pairs of hinges does your laptop need? You know what a hinge on the laptop is? Yup, that thing which holds the LCD screen from the base of your laptop computers. Usually you just need one pair for each computer. Then why is someone trying to sell 5 pairs on eBay? Probably because [...]

Guido van Rossum: Python 3000 Status: A schedule was first published around a year ago; we were aiming for a first 3.0 alpha release by the end of the first half of 2007, with a final 3.0 release a year later. (Python 3.0 will be the version when it is released; “Python 3000″ or “Py3k” [...]

I was wondering why the font rendering on Safari for Windows looks so different. Actually I’ve used a Mac for the last 4 years, but seeing Apple’s anti-aliasing rendering engine working on Windows does feel a little bit strange. Joel Spolsky outlined the differences between two camps: Apple generally believes that the goal of the [...]

Yup. You all heard that? Safari, the default web browser on Mac, now also has a Windows version ready to be downloaded. It is a 8MB download without the Quicktime runtime, but still contains useless attachments like Bonjour and Apple software updater, although these are optional and you don’t need to install them. Anyway, the [...]

Google: You can now download the latest 2000 items from Google Reader for offline reading, thanks to Google Gears. Having worked on a web-based application for the last 6 years, I have to say that off-line support is one single most requested feature which means there is still a huge desktop/offline market. An online/offline feed [...]

Mezzoblue: PHP files hosted on DreamHost modified to include spammy links, and apparently around 3,500 FTP accounts have been compromised on DreamHost. I guess for the friends who are also hosting on DreamHost — check your files and make sure they are still intact. Update: response on DreamHost Status blog.

TechCrunch: Movable Type 4.0 to be open sourced with MySQL-like dual license, and Anil confirmed that it is going to be GPL. Congratulation to SixApart! I felt they somehow “lost it” back in 2004 when Movable Type 3 was released with a new license terms. What follows was a mass migration, with open source advocates [...]

Read/Write Web: Top 60 Web 2.0 Applications in Australia, or rather, top 60 web start ups by the Australians. Whether they are “Web 2.0” really depends on your definition. For example, why is a search engine indexing only Australian blogs considered “Web 2.0″? Don’t we already have search engines and indexers in Web 1.0? Or [...]

As Facebook has just been predicted as the largest social network on Internet, I think it would be a good time dusting off my Facebook account and check out what the hype is all about. Looks like it is still appealing to those who are in their 20′s, just like MySpace is appealing to the [...]

On the left hand side, we have multiple vulnerabilities with PHP release 5.2.1 or less. Remote attackers might be able to exploit these issues in PHP applications making use of the affected functions, potentially resulting in the execution of arbitrary code, Denial of Service, execution of scripted contents in the context of the affected site, [...]

Peter Beattie: “Brisbane is the place to be, Sydney knows that. We won the State of Origin and I think that Brisbane is the capital”. If State of Origin is the judging criteria for being the capital of Australia, then we’ll probably looking at changing capitals every year or two. Or at least Melbourne and [...]

TechCrunch: Engadget Knocks $4 billion off Apple Market Cap on Bogus iPhone email. Verdict — someone is getting into serious trouble. Just a side note — it is actually not hard to understand why public companies do not like their employees blogging, especially when it is (1) not moderated (2) talking about work. While small [...]

Matt: WordPress 2.2 “Getz” has been released. Of course, “Getz” came from the Jazz musician Stan Getz. However the first thing that popped up in my head is actually this Hyundai’s little tinbox. So what do we have? WordPress Widgets — Never going to use it as I don’t even have a sidebar here. Full [...]