Scott Yang's Playground

I wrote about how Commonwealth Games affected daylight saving in Australian states, and its implications to software developers. It seems that the easiest way is not to patch it, but announce that daylight saving will end early on your site instead, and state that the issue will be automatically fixed in one week. I wish [...]

Daylight saving changes usually occur on the last Sunday of March and the last Sunday of October for the eastern states of Australia (Queensland excepted). This year is an exception. Got an email at work yesterday asking us to reboot our Windows boxes to have this patch applied. Apparently because of the upcoming Commonwealth Games [...]

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” [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

SMH: Kerry Packer, media magnate and Australia’s richest man, has died at home, age 68. That’s pretty young for a “peaceful death”, don’t you think? But then, he was announced dead for 6 minutes back in 1990, and has since suffered bad health. After all, whoever dies with the most toys, is still a dead [...]

Looking at what has happened to Sydney over the last couple of days — the violence, the riots, the racial conflicts, the abusement over women and children — it has truly been sickening. It is not the kind of day where you’ll feel proud to be an Aussie. And this “mateship” where every true blue [...]

An interesting local news from last week — Randwick Mayor Ted Seng of Liberal drives a V8 Holden whereas other Green mayors are moving to push-bikes. So the question is, what sort of car should be provided to city council mayors in Sydney? A $350 Giant? A $40,000 Toyota Prius that runs on hybrid of [...]

Well, I won’t talk about Peter Jensen, Kim Beazley and John Howard. I am sure Jensen is criticising the possibility that workers might loose their bargaining rights, and are forced to work overtime/weekend, where they should be at home with their family. I am sure Howard did not bring out WorkChoices just to piss the [...]

Sydney Morning Herald reports, study finds HSC pressure is cracking our kids. It says: The study of 320 students in this year’s HSC class uncovered deep despair, with many describing the exams as the “be-all and end-all” moment in their lives. Two amongst the 320 were quoted by SMH. “If I do poorly in the [...]

Not really sure what’s going on out there, but I guess politicians are just there doing what they are best at. At the end, does Coalition benefit from it? Maybe. What about Labor? Maybe not. Australians? I don’t think so. If we want to see fights, we vote them (off) the reality shows. Not into [...]

Two weeks ago the big “A” asked whether I am interested in working for them in that far far away land in Seattle. Too much to travel so I reclined. However, if anyone in Sydney who is interested in software engineering job with a big online retailer, and do not mind relocating to the States [...]

Via Neil: Hillsong coughs up, Sydney Morning Herald reported Hillsong’s Houstons’ 1 million dollar plus “business”, Leadership Ministries Inc. Just by looking at the article on how each entities related to each other, it sounds like accountants and lawyers were working hard on structure finance there. More like a “business” than “ministry” to me… I [...]

Just noticed the vast similarity between Sydney (biggest city in Australia) and phpBB (open source forum software). phpBB Sydney Most popular open source forum software. Searching for “Powered by phpBB” on Google returns 4,770,000 results today. Most crowded city in Australia. Population is around 4 million people and growing. Had a humble beginning, when PHP [...]

60 years ago, 6th of August 1945. A B-29 Superfortress carrying the Little Boy, a 4 ton atomic bomb containing 60kg of Uranium 235, bombed the city of Hiroshima, Japan. 80,000 civilians killed outright. Many many more continue to suffer ’til this day. It was a hot discussion topic over the last couple of days [...]