Scott Yang's Playground

It was a bit unexpected yesterday. It has been over 24 hours now but the shock lingered on. From the home page of Apple Inc yesterday: Steven Paul “Steve” Jobs, February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011 — R. I. P.

Via Hacker News. Google Chrome Pwned by VUPEN aka Sandbox/ASLR/DEP Bypass. While Chrome has one of the most secure sandboxes and has always survived the Pwn2Own contest during the last three years, we have now uncovered a reliable way to execute arbitrary code on any installation of Chrome despite its sandbox, ASLR and DEP. I [...]

Via Hacker News. Setting up PHP-FastCGI and nginx? Don’t trust the tutorials: check your configuration! I have in fact written quite a few tutorials and published automated scripts that are vulnerable. Seems the easiest way to prevent this issue is by adding a try_files statement (or a if (-f $request_filename) if Nginx -V < 0.7.27) [...]

Don’t Distract New Programmers with OOP. The shift from procedural to OO brings with it a shift from thinking about problems and solutions to thinking about architecture. That’s easy to see just by comparing a procedural Python program with an object-oriented one. The latter is almost always longer, full of extra interface and indentation and [...]

Internet Explorer 9 has just been released and here’s Microsoft’s promotion site. Now get ready to code some HTML5. Oh wait. You mean no offline application cache? No web worker threads? No WebGL? No drag and drop from desktop aka Gmail’s file attachment in Chrome/Firefox? D’oh.

Via James Yu’s farewell blog post on his startup employee life at Scribd. This brings us to the most important quality that enables impact: trust. Without trust, employees aren’t empowered. And without empowerment, there can be no impact… This is exactly the reason why startup hiring is difficult: the amount of trust required in the [...]

Martin Kleppmann: Accounting for Computer Scientists. Certainly very useful for those who are starting out.

Bought an ATA from Cormain back in January. It’s ugly, but it works. Connected to our new Billion 7800N ADSL2+ router and makes calls via PennyTel. No problem what so ever until a week ago. Suddenly VoIP stopped working. I am also unable to connect to ATA’s web admin interface to figure out what might [...]

Situation: Bought a new big LCD TV with HDMI input. Got an year-old HTPC with Athlon 64 X2, Gigabyte motherboard and ATI Radeon HD 3200 integrated graphics. HTPC has a HDMI output. Connect it up with the LCD TV, but only gets video (Windows Vista desktop in 1920×1080 glory on a 55″ LCD TV). No [...]

Introduce my new toy — a Lenovo ThinkPad T410. I have been a Dell man for the last 10 years — having a total of 3 Dell laptops (Inspiron 8000, Latitude D600 and Latitude D630). Well now I am having a change and migrated off Malaysian product to Chinese product :) Built quality is probably [...]

Much better looking 404 Not found page at Google. Interestingly this is a single HTTP request — despite the Google logo + that blue’ish broken robot, that is embedded as url(data:image/png;base64,…) as inline CSS inside the HTML.

Interesting reading from Alex Payne, on issues facing Hacker News, but also running a community website in general. A great community isn’t something that you just set up and periodically patch. Running a great community is a full-time job, not a weekend hack project. Indeed — and that applies to some of the community sites [...]

Got this via this Dell Swarm offer for just $23.76 to replaced my old scanner (9 year old HP ScanJet 4200C that refuses to work on Vista/Windows 7). It has got wireless printing and scanning, although I am quite a bit disappointed that it can only scan to your Windows desktop computer running Dell’s proprietary [...]

Via Hacker News: And according to Nokia entry on Wikipedia In 1898, Eduard Polón founded Finnish Rubber Works, manufacturer of galoshes and other rubber products, which later became Nokia’s rubber business. At the beginning of the 20th century, Finnish Rubber Works established its factories near the town of Nokia and began using Nokia as its [...]

Nokia vs SGI on Hacker News Comments. Interesting to see how both have ex-Microsoft boss, and both have decided to replaced in house operating system with Microsoft’s offering. And we all know what happened to SGI. Another interesting post on what Microsoft has done with the management at Nokia. Brilliant.