Scott Yang's Playground

Steven and Shirley dropped me back home at around 5:15pm this afternoon, from the annual FOCUS Long Termers’ weekend away at the Rafferty Resort. Long Term Leaders at FOCUS are those who have finished their degree but have continued to stay in FOCUS for the sake of overseas student ministry, and this weekend away has somehow reaffirmed us what FOCUS is really about. Don’t let the term “long term leaders” fool you, this weekend away was more of a holiday than your typical Christian retreat. Though Rev. Ng doesn’t want other people to know about this so I won’t mention it again :)

Here are some of the highlights/reflections in this year’s weekend away. For me at least. Sorry about the point form. Not arranged in any particular order…

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Woke up this morning, and found WordPress, the software that powers this blog, released a bug fix version 2.0.1. So I logged onto my DreamHost account via SSH, and

1. $ wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
2. $ tar zxvf latest.tar.gz
3. $ cd wordpress/
4. $ tar cf - . | (cd ~/scott.yang.id.au; tar xvf -)
5. $ wget -O - http://scott.yang.id.au/wp-admin/upgrade.php?step=1 > /dev/null

Done! Software upgraded, and it is happy serving web pages again. Repeat step 4 and 5 for all my other WordPress running sites. Way too easy. It is what I call an effortless upgrade..

I wondered when will other agile web development framework (RoR, Django, etc) catch up.

Happy Chinese New Year! 新年快樂!!

Again, it doesn’t feel like Chinese new year here in Sydney. Very quite tonight, though I can hear the infrequent fireworks outside. Been to Amanda’s place with the rest of the Mandarin Bible Fellowship this afternoon. There were food (boil dumpling tonight) and games (acting out pictionary). But I still feel something lacking…

Maybe it is just this “age” thing.

Anyway. Welcome to the year of the dog.

Btw, Google AdSense has a dog year themed ads. Ain’t they cute! I’ve turned mine on, and hopefully they will be here shortly.

One of Guido‘s earliest assignment at Google is to write a mid-size web applications for internal use, and he is sharing his opinions on his research on Python web frameworks. At the end he hasn’t found anything that is satisfactory, even though the requirement is straight forward.

By browsing through the comments, despite Python’s “one way” philosophy, you’ll see how diversify Python’s web framework is. It is like going to an expo, where everyone jumps on and says this and that is what he used — and they all different! Some got mentioned multiple times (like Django, TurboGears, web.py, etc), but there are many others that I have never heard of. Do we really need that many choice?

I’ve been playing with Django for one project, but as Guido has stated, the amount of magic scales me. Early waiting for the magic removal branch to merge so I can get back to it again. Meanwhile I am actually using web.py for another project (though I’ve criticised it), which involves minimal session management, minimal templating, and mainly web services using XML and JSON), pulled from static XUL application. I guess it’s nature of quickly get up and get going really suits it.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep on sampling frameworks for up coming projects. Pylons and trying out TurboGears again.

TW: Aaron Wall the “seobook” basically claimed that AdSense referral sux because there exists too many penalties for those “slow earners”. He is talking about the new $100 in 90 days recently discovered by JenSense. Personally I have never made anything through the AdSense referral (and probably never will), however I can understand why Google does that. They are not charities — the Big G, as a public company, shouldn’t hand out $100 for every Joe Sixpack you have introduced who only has a 2 page site on GeoCities. They have introduced their referral program, hoping that it might bring in more big traffic publishers, i.e. more money to them.

At the same time, a new site that makes $2 per day (which won’t make Google referral payout requirement) might be brining $2,000 a day in 12 months time, keeping both the publisher and Google’s shareholders happy. Who knows. Except the original referrer who missed out on the reward.

By the way, I’ve found ThreadWatch.org getting rather negative about Google after change of ownership. Maybe it is just an art of link-baiting?!

SMH: Google another brick in China’s great firewall. Google wants to setup a mainland based search engine to combat compeition, but they need to abide China’s censorship rules, by blocking “unhealthy” contents from its search result. While it is not bad to have a search engine without the pr0n, they have immediately being labeled “evil” by the free speech advocates, and some have threatened to remove AdSense from their websites.

However, from the SMH article both Yahoo and MSN have been censoring content in China before Google has joined the party, but the cruel world of Internet made little fuzz about it. What can we conclude?

