Scott Yang's Playground

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.

Weeding has not been my most favourite gardening work, although in most cases it is necessary. Sometimes it is easy — just pull them off the ground and throw into the bin. Sometimes it ain’t that easy, especially those big wooden weeds which everyone else mistaken them as trees.

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Sending Vivian and Anna to airport this morning, catching Qantas flying to Hong Kong for 3 weeks. Meanwhile, it is just going to be I, me and myself at home.

Miss them already.

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More than 18 months after Gmail is introduced, they have finally done it!

I selected quite a few mails from mailing list which I don’t have time to read, and search for “Move to Trash” option in the drop down menu. Then I spotted the Delete button. Wow. I have to check that it wasn’t a GreaseMonkey userscript doing the trick — it is really a genuine Gmail delete button! I thought they’ll never do it but maybe they do listen to their users this time.

Then I found it in their new features section:

When you’re positive you won’t need a message, use the Delete button to send it to Trash. Deleted messages and conversations are permanently removed from your Gmail account 30 days after you send them to Trash. Deleting unimportant mail is a great way to free up some of your storage, but with more than two gigabytes, you could even keep those messages, too! So, if it’s possible that you’ll need a message or conversation in the future, we recommend using the Archive feature.

30-day permanent deletion doesn’t seem to work for me — I always have to manually dump my trashcan. Anyone has the same issue? Well, not that I need the space, but I am really a tidy person, you see…

Update: As reported on Google’s official blog: Our shipment of delete buttons finally came in.

Glen suggested that I should port the Scripturizer for Javascript to GreaseMonkey, and I finally managed to give it a go this weekend.

It is trivial to get the script working. In fact I got to trim the bulk that provides Internet Explorer compatibility. The only tricky thing is variable scoping for a running GreaseMonkey user script.

It is working well for now. You can download the user script from the GreaseMonkey section. It is not as configurable a the regular Scripturizer for JS, i.e. you cannot re-configure the engine by changing variables/parameters at runtime. However, it saves you a click to “scripturize” the HTML document, which currently can be done using the bookmarklet.

Btw, Glen and Lawrence have teamed together to further the development of Scripturizer for WordPress. Code looks a bit massive on the SVN trunk, but has some good ideas, which I am hoping to include in Scripturizer for Javascript as well. Good works!

Imagine this.

Like a Buffet Restaurant?!

You have booked yourself and a couple of friends to this nice seafood buffet restaurant downtown. It has everything — nice food (and lots of them), good experience, live music, and the best of all — it is cheap. It costs you only five bucks to enter, and you can eat as much you want. Moreover they will actually half your bill if you bring your friends along. What a bargain.

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Stupid thing I did this week:

In the process of moving Bargain Blog back to my own home server, I somehow rsync’ed my entire design/test site, including the robots.txt, which contains deadly commands to forbid all bots/spiders!

No wonder for the last few days my AdSense ads on that site are totally irrelevant, and CTR plumbs all the way below 1% — Google wants to help but can’t! Now I have fixed the file, and please come back media partner bots!

Btw, I use Unison to synchronise content between my design sites and actual sites. Not as sophisticated as Glenn’s Subversion solution as I don’t really care about version control, but it does a much better job than rsync because it has (1) two-way synchronisation (2) comprehensive configuration options, which should have easily solve my stupidity.

SMH: For the cost of putting a baby born in 2006 through private schooling, parents could pay off a mortgage on a two-bedroom suburban Sydney flat. The estimate shows that the cost of an elite school education for a baby born this year will approach $300k. (Btw, congratulation to the Phoons for their baby girl born in 2006!)

Adds 3 year university degree it would be another $140k, bringing the whole education cost to around $430k. That’s a lot of money.

However, note that:

• Not everyone is going to elite school. Alright, not everyone can afford, but at the same time not everyone wants their kids to be educated there. After all, “elite” school cannot be 1337 if everyone goes there.
• Research is done by Australian Scholarships Group, an education investment fund, who is a financial planning organisation. With motto like “Planning ahead helps cover the costs of education”, I am sure they will give unbiased opinion.</sacarsm>

It still does not deny the fact that education won’t be expensive. Actually, education will continue to be expensive in this country if institutions are run by greedy corporate heads that the only sound they want to hear is “chin-chin”!

Gotta save up…

Google has announced Google Earth for Macintosh. Google Earth has to be one of the most interesting desktop application (read “time wasting”). Unfortunately it requires Mac OS X 10.4 (I only have Panther). Check my “geo.position” in this blog to see where I live!

Guido van Rossum started his work at Google, and is able to commit 50% of his time working on Python. That is great! Hopefully we’ll see a beta of Python 2.5 soon with PEP 342 Coroutine via Enhanced Generators implemented. Also, Google is mostly C++, Java and Python — so is the place I work, except “open source” is treated more like a plague by our clients…

I am talking about hosting and my Bargain Blog. I moved the site to DreamHost more than 2 months ago, but have decided to move it back to my poor old home server yesterday morning.

Problems? There are two. (1) Google (2) DreamHost.

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There are a few annual events that are really influential in the tech world. MacWorld is one of them. Every year Steve Job’s Reality Distortion Field rocks Mac geeks, and this year is no exception. Here is the coverage. Software wise there are Mac OS X 10.4.4, iLife and iWork ’06. They bring in new features that make lives of every Mac zealots easier, but most importantly, they also contain the universal binaries to run on Mac’s latest platforms. So what new products from Apple have been announced?

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Google Fanboy Essentials — actually Google calls it the Google Pack, announced on their official blogsite and press release.

So we created the Google Pack — a one-stop software package that helps you discover, install, and maintain a wide range of essential PC programs. It’s yours today – and it’s something we hope you find to be painless, easy, and even fun (if computer setup can ever be called that). And it’s free.

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Bought a webcam from eBay for $23 — yes one of those $0.01 win + $22.99 posted from China. Very average cam at this price point — 350k pixel CCD that does 640×480 at 15fps or 320×240 at 30fps. Powered by USB with a built in mic, it also sports 6 LED that emits weak blue’ish light when its top senser detects darkness.

It installs as “Vimicro USB PC Camera” (which I guess is the processor inside). Quality is pretty lousy. Serious lag, and image is noisy at low light. I guess that’s what I should expect at that price point anyway.

I am going to use it to use the Skype video to talk to Vivian and Anna when they are away in Hong Kong for 3 weeks over Chinese New Year, as well as talking to my parents in Taiwan.

By the way, Skype 2.0 final was also released today. It is still the same VoIP over its P2P network, but this time it adds video phone support, so that you are not only going to get free phone calls, you are also able to see the person you are talking to. I guess video phone has already been popularised by other IM networks like MSN, but Skype has its “firewall penetration” advantage — I can even use it at work with nothing but port 80/443 through ISA.

My Skype ID is on my contact page. Don’t expect me to have video up all the time though :)

What other use is a cheap webcam?

UPDATE: Due to popular demand, the driver for my webcam is here: vimicro-pc-camera-301x.zip (ZIP, 1,912kb)