Scott Yang's Playground

Took the flight from Sydney to Gold Coast and landed here at around 3:25pm. Holidaying? Not really, but it is nice to be back to the house that I once called home 20 years ago, sleeping in the very same bedroom.

First time taking the family to the zoo this year, and last time we came was on the New Year’s Eve.

Note that the photo was taken using Galaxy Nexus’ Panoramic photo feature — first time testing it and it worked amazingly well. Oh, did I mentioned that I recently bought a Samsung Galaxy Nexus, from MobileCiti for ~$390 ex-GST? Initially I was put off from its 4.65″ AMOLED screen thinking it must be too big (and resulted awkwardness trying to put it in my pocket all the time). Turned out that, yes it is big, but not as awkwardly big. Moreover, after getting used to having 4.65″ rested on my palm, I can’t see myself going back to my previous 3.7inch-er any more.

After trying to squeeze in a bit of reading time before bed for the last 2 months, I’ve finally managed to finish reading all 7 volumes of Harry Potter. My almost-8-year-old Anna started reading them first, now half way through Prisoner of Azkaban, has already grown into a fanatic of the series, sorted into Ravenclaw on Pottermore, learnt all the incantation and all that.

As for me, I guess that story of the young wizard sorted of compensated my otherwise pretty adventure-less youth. Middle age crisis much?

What’s next on the reading list? Bought The Hunger Games series on Kobo last month. Might get started on that.

That’s why I don’t go to many networking events. Talking to the new social media expert startup entrepreneurs can be quite stressful sometimes.

Funny that after I posted my last blog post a few days ago, Jeff Atwood blogged about moving on today at Coding Horror. He is leaving StockOverflow for family reason.

Startup life is hard on families. We just welcomed two new members into our family, and running as fast as you can isn’t sustainible for parents of multiple small children.

His comment resonates when I looked at some of the decisions I’ve made over the last 12 months. Not necessarily quitting a startup. Actually, I quitted my corporate job of 10 years, turned one of my hobby site into a “startup” (despite being already 5 years in existence). Hired my first employee and keeping cash flow positive. It got more and more demanding to a point that I have to let my other hobby site go. “Quitting” was a painful decision to make, especially when you perceive yourself in the middle of “achieve something”. But at the expense of your family? No. Never.

These days people often asked me what’s my future plan for my business. It’s easy to get excited to talk about all the expansion plans & world dominations, etc. I need to remind myself that running a startup is a life style choice that gives you more flexible time to look after your family, help out at church, etc, rather than letting the startup world takes over you.

One day I shall come back to write about the last 12 months. One day, when things settle down a bit.

Handed over two projects this week. One that I have worked on actively for 4 years — an active blog + an active community that I found myself no longer having time to take care of. The other one was a website that I have started almost 12 years ago — was enthusiastic at first, but the whole thing just slid into the limbo land over the last couple of years.

There’s a bit of sadness in me, but on the other hand I was glad that they were over. Hopefully both projects will continue in safe hands. Hopefully.

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.

Jason Freedman on how to email busy people, as we all know busy people don’t have time for all your emails and they do say “crap, Ctrl-A, Delete and let’s start again”.

1. Subject Lines Matter
2. Use Your Company Email Address
3. Remind Him of Context
4. Limit Your Entire Email to 5 sentences or Less
5. Make Your Ask Explicit
6. Respond Immediately
7. Include a Short, Professional Signature

Need to remember that the next time I email.

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 would hope an update to fix the exploit would be released soon, although sandboxing has already proved to be insecure which makes future exploits easier. Meanwhile, I’m going back to browsing by telnet hostname 80.

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) into location ~ \.php block. For example

location ~ \.php$ { # For nginx -V >= 0.7.27
  try_files $uri =404;
  fastcgi_pass localhost:8080;
  ...
}
location ~ \.php$ { # For nginx -V < 0.7.27, i.e. Debian 5
  if (-f $request_filename) {
    fastcgi_pass localhost:8080;
  }
  ...
}

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 annotations. The temptation is to start moving trivial bits of code into classes and adding all these little methods and anticipating methods that aren’t needed yet but might be someday.

Haven’t I seen that all too often on that project that I have worked on over the past 10 years?! Premature optimisation is the root of all evil. Unnecessary architecting the solution won’t be too far from that.

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 candidate is magnitudes above that of large companies.

It is so hard when you are evolving from one to two.

Went and watched Unknown with Vivian at Westfield Eastgarden today — something that I would never been able to do with a day job. 10:40am in the morning with bunch of oldies in the cinema, and almost felt like one as well.

As of the movie — acting was good and Liam Neeson was great. It was a bit boring at the beginning, where you know about it all from the movie trailers. Dr. Martin Harris went into coma for 4 days, and everything changed for him when he woke up. Identity stolen, wife stolen and being treated like a lunatic in Berlin. Then the action starts — that’s how much the trailer has told us. There is however a big twist in the plot in the final act, which tells us why everything happened the way it happened, which was a surprise. The ending is a bit weak, but strong deliverance of the story nevertheless.

Moral of the story: don’t ask the taxi driver to load your suitcases!

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