• People will attack you because of your “do no evil” motto, even though you are just doing what everyone else is doing.
• Market share > Motto. Google, as an international multi-billion-dollar company, will bend for a market that they cannot ignore. The question is just when, which has just been answered.
• It is a good PR to claim that “Faster Search Engine Access” == “Greater Good” at the expense of free speech of millions of Chinese. Censorship a necessary evil?
• Zealous advocates removing their AdSense ads from their BlogSpot sites will not make a dent. Don’t cry when Google bans your account.
• Those in China who are interested in the 3 T’s (Tibet, Taiwan and Tiananmen) and 2 C’s (Cult and Criticism) can still to get them through anonymous proxy, smaller blog/news sites and search engines. China’s great firewall is big, but not fool proof.

Update: Saw this on Jeremy Z’s linkblog. Google China preview. Very very funny.

Ross Gittins of SMH argued that “it is neither possible nor desirable for proportion of university applicants being accepted to even remotely approach 100 per cent”. Yes — university is not (and shouldn’t be) for everyone, but these days it just feels “weird” if you don’t have a university degree (especially amongst us Asians). A bachelor degree is now just an extension of high school — it worth nothing in a few years time, and the “keen ones” will seek even higher education. No wonder tertiary education has been such a successful “business” in Australia, especially to those with the mentality that life is not complete without a uni degree.

No. It is not a be all and end all. I found that I have learnt very little in my 4 year engineering degree (actually I am pretty sure I’ve learnt heaps except I’ve given all back). Maybe I won’t mention that to at church, when all the new students swamp in next month :)

And Gittins raised this question at the end of his column: “Why so many kids would prefer to be poorly paid GPs or suburban solicitors rather than high-charging, self-employed tradespeople is beyond me”. Why? Exactly the same question I would like to ask to many.

Darren Rowse the “ProBlogger” raised a question — liquid or static blog layouts? I kinda agree with Chris’ comment here that liquid layout is more difficult to master than fixed width (give me “flex” attribute in XUL!!), however I do not think it is webmasters are necessarily lazy if fixed width design is implemented. In fact, many good “pixel perfect” design has to rely on fixed width layout, where placing your element at that precious position is crucial. They usually came from desktop publishing background, when your A4 is always 210mm by 297mm.

However, web browsers are a bit different. Computer monitors have different sizes, and users don’t always maximize their browser to fit the whole screen (especially non-Windows users).

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During link-hooping today, I spotted a post on “Free Money Finance” (don’t ask me how I got there) — Biblical Investing. Not sure whether the site is operated by Christians (probably is, as it is American </sacarsm>), but it did spell out the principle:

The first topic that needs to be considered is whether investing is or is not scriptural. As in many cases, the answer depends on the situation. Anyone investing because of greed (Luke 12:15), to get rich quick (Proverbs 23:4-5), or to massage his ego (Proverbs 29:23) is not participating in biblically-based investing. On the other hand, those who are acting as good stewards as in Luke 19:12-27 or those who are saving for future needs such as college or retirement (Proverbs 6:6-8) are participating in biblical investing. In the end, it all depends on the attitude, which is ultimately determined by God. Remember, “All a man’s ways seem innocent to him, but motives are weighed by the Lord.” (Proverbs 16:2).

Not sure why it has omitted the most obvious reference:

Matthew 6:24 (ESV)
No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.

Luke 19 seems to have been used outside its context, where Jesus was about to enter Jerusalem, and told this parable to address their disciples’ misunderstanding on the coming of the Kingdom of God (Luke 19:11). Being a good steward in Luke 19 is not about investing money wisely and “grow your net worth” in this age.

On the other hand, Proverb is full of messages encouraging its audiences to be prudent, not to be lazy, and other principles of “good living”. Cash Value of Matthias Media has a nice chapter on Proverb and prudence. Here’s an extract:

All the same, lest we think that Provers is endorsing some kind of capitalist work ethic, we should also note the ‘take it or leave it’ attitude Proverbs displays towards wealth… Proverbs is also quick to point out that wealth has its limitations and disadvantages.

Especially with Agur’s words,

Proverbs 30:7-9 (ESV)
Two things I ask of you; deny them not to me before I die:
Remove far from me falsehood and lying; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you and say, “Who is the LORD?” or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God.

Joshua will give 3 sermons on Proverbs later next month. Looking forward to them.

With long articles, I love to have a Table of Contents nearly the beginning of the page, so that I can clearly see how an article/post is structured (if HTML heading elements are appropriately used), and I can also quickly jump to specific section of the document.

Previously with a few of my coding pages, I have to manually construct a table of contents, and ensure it stays synchronised with the actual content. Laziness in me calls for a plugin to be written to simplify the process, thus Table of Contents Generator WordPress plugin is created on a Saturday afternoon.

It basically scans through HTML headings in your post, constructs a Table of Contents, and replace every instance of <!--TOC--> with the actual TOC. It saves me a lot of time, and it is now easy to show how your page is structured!

Check the plugin page for more details.