scott yang’s playground | faith, technology and randomness in life, according to scott

scott yang’s playground | faith, technology and randomness in life, according to scott scott yang's playground faith, technology and randomness in life, according to scott wednesday, 31 october 2007 techcrunch: google opensocial to be common apis for building social apps. instead of building yet-another social network, google is releasing something this week that provides a platform to link all the partnered social networks out there — orkut, xing, friendster, hi5, linkedin, etc. it allows developers to write applications for all these social networks using html and javascript, instead of fbml on facebook. i can’t wait to get thousands of invites to be zombies, pirates and sith lords from my friendster and linkedin network… category: google, quickies, social network | 0 comment agency fusion’s latest ad campaign, make my logo bigger cream, where for merely $29.95 you can get not only the make my logo bigger cream, white space eliminator, starburst dust, fluorescentizer, you also get emotionator that transform your design and website! funniest ads i have seen for ages, but i think my sites do need some of these treatments. category: humour, quickies, webmastery | 3 comments monday, 29 october 2007 text links, nofollow and google pagerank in my pursuing of monetising this blog i joined text-link-ads back in september last year. it was simple to deploy their code and then start to generate income by selling text links — it was almost effortless. so i used tla to earn some petty cash from a few sites that i got lying around, and all is good, although i knew link-buying for the sake of search engine manipulation is not as white hat as i like. then in august this year i wrote about potentially being penalised by google for selling text links and paid reviews. i could sense a storm is coming, although my sites were just small fishes in a big pond. i did cancel my account with reviewme back then, but i kept my text-link-ads account alive for a while. after all, the “petty cash” got up to around $300-$400 us greenbacks a month which supported development of my other sites, and it just became too hard to get rid of it. but i eventually let it go. continue reading » category: google, seo | 2 comments thursday, 25 october 2007 google finance blog: australian and new zealand pricing data. “we’re pleased to announce the availability of pricing data for australian (asx) and new zealand (nzx) listings on google finance.” great! time to throw out that dated yahoo finance with oversized advertisement and 90’s user interface. here is the company i work for. category: finance, google, quickies | 0 comment tuesday, 23 october 2007 john linton of exetel: why are victorian’s so different? “… victorian users average twice the bandwidth usage of all other state and teritory users.”, and that was his experience over 12 years setting up and operating isps in australia. sounds like the garden state should also be nick-named “leecher state”. category: exetel, quickies | 1 comment thursday, 18 october 2007 austpost po box - a $70/year spam box there is an advantage and a disadvantage living on the southern side of gardeners road. i live in daceyville, where most of my neighbours are of the state housing commission. as i have suspected that it is the reason — i actually do not get many unsolicited commercial mails, i.e. spam. compare to the kingsford residents just across the road, their street-facing mailboxes are usually filled with supermarket catalogues and promotion flyers, whereas we have got none. it is either the spammer delivery boy got too lazy to cross the road, or they reckon the housing commission guys over there are not going to afford any shopping anyway. unfortunately some of these spams, most notably the coles/woolies/franklins catalogues, are vivian’s weekly reading material. how are we supposed to know what to buy, what is on sale, what is cheap, etc when we go to the supermarket, if we don’t have their spams in our hands? so vivian had to explicitly asked woolies to post their catalogue to us (yes, they do that kind of service), but that is another story. so i am sort of used to having very few unsolicited commercial mail in my mailbox, until… i got myself a post office box! i rented a po box in kingsford a few weeks ago as i feel that it is safer to have your financial statements posted there. in some occasions i also do not wish to disclose my residential address so a po box is pretty handy. i went for the smallest one, and at $70 per year it is not too bad. upon signing up, there was an option whether i wish to receive unaddressed mail. how would a piece of mail with to to: address landed in my po box, if it is not a spam put in there by an australia post staff? so i ticked on no… but apparently the spam filter at austpost does not work! every morning when i go and pick up mails, there are always catalogues and flyers and pamphlets in my brand new po box. some are trying to sell me mobile phones, or dell computers, or other business necessities. quite a few are actually explicitly targeting austpost customers, as they spelt out their “exclusive offer to austpost”. i am actually getting far more spams in my po box than my usual letter box — consider the only way to stuff a mail into a po box is from inside the post office! so there we go. austpost po box — it is a $70/year spam box. i read sydney morning herald and slashdot everyday, and advertisement kept those sites free. why then am i still charged 70 bucks a year for receiving spams in my po box? category: australia, life | 2 comments gravatar 3.0, powered by automattic one of the best news today — automattic acquires gravatar. from the new owner of gravatar, automattic’s matt mullenweg: so we worked out an arrangement to transfer the code and service from tom to