Scott Yang's Playground

While I do not agree that changing the domain name would eliminate irresponsible blogging issue (more to that later), earlier this morning I still managed to acquired a new .net domain from GoDaddy for 2 years at USD$8.95 per year. I’m pretty happy about this purchase. Hopefully I would not catch the credit card swiping [...]

One problem of writing publicly on a blogsite is that you sometimes get unexpected visitors browsing your site. Those you wondered, “huh? How do they get here?” That’s the shocking feeling I got after I discovered two instances of unexpected guests. One landed on my website (my on-line resume actually) by searching the name of [...]

The server that hosts this website and around 20 other sites had a fault hard disk, which caused a kernel panic last Wednesday. It came back on-line on Sunday, with a new 120Gb disk, a new Gentoo rebuild, upgraded to a fast Pentium III 450Mhz box, and has been running happily so far. Here is [...]

Over a month ago, I started the random quickies section of my blogsite to store interesting links that I have found on the Internet. A “linkblog” as most bloggers would have called it. It was implemented as a separate blog on my old Movable Type powered site, but since my move to WordPress, I have [...]

Migrating from Movable Type proves to be pretty much straight forward, as WordPress has already had a well written and documented Movable Type importer, that imports everything including all post entries, comments and trackbacks. However, getting the old permalink to forward to my new WordPress powered link might not be that trivial. One issue is [...]

As of this morning, “Scott Yang’s Playground” has yet again changed its software that powers the site. Last time, which was over 18 months ago, it was a conversion from PhpWiki to Movable Type. Since the Six Apart changed the license terms with Movable Type 3, I have been thinking of jumping ships – to [...]

If you don’t see me blogging over the next few days, I would be busy migrating this site over to WordPress 1.2, which was recently released a few days ago. I have been playing with it yesterday. I have been hacking some Perl and PHP to get Movable Type import to work property, so I [...]

The computer that serves you this page is dying. Not yet, but bits and pieces are falling apart. My vintage CD burner has been generating more frisbee than ever. It started last week, and has so far produced half a dozen useless coasters. Using cdrecord, it would report that CD writing has achieved nirvana speed [...]

I have started the Friday Random Quickies on this weblog nearly one year ago, but has been getting slack over the past few weeks. At the end I am just too lazy to tidy up one big long post to flush out all the junk I’ve collected through out the week. And it pretty much [...]

I’ve changed the style of this blogsite, mainly on the CSS level. Layout pretty much stayed the same, but I might gradually roll out some planned changes over the next few weeks or so. It is now having cleaner lines, and feels more consistent on all the web browsers that I use (that is, IE [...]

Got my “bad mail” statistics page implemented to track down spams and viruses. A Python script is triggered when Clam AV quarantines an incoming virus, or when Spam Assassin detects an incoming spam mail. It inserts information gathered into a local MySQL table, where a web page would then pull the info out using PHP. [...]

While browsing Bloglines, I discovered that it is actually possible to see the list of people that have subscribed to your blogsite. Well, at least those who opt to share their subscription lists. Moreover, you can look at what other blogsites their have subscribed to. My interesting discovery of the day. This does solve half [...]

Many people have multiple blogs as they blog about different matters. There is diversity in one’s life, and some bloggers also chose to express this diversity in different areas of their blogs. I also blog about different areas of my life. Usually these areas of my life don’t correlate, but sometimes they do intersect. At [...]

Tonight I will be moving the good old server from my old place on Kennedy Street to my new house on Gardeners Road. I am aiming to start at 10:00 PM, and hoping to get the box moved in 2 hours. Here is my plan: ssh into the box at 10:00 PM, from my iBook [...]

After a few hacks last night I have made the stock price available on my Playground blogsite. You will see the box titled “Blogshares” on the right-hand side of the page, below the “Links” box, displaying some stock information that I have retrieved from Blogshares periodically. It is actually not a real time share price [...]