Scott Yang's Playground

Have been quite stressful last couple of days — hard disk of the home server is dying, mails were dropped and files gone missing. Went out to buy a new hard disk yesterday and gotta do the upgrade tonight. But now this DreamHost DNS outage is just making my day worse. (Note: their website is [...]

Sorry that I have not been blogging here for weeks — very busy at work which translates very little time coding for my own. I wish I can just write about all the WTF I’ve enountered at work over the past weeks, trying to make a multi-threaded CORBA-interfaced Python app server scalable (note “multi-thread”, “Python” [...]

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 [...]

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.

I have been running some of my sites on DreamHost or 2 months. I initially joined the Crazy Domain Insane hosting plan, which provides me more-than-enough storage space and bandwidth, but does not allow me to customise my DNS entries — this is for higher priced plans. However when I logged into my DreamHost control [...]

FuCoder.com is now hosted on DreamHost. Using the cheapest hosting plan, but it still provides me far more than I need. 4.8Gb space and 120Gb bandwidth a month. Shell on Debian-based Linux server. Cron job. Etc. It is actually the first time I signed up to a hosting account — most my other sites are [...]

Via Downloadsquad. Backpack from 37signals, who also gave us Basecamp and Ta-da List, claimed to be the on-line information manager for both individuals or small business. The mechanics is actually quite simple — I was in fact expecting a full-blown PIM suite when I heard the phrase “get organized“, but it gives me not much [...]

Social bookmarking service provider del.icio.us now supports “for:username” tag to send the links to another user. It would be useful to push links to those who have no idea how to subscribe to an RSS feed, like your average grannies and church pastor (maybe Longhorn and IE7 can fix this?). This has enhanced del.icio.us, which [...]

As discussed on Slashdot, is another PHP library vulnerability that affects PEAR’s XML-RPC module. James at GulfTech has demonstrated this vulnerability with an exploit. It turns out the PHP XML-RPC library uses eval() without checking, which allows arbitary PHP code to be executed if the XML-RPC message is cleverly crafted.

ZDNet: Two senior system administers at Swiftel/People Telecom have been sued for alleged music piracy. Piracy is wrong – you are stealing money from the mega-supa rich in the music industry, and all stealing is wrong. However, I do not see how it is justified holding two ISP staffs accountable, when they was not involved [...]

Lightover.com has predicted the destruction of professional journalism by EPIC – Evolving Personalized Information Contruct by GoogleZon in the year of 2014. Yeah. We got your message – personal bloggers are evil, who will make all the traditional media companies go out of business. Interesting Flash video nevertheless.

Yet another Google product in beta – Personalise your Google home page, which let you includes items like your Gmail inbox, Slashdot articles, BBC news and weather reports. Still very US centric, and the Australian version kept on giving me re-direction error (thus beta I guess). Who says Google is not a portal?

Yahoo! has released “My Web” as Beta, which integrates a nice social bookmark interface. For more information see the feature list. Maybe it’ll replace my del.icio.us and BlogMarks account.

2 security alerts concerning Mozilla Firefox, one can extract cross-site cookies and another one escalate to system priviledge via Mozilla’s extension architecture. As a browser reaches its critical mass, security holes and exploits will popup from no where like there is no tomorrow. That’s why I use telnet or netcat to browse the Internet these [...]

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.