Google has just launched their web accelerator product, which installed locally on your desktop, opens port localhost:9100 to listen to proxy requests, modify your web browser’s configuration to use a Proxy Auto-Config file downloaded from there, and then start optionally serving web pages from Google’s gigantic cache farm.
I have moved this project to my new programming/Internet blog — ESV Popup in Javascript.
ESV Popup is a Javascript you can use on your website that creates a small popup frame to display Bible verses from the English Standard Version Bible, using Javascript Syndication provided by the nice guys from Good News Publisher/Crossway Bibles.
List of bloggers from University Chinese Church on Xanga, 26 from the last count. Oh well, ESF on Friendster, Pelita on World of Warcraft (?), and now our bros and sis from UCC are all blogging away on Xanga…
Engadget has done a 2 part interview (part 1, part 2) with the chairman and chief architect of Microsoft, Mr. Bill Gates. Very interesting read on what Microsoft is planning for your living room, especially on the up-coming Xbox 360.
I have received a promotional email today (read “opt-in spams”) on one of the latest mobile phone reseller in Australia, I nearly jumped for joy. Revolution Telecom, who claims to have Australia’s cheapest pre-paid mobile SIM, is reselling Vodafone’s network, and has the following offer:
ESV/Good News publisher has just announced an update to their online audio version on their blogsite, and it allows you to listen to segments of a chapter. Audio link is now also part of their search results. Recent version of RealPlayer is required however, as somehow RTSP does not work with “Real Alternative”.
feed2html.py is an open source/free source command line tool that takes a RSS/RDF/Atom news feed, and converts it into HTML documents (or other text documents using templates). It is developed in Python (2.3+ required), and it requires the universal feed parser to be installed separately. It can take input from an URL, a local file or from standard input, and can write the output to a local file or standard output. It has a built in template engine to allow customisation of the resulting HTML. feed2html.py can also be invoked from the web server as a CGI application.
feed2html.py should run whereever Python does. It is released as a free software using Python Software Foundation License.
ESV English-Greek Reverse Interlinear New Testament, published by the Good News & Crossway, will be released this October, that features ESV English text with Greek underneth. It would be useful for someone who does not read Greek (i.e. me) to pick up the links. A bit pricy though, pre-selling at USD$49.95.
OpenLaszlo 3.0 is now officially released. Lots of new features here, most notably the LPS-less deployment. It would be a nice welcome, as I don’t see how one should limit your backend platform when choosing a front-end environment. Laszlo has been one of many things that I would love to play with. Time. Oh need more time…
Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications. Jesse James Garrett defines what Ajax (Asynchronised Javascript and XML) is, and how its combination with DHTML and DOM can change the way web application is written. Seems to be hottest thing since slice bread at the moment, except we’ve been using this “Ajax” model at work since mid-2002…
Updated 2 May 2005: It is SOLD, for a mere $130 Australian dollar. Not as much as I like, but well, everyone finds a bargain on eBays…
It is probably going to be my very last entry on Psion. Not that I have written much in the past. As of Psion, nothing has really happened on the hardware side over the past years, even though Symbian is now dominating the mobile phone operating system market. Moreover, I am selling my beloved Psion Series 5mx on eBay. This little beauty has been sitting inside my drawer unattended for the last 12 months, and I don’t think I will be using it anymore, so I thought I might as well sell it.
Today I just realised that WordPress does not actually delete the incoming comment/trackback, but instead obliviously inserts them into the database with “approved” field marked as “spam”. Yes – every single comment, that has been categorised as spam, is still stored inside my WordPress database, even though I have never received any notification, nor is there a way to revert them back to legitimate comments. And I am backing all of them up when I run the mysqldump in cron jobs everyday!! Aargh!
And looking at the comments stored, my signal-noise ratio is current at 1:7.2. That’s right, by the time you typed up a comment to reply to this meaningless blog entry, 7.2 comment spams are blocked by the WordPress comment blacklist, which by default looks at
The combination works pretty good so far, as I rarely receive comment spams. FOCUSer.net has a SNR of 1:14.9, but it still suffered badly as I have to manually update its blacklist everyday to catch the latest spam words. I guess MT is just more heavily attacked.
English Standard Version Bible is having its own blog site. Apparently they are powered by WordPress as well. And now they are giving their Bible away for those who link to them int their blogroll.
New toy at work! Dell E1905FP UltraSharpTM 19 inch LCD monitor right in front of my desk, and this thing is massive. Oh well, some developers got two for dual display, and that is spelt MASSIVE. I am hooking it up to my Dell Latitude D600, and its 14″ screen is small, dim, lack of contrast, and a little bit too sharp for my eyes. After working with our new E1905FP for a few hours in the afternoon (mostly coding inside Vim under SSH sessions), here is my initial impression:
I am still getting used to looking at two monitors with very different characteristics at the same time…
Slashdot reports Adobe buys Macromedia for USB$3.4 billion. Do I smell the monopoly for the graphics productive software? And we will see further domination of Flash for the interactive websites. I wonder what will Microsoft and the Open Source world will react to it.
Playground is the personal weblog of Scott Yang, a Chinese-Australian Christian who works as a software developer in Sydney Australia.