Scott Yang's Playground

Reddit is about one of few tech-related social news sites that I read regularly (especially programming.reddit.com). The others are Slashdot and Hacker News. The big news is — they have gone Open Source! Since reddit’s beginning, we have stood on the shoulders of giants in the open source world. Every library, tool and platform we [...]

shyam: Goodbye Litespeed, hello Nginx, says WordPress.com. Apparently the reason to ditch LiteSpeed for Nginx is, according to Matt M (but no quotes), that WordPress wants to run open source for their full stack. LiteSpeed is a nice (but expensive) async-IO based web server that provides full Apache compatibility (which is not that useful if [...]

As Matt Mullenweg has pointed out in his blog post, Pligg is selling out, Vanilla is adding spammy links and guess which other open source program will be sponsored by other shady SEO’s — not for the sake of advancing free software ideology, but that they can resell massive amount of link-love for commercial gains. [...]

Mark Pilgrim talked about his previous on patents at IBM, and felt ashamed to be in this patent-filing business. Finally, I reached the now-or-never moment with my manager. I considered quitting anyway. I considered my mortgage payment. I took stock of my personal finances. My mortgage payment won out. I sat down and did what [...]

Last week, Mark from Weblog Tool Collection posted his stand on sponsored themes, and asked all sponsored themes to disclose their sponsorship. A few days later Matthew Mullenweg also outlined the social and ethical issues with sponsored themes, and vote for removing sponsored themes from WordPress.org. These are the WordPress themes developed by web designers, [...]

Google has just released its latest project, Google project hosting — a “SourceForge-like” hosting services for open source projects. So far it has only an issue tracker and Subversion repository so I don’t see how it “competes” with SourceForege feature-wise. At least it has the scalability and reliability of Google’s infrastructure. It also has the [...]

Just saw this entry on Mark Pilgrim’s blog, which mainly talked about accessibility. But there’s a paragraph or two in the middle that talks about plush toys. My two-year-old can say “Firefox”. I point at the plush toy and say, “What’s this?” and he says “Firefox!” and clutches it with both hands and pulls it [...]

Last night I have posted my very first flash video on the web — and it was Anna sitting there watching, her own video for 2 minutes (which probably would only interest the parents and grand-parents). Anna’s video aside, I was also having fun figuring out getting that video online. There are many ways putting [...]

code.sixapart.com — home of 6A’s open source projects, from the maker of Movable Type and TypeKey. Funny that except for code snippets of Movable Type plugins, most other open source projects listed there are probably considered as part of acquition of LiveJournal.

Via /., Firefox 1.5 has been semi-officially released. I haven’t been able to find them on Australian mirrors early this morning, but you should be able to pick them up in the US mirrors. Actually, it is exactly the same as RC3 released over a week ago, so there is no need to upgrade if [...]

OpenOffice.org 2.0 has been released, for Windows, Linux and Solaris. Many bugs I have submitted are still pending (mostly OD<->MS Office related), but still, well done guys! Download them at the nearest mirror.

Microsoft might support OpenDocument if there is enough customer demand. OpenDocument is an OASIS standard, submitted to ISO, and is the standard file format for the up-coming OpenOffice.org 2. Way to go, Microsoft, and please show us how you will embrace the standard! However, if native PDF support in Office 12 can be regarded as [...]

Drupal, an open source PHP-based content management system, has its web site gone down last week, due to shared server getting hacked. It asked the community for $3,000 donation so they can buy a dedicate server, but subsequently has raised $10,000! Moreover, Sun Microsystem has donated a dual-Opteron Sun Fire. Plus the three Dell Linux [...]

OpenSolaris – SUN Microsystems’ open source un*x operating system. We have one running at work for a few weeks, but I’ve never bothered logging onto it. Probably that Slowaris-phobia I’ve got from my Uni and GET days. And this blog entry gives me a good laugh.

CTorrent is fast and light weight un*x command line BitTorrent client, which is why it is the only BitTorrent client (other than the Bram Cohen’s reference Python implementation) I would use. It is just so much easier to ssh into your Linux server, start the download inside a screen, detach it, and 10 hours later [...]