Scott Yang's Playground

In one of the project at work we have been using OpenOffice.org running in headless mode to do document format conversions in the background, i.e. converting to and from various MS Office formats OpenDocument formats and PDF. One problem of using standalone OpenOffice.org installation as backend is that you can only run one instance at [...]

Got it on WordPress’ Twitter status: WordPress 2.8 “Baker” is now live to the world! http://bit.ly/wordpress28 (spread the good word) Yup. It is here, and you can read more about the new features here. To upgrade to the latest version using subversion while Automattic haven’t tagged the 2.8 – Go into your previously checked-out WordPress directory Run svn switch [...]

Need to analyse a list of top sites in Australia, and the following Python scripts helped me to get the site name + domain name off from Alexa with minimum effort: #!/usr/bin/env python import re, urllib r = r'<a href="/siteinfo/(.*?)" ><strong>(.*?)</strong>'; for i in range(25): u = 'http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries;%d/AU' % i for [...]

Saw this on Sydney Morning Herald yesterday — Google named Australia’s best place to work: After its outstandingly successful parent company topped a 100 Best Places To Work survey conducted by the US magazine Fortune, Google Australia has claimed the No.1 spot in a similar Australian poll. BRW, which conducted the study, said Google had created a [...]

Last.fm radio announcement — international radio listeners will require paid subscription, at €3 per month (although you also get 30 track free trial). The only part of the world that can continue to get free streaming are United States, United Kingdom and Germany. Darn. That means no more free Internet music radio for me [...]

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 released to the public as of this morning, thanks to Nick for notifying me. Much better if you are a developer that needs to support the IE platform, or want gimmicks such as web slices. Too bad the animated GIFs is still not working, which I think would probably break [...]

Undo Send — new in Gmail Labs, via Twitter. One feature that I wished that I have over the last 14 years of emailing. Back in the Thunderbird days, way too often press [Ctrl]-[Enter] instead of [Enter], which sent off an unfinished email. Too bad you only have 5 seconds to recall your mistakes.

HostingFu — EveryDNS Python API and Command Shell. A Python library I wrote to provide API access to EveryDNS, a free DNS hosting service. Very useful if you need to change IP address to a few dozen DNS records.

LowEndBox — Yes you can run 18 static sites on a 64MB VPS at VPSLink. Step by step commands included to get a plain vanilla net-install Debian 5 Lenny VPS with only 64MB RAM, to run WordPress.

Basically I have been playing with the HTC Dream smartphone for the last week and half, thanks to the loan phone from Optus. Let me say it first — it is a very very nice phone that I believe every geek would love to have one. On the day when it arrived on my desk, [...]