Scott Yang's Playground

In one of the project at work we have been using OpenOffice.org running in headless mode to do document format conversions in the background, i.e. converting to and from various MS Office formats OpenDocument formats and PDF. One problem of using standalone OpenOffice.org installation as backend is that you can only run one instance at [...]

Yesterday when we were in transit at the Hong Kong airport, Anna and Elsie were playing with the kids’ ride that simulates the cockpit of a commercial jet. There’s nothing real about the cockpit, but I guess it does not really matter as kids are happy with anything that resemble buttons and blink.

Apple has long been running their switch Get a Mac campaign, luring the PC users to abandon Windows to come to the paradise. Then we have geeks migrating from Mac to Ubuntu out of frustration from the built-in apps. Now, we have David Young, theJoyent CEO, is talking about his switch from Ubuntu to Windows [...]

IEBlog: Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP is now available. WinXP SP2, WinXP Pro 64bit and Server 2003′s are supported. I am actually downloading it now and will install it on my development box. Hopefully it’ll be much more impressive than my previous encounter.

A new Windows Update applied this morning, which according to this knowledge base item, it “remove the Australian daylight saving time 2006 912475 update”. Daylight saving time changes to standard time on last Sunday of March, 2007. Therefore, computers that have the KB 912475 update installed will not show the correct 2007 daylight saving time [...]

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 :)

(Update: Actually, there is no point setting up QEmu, playing around with VMX file, etc to try to bootstrap the disk image. There is actually no point getting VMWare Player. Just go an install the free VMWare Server — it is so much better.) Me. I am stuck. On Windows. Well, not really by choice. [...]

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 [...]

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.

Vade-Mecum is the plucker file viewer for the Windows Mobile devices. I’ve used Plucker in my Palm III days, and absolutely loved it. Great that it is also available on Pocket PC’s.