Scott Yang's Playground

Nokia vs SGI on Hacker News Comments. Interesting to see how both have ex-Microsoft boss, and both have decided to replaced in house operating system with Microsoft’s offering. And we all know what happened to SGI. Another interesting post on what Microsoft has done with the management at Nokia. Brilliant.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 released to the public as of this morning, thanks to Nick for notifying me. Much better if you are a developer that needs to support the IE platform, or want gimmicks such as web slices. Too bad the animated GIFs is still not working, which I think would probably break quite [...]

After Tech.Ed 2008 (I think) I have some new thoughts on Microsoft. It is in fact a different company than many Internet users and mass media have perceived. It is a lot more than just Windows, Internet Explorer, Office, Live/MSN, and Xbox 360. It is really about developers, developers, developers. For those who have read [...]

I am tired. It’s almost 12am (and by the time I finish this post, I am pretty sure it will be over 12am). I had a long day at Tech.Ed today and I went straight to the regular Friday night Bible Study afterwards. However as I have blogged about my last two days of Tech.Ed [...]

2nd day at Tech.Ed and it was actually not bad — I guess I am well on my way of getting brain washed. Got out of the house at around 8am this morning, and saw Cherry on the bus on the way to the city. She thought I was early (I normally arrive work 9:15-9:30am), [...]

“Enemy Territory” — because I went to a conference promoting Microsoft products and were surrounded by Microsoft-worshipping geeks today, from 8:30am to 6:45pm. Not the greatest experience, and I was totally overwhelmed at how many “stormtroppers” who actually attended Tech.Ed. It did not end up as bad as I thought would be (i.e. I did [...]

DailySearchCast: Microsoft Wants to Buy Yahoo! Some of the best commentary from Danny Sullivan the Godfather of “search” on the whole Microsoft offering $45b to buy Yahoo event.

Gizmodo: Microsoft’s Children’s Book on Windows Home Server. Don’t expect to find that on Anna and Elsie‘s bookshelf though! Basically the story is: Servers bores the adults working in the boring office. Although many servers live in data centres… But the Windows Home Server is fun! Hopefully more fun than that dreadful Windows Vista! Daddy [...]

I was wondering why the font rendering on Safari for Windows looks so different. Actually I’ve used a Mac for the last 4 years, but seeing Apple’s anti-aliasing rendering engine working on Windows does feel a little bit strange. Joel Spolsky outlined the differences between two camps: Apple generally believes that the goal of the [...]

Dan Warne of APC talked about Ubuntu Christian Edition in a sort-of mocking way. I actually took a look at this Ubuntu Christian Edition (UBE) thingy, and it is nothing more than one bash script (convert_me) that installs both GnomeSword + a few modules (an open-source Bible study software) and DansGuardian (a web content filter), [...]

Ars Technica: Microsoft’s open source software lab is inviting Firefox and Thunderbird developers for a tour of their research centre, in hope to assist them to make Firefox running smoothly on Windows Vista. The question is, will they get out alive? Kidding aside, Firefox has been running smoothly on Windows XP without their developers having [...]

I have been using Internet Explorer 7 beta 2 for the last few days just to check out whether the web application we’ve developed still work on Redmond’s latest offering. Here’s my impressions. Feel free to comment. Interface looks sleek. Nice shades. No more menu bar (unless you want to be called a classic). Now [...]

Microsoft has finally released security patch to a vulnerability in reading Windows Meta File (WMF). Hurry up! Run, download and apply this patch (if you haven’t got yourself infected). Unless you are running Mac or Linux of course :)

Via digg.com, Visual Studio Express is now free download for one year from MSDN website, and from the FAQ, you can apparently use it commericially and for production sites. And with its “free for one year” deal, it just means that Microsoft might start charging those downloads after Nov 2006, but what has been downloaded [...]

Windows Live “beta” — absolutely the most talked about topic on Internet over the last two days. Heavy “Ajax” that has been all over the web these days which I have started to hate. Doesn’t work on Firefox yet, and it constantly crashed my Internet Explorer. Still, sounds like Microsoft has finally decided to ditch [...]