Scott Yang's Playground

2 days after the election and we still cannot sure who will be Australia’s next Prime Minister. Most exciting election in Australia over the last 50 years? More like most disastrous to me. Although I did vote for that Mid-Night Oil guy (who else is worthy in Kingsford-Smith?) I gotta say that I am really [...]

Need to analyse a list of top sites in Australia, and the following Python scripts helped me to get the site name + domain name off from Alexa with minimum effort: #!/usr/bin/env python import re, urllib r = r’<a href=”/siteinfo/(.*?)” ><strong>(.*?)</strong>’; for i in range(25): u = ‘http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries;%d/AU’ % i for x, m in enumerate(re.findall(r, [...]

Watching the live stream from Kevin Rudd’s victory party in Brisbane right now. Looks like the election is now finally over — no more election campaign ads everywhere! Oh, Australia also has a new Mandarin-speaking, me-too echoing Prime Minister. Yeah. A new era. I went to vote this morning (in Kingsford-Smith). It was an easy [...]

There is an advantage and a disadvantage living on the southern side of Gardeners Road. I live in Daceyville, where most of my neighbours are of the state housing commission. As I have suspected that it is the reason — I actually do not get many unsolicited commercial mails, i.e. spam. Compare to the Kingsford [...]

Do we need another tax cut? According to the latest promise from the Coalition, it seems to be a good thing for all Australians. No doubt that it is more likely the Coalitions need it more than the Australian tax payers, as November 24 the election day draws closer, but looking at the benefits — [...]

Peter Beattie: “Brisbane is the place to be, Sydney knows that. We won the State of Origin and I think that Brisbane is the capital”. If State of Origin is the judging criteria for being the capital of Australia, then we’ll probably looking at changing capitals every year or two. Or at least Melbourne and [...]

Official Google Australia blog, and it is also their very first country-specific blog as well. It was just started 2 days ago so not much content yet, but hopefully we will see more action there. It does make me wonder, whether country-specific blog is going to be a trend in Google, or is there something [...]

Blogpond: Top 100 Australian Blogs Index, listing all the top ranking Australian blogs using this algorithm, which is basically: R = (3 x A + X + T) / 5 R: Overall rankA: Alexa Australia rankX: Alexa rankT: Technorati rank Sounds fair to me, because this very blog is ranked number 17 on that list! [...]

SMH: Australia Trials Low-Cost Laptop. Such a misleading title from the Heralds! The article talked about someone liaising with Australian local governments for trials of OLPC, but (1) no response from the actual government body, and (2) no response from the actual OLPC group/distributor. I thought OLPC was initially developed for 3rd world and developing [...]

Last year was Peter Jensen, this year RBA’s ex-boss Ian Macfarlane is on ABC Radio’s Boyer Lectures, on the topic of Searching for Stability. Very interesting talks, looking at Australia economy from after WW II to the recent years. A bit heavy for my engineer’s head, but it does give me some new perspective on [...]

Via Slashdot, apparently you are infringing copyright law and could be fined if you get caught singing “Happy Birthday to You” in public in Australia. The phrase has not only been trademarked, the 4-lines of lyrics has also been copyrighted by the Warner Chappell Music, and they won’t expire until 2030. Aargh!! I’ve just realised [...]

Just bought a programming related book on-line. It was released in Q2 2006 so I did not consider the second hand book market. I went straight to the oracle asking where can I find it in on-line bookshops in Australia. Only a handful of shops returned, and LSL Australia is around $10 cheaper than the [...]

Glenn Slaven: Australia and New Zealand Get Geocoding. You can now take Australian or New Zealand street address, feed it into Google Maps geocoder, and it gives you back latitude and longitude for you to plot on the map. Domain, the FF real estate website, has got this in action so you can easily see [...]

I wrote this quite a while ago on Whirlpool forum over a debate on Australian verses overseas (usually US-based) web hosting. Thread has since been closed (not my fault :) but I think I will repost my thoughts here, looking at what is the most suitable web hosting solution for Aussies.

According to this thread on the Whirlpool Forums, you can get 45Mbps down stream and 3Mbps up stream ADSL with no traffic quota and cheap VoIP phone for around ¥4,138 per month, which is just a bit more than AUD$50 today. At the same time, I am paying AUD$55 per month for Swiftel‘s 512kbps/128kbps plan [...]