automattic, and here we are. here’s what we’ve done so far over the past few days: we transferred the rails application and most of the avatar serving to our wordpress.com infrastructure and servers. avatar serving is now more than three times as fast, and works every time. we moved this blog from mephisto to wordpress. wow. talking about rails bashing. anyway, om malik is wrong about gravatar — it is not a “small project that gives wordpress users the ability to add avatars to their profiles” — in fact i use it in almost all my applications where a profile image needs to be placed, be that wordpress, drupal or other custom built apps — as long as a user can be identified by an email address. i guess i am just way too lazy to implement one myself, but at the same time, why reinvent the wheel when something as neat as gravatar is available? however gravatar was no short of disasters. their domain expired once, performance has been ranging from mediocre to very slooooow, and the coming of gravatar 2 early this year did not seem to improve anything other than “hey, we are now running rails behind lighty 1.5beta!” that is why i coded the generic gravatar cache, as you really cannot count on it being available 24×7! now with automattic powering the infrastructure — the same company that gives us massively popular wordpress.com and akismet services — i can now sleep easy at night knowing gravatar will continue to serve those 80×80 profile images even when my apps are dead. oh wait, just let me check whether my sites are still alive… what’s more exciting is the plan for “gravatar 3.0″ — although i suspect automattic is going to absorb the gravatar front-end into wordpress.com and keeping only the api, which is most useful for third party app developers anyway. that includes: cdn delivery bigger image at 128×128px wordpress.com profile images accessible via gravatar api etc nice. category: gravatar | 1 comment monday, 15 october 2007 do we need another tax cut? do we need another tax cut? according to the latest promise from the coalition, it seems to be a good thing for all australians. no doubt that it is more likely the coalitions need it more than the australian tax payers, as november 24 the election day draws closer, but looking at the benefits — everyone gets a raise in paypocket, and it is also a good incentive to encourage more people to stay at/join the workforce (and subsequently boosting the australian economy). in 5 year time (2012), the top bracket will be at $180,000 and 40%, and you’ll be pretty much tax free if you earn less than $15,000 per year! current 2008 july 2009 july 2010 july 0 - 6,000 0% 0 - 6,000 0% 0 - 6,000 0% 0 - 6,000 0% 6,001 - 30,000 15% 6,001 - 34,000 15% 6,001 - 35,000 15% 6,001 - 37,000 15% 30,001 - 75,000 30% 34,001 - 80,000 30% 35,001 - 80,000 30% 37,001 - 80,000 30% 75,001 - 15,000 40% 80,001 - 180,000 40% 80,000 - 180,000 38% 80,000 - 180,000 37% 150,001 + 45% 180,001 + 45% 180,001 + 43% 180,001 + 42% is it affordable? sure, with huge surplus in federal budget — why not use some of that to buy votes reward the hard working fair dinkum aussies?! there is no better way to spend the budget surplus on tax cuts! everyone can feel richer! unfortunately “better of” is usually a relative term, and the only thing that seems to keep the inflation low is the cheap imported chinese-made goods. on the other hand, there are many things that i would love the government to fix — roads, hospitals, schools, etc — and i do hope they have not been taken out from the budget to cater for tax cuts. we’ll see what kevin07 has under his sleeves. probably a “me too”… who will you vote for on november 24? category: australia, current affair | 0 comment wednesday, 10 october 2007 someone has just sent me an sms a few minutes passed noon today, i received an sms message from some number i did not recognise. reminder: your tax return is due 31 oct. you can use e-tax at ato.gov.au please ignore if recently lodged. australia taxation office. thanks for the reminder from our considering government, not. is it the first time ato used sms to remind the procrastinators? dreadful time of the year again and it is going to be a bit more complicated this time because i’ve got an abn this year. hmm… category: life | 7 comments friday, 5 october 2007 john gruber: forever is a long time: “there’s only one way to pressure apple into opening up iphone development, and it isn’t by developing underground iphone apps. it’s by not buying iphones.” you can actually buy an unlocked iphone in australia for less than aud$800 (although i suspect it is going to get more expensive as new iphone builts all have 1.1.1 firmware). however by buying more iphone, ipod, appletv or other proprietary gadgets from apple is actually giving apple the wrong message — “you can stay closed and we’ll still give you money!” that’s why i will never buy an ipod. category: apple, quickies | 0 comment next page » search subscribe entries comments recent comments 12/11: jim on posting flash videos with ffmpeg and flowplayer12/11: bluefrogx on text links, nofollow and google pagerank5/11: drew on page containing non-secure item?2/11: ndaru on text links, nofollow and google pagerank2/11: daniel on good man goes to hell, bad man goes to heaven31/10: den on do you need permalink redirect?31/10: timhu on make my logo bigger cream31/10: scotty on make my logo bigger cream31/10: timhu on make my logo bigger cream30/10: jag on posting flash videos with ffmpeg and flowplayer30/10: tami on austpost po box - a $70/year spam box30/10: matt on the babel fish about playground about archives code contact playground is the personal weblog of scott yang, a chinese-australian christian who works as a software developer in sydney australia. © 2001-2007 scott yang. powered by wordpress. hosted at slicehost.

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