Scott Yang's Playground

Someone caught Google and Sun hang out together! 10 more hours to go before the announcement, and I would really like to see: Google branded StarOffice! Google services integrated into the office suite. OpenDocument being declared as the “Internet Standard”, regardless what legacy system (read “MS Office”) you are using on your desktop. Everyone wants [...]

Opera turned 10 last month, and gave away free registration code. I guess they must have been overwhelmed by the response, and now they are giving away their browser for free — forever! They have free Opera for most modern desktop operating systems. Download Opera 8.50 today, otherwise you might not know what you have [...]

Can I smell a bit of competition in the desktop widgets arena, especially between mighty search engine portals? Yahoo! bought Konfabulator a while ago, which subsequently became Yahoo! Widgets. Now Google strikes back, released the new Gogle Desktop 2 beta yesterday with Sidebar, where you can also customise by adding widgets3rd party plugins. Fun. Search-wise [...]

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 [...]

GreatNews – the intelligent news reader. It’s available on Windows. It’s free. Made by a fellow Chinese. It is relatively light-weight (no .NET nor Java). It has lots of features that I cannot get use to. Moreover, it has Bloglines integration, so my reading status is still stored centralised.

Google Desktop Search has now came out of beta with its 1.0 release, including new features like searching Firefox history and Thunderbird emails. Also released is its plugin architecture – all I need now is a plugin to support OpenOffice.org files (or maybe the up coming OASIS format in just released OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta).

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 [...]

I know it is going to come sooner or later, but now there is a wide-spreading worm that attacks vulnerable phpBB installations, by exploiting its now infamous “highlight” bug prior to 2.0.10. It overwrites every .php file found on your system, which makes a quite big mess. I patched the only copy of phpBB installed [...]

Firefox 1.0 is just around the corner, and the Spread Firefox team is trying to get a full page ad on The New York Times. This site is also highly optimised for Firefox – you probably won’t see the rounded border if you don’t use the “right” browser. What?! Still use Microsoft Internet Exploder? With [...]

Christian File Center provides many extra modules for popular free Bible study software E-Sword, a finely developed software that runs on Windows. I downloaded ESV+footnote, NET, and CUV traditional+strong. I wonder whether it is possible to use E-Sword modules with SWORD related projects, like MacSword, so I can use the same text on my iBook.

In one article on the OpenOffice.org Mac Community website, it talked about a company that rebranded OpenOffice.org 1.0 for Mac OS X (calling it LuxuriousityOffice – what kind of name is that?) and then sell it on their website and eBay. In Luxuriousity’s web page on this office product, it claims its very own Luxuriousity [...]

I saw this article/survey on Mac-Central – Survey looks at Bible software for the Mac It starts with… The Christian Macintosh Users Group is conducting a survey asking Mac users to voice their opinions and give their feedback regarding the Bible software programs currently available for their preferred computer platform… I myself have been a [...]

This morning Vivian and I got up earl’ish (well, 9:00am is early for Saturday) to help Jade setting up her garage sale. While moving her things, Vivian has suggested to her that why not sending out an advertisement email to the FOCUS mailing list, since lots of overseas students want to buy and sell when [